MKA Art Teacher Puts Lessons Into Practice

In a perfect example of a teacher modeling a lesson to his students, MKA Upper School art and photography teacher Tony Cuneo has been engaged in a five-week “Drawing a Day” project, recently on display in the Weiss Gallery.

The idea for the project came from Cuneo’s own observations of his students grappling with the process of inspiration. “One of the really big ideas I've been stressing with students,” he notes, “is that you get ideas from working, not from waiting around for inspiration.” Seeing his students’ tendency to “think they're not creative if they don't have absolutely amazing ideas from day one,” Cuneo set out to demonstrate that inspiration is a process.

“I wanted them to see how a visual idea evolves, how a series develops, how you backtrack, and step to the side, how you revisit something, how you run with an idea until you get tired of it, then try something else, and to understand that the place you start isn't the place you end up.”

For Cuneo, a practicing artist, the project was not without its challenges. “The biggest problem I had was stopping each drawing after a day. My normal working process is to start something, set it aside, revisit it, layer something on top of it, so it was hard to just do a drawing and leave it.  I started thinking I'd do about 30 minutes a day, but most of the drawings ended up taking more like two hours.”

Pictured above, A drawing a day, #41, 2014, pigmented marker, colored pencil, graphite, gouache, oil pastel.
Click here to see more work from Cuneo's Drawing a Day project.