You could say that painter Tom Everhart has peanuts on the brain. Or, actually, Peanuts. That’s because for the past three-plus decades the main subject for hundreds of his artworks are the beloved characters from the long-running comic strip. Some that evolved out of a partnership and friendship with their late creator Charles Schulz himself.
But no mere copies or tracings, Everhart’s work painted in his own hand uses Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Pigpen and the gang more as a jumping point for his statements and visual impact goals, usually with bold color swaths.
A selection of them will be on display for viewing and sale in the retrospective Recent Works: The Art of Tom Everhart at Off the Wall Gallery, beginning March 24. Everhart himself will be in attendance for two receptions on March 27 and 28.
“This is a very interesting show for me because it will show a lot of my larger scale work. And these works educate the audience much more,” Everhart says via Zoom from his California studio, with some of those large pieces visible behind him.
“And my work is one of the most misunderstood in the world today,” Everhart continues. “He was a cartoonist and I was a painter, who often had skeletons and very dark color palette and subject matter! And neither one of us had much education in either field, so we were fascinated with each other and fused these [artforms] together. And that’s my biggest fight today: showing people that this is not Pop Art.”
The then New York-based Everhart first met Charles Schulz at the older man’s studio in 1980 when he was tasked with a freelance project to create Peanuts character renderings. Over the years they forged a friendship in which they spent hours talking about art, its impact, and the potential crossover between “comic strips” and “fine art.”
They also sat side-by-side drawing line work of the characters together, and Everhart soon became very adept at creating his own drawings that were almost indistinguishable from Schulz’s own. Still, no official collaboration or project was considered, though it was on Everhart’s mind. And Everhart continued to pursue his non Peanuts-related work.
He even recalled attending a party hosted by Andy Warhol (to which he was brought to by another famous artist and friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat). Everhart talked to the bewigged Pop Art provocateur about what he wanted to do but scared how the “Art World” would respond.
Warhol—himself known to incorporate pop culture images and objects in his work—told Everhart to forget the potential naysayers. And that he should forge ahead with something that had the potential to be “special and different.”
But everything seemed to stop in 1988 when Everhart was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon and liver cancer. Recovering in his hospital room at Johns Hopkins, among the flower and gifts friends had sent, was a stack of art books as well as Peanuts strips from Schulz. In an almost divine intervention, the light streaming from the window projected images from both sources on the wall, giving Everhart inspiration for what to do.
“His stuff would go into my brain and come out the other side of my head my way,” Everhart says. “We tried to explain that it wasn’t cartooning, it was painting. And I sensed that gave him some pride.”
He would approach Schulz about incorporating the characters into his own paintings. The cartoonist agreed, but with one caveat: The art had to include Everhart’s own personal stamp on every piece. So, he starts each painting with something that he wants to say in his mind and often titles his work with a jarring-but-descriptive phrase.
“It had to take what he did to a different place. It had to be my way of seeing things,” Everhart recalls in a promotional video. “It had to be a new way of seeing what he did.” And that it did, as the pieces well-represented Everhart’s bold and evocative use of color, interpretive smearing, and exactly placed applications.
“Schulz and I never discussed color, we talked about black and white only for 20 years. And when he put color in the Sunday strips, it was from a printer’s guide,” Everhart says, noting that he took seven years of color theory courses and would keep index cards of how to mix a certain one. One particular shade of gold paint he uses took him 12 years to perfect.
“So, I learned very quicky how to guide someone’s eye through a piece of work with color. If I want them to feel laughter or warmth or concern, I know what colors I can put together, how much, and what goes next to it. I use that all the time. It’s not a trick—it’s an educated process.”
Everhart has great praise for what Schulz did in terms of not just the actual look of Peanuts, but the emotion and atmosphere he could convey with just a few black ink scratches. He says that his black-and-white paintings hue closer to that original look.
Perhaps more than any other comic strip characters, it’s those from Peanuts that people have the closest and deepest emotional connections to, whether they evoke childhood memories or it strikes something in them as adults. There’s plenty of tears shed each holiday season in living rooms where A Charlie Brown Christmas is playing. And Everhart says he often has attendees as his shows coming at him with the waterworks flowing.
You don’t get that kind of reaction from people about, say, Hagar the Horrible, Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, or even (sorry, cat lovers), Garfield. And he knows why.
“It’s an easy answer. He didn’t draw the strip for children, he drew it for adults. He’s talking to adults through the eyes of a child. That’s what makes it so sensitive. And it could reflect a certain time in a person’s life,” he says.
“And it’s neutral. [Schulz] is not left, not right, and the subject matter floats between things. It doesn’t offend on purpose. That’s one of the things that Sparky [Schulz’s nickname] always wanted to do. And I don’t like to offend either. But I like to agitate—amusingly.”
Interestingly, the characters from Peanuts are some of the most tightly controlled and restricted pop culture intellectual properties out there. But in 1991, Charles Schulz and Unted Media drafted a legal agreement to allow Everhart to use visual object matter from Schulz’s Peanuts strip in his art for the duration of his lifetime.
And in the interim, Everhart’s work has been displayed in galleries all over the world, most famously at the Louvre in Paris for Snoopy Fetes Ses 40 (Snoopy Celebrates His 40th Birthday), with Schulz in attendance. A TV special that celebrated Schulz also used the paintings as backdrops.
As for his personal favorite Peanuts character, the now California-based Everhart says “it changes all the time.” But there is one that he says is perhaps most useful to him as an artist who wants to get a message across. And no surprise, it’s that big-nosed beagle.
“It’s Snoopy because he expresses so many different emotions while the other characters have sort of a limited range. And Snoopy also has this fantasy side where he goes off as a Flying Ace or into space,” Everhart says.
“But the hardest one to draw—and I didn’t realize this until Schulz told me—is Woodstock. And it was the hardest for him as well! In the ‘50s, the birds looked like pigeons! It took him so long to abstract what became Woodstock.”
Knowing challenge when he saw one, Everhart then set out to create something special. And he did in Does This Make Me Look Fat? It features a prone Snoopy covered in what looks like a blanket of Woodstock heads. Around 500 overall.
“I loved getting under his skin sometime. I did it for him just to make him drop his jaw. And he did! He told me, ‘You’re absolutely nuts!’”
Recent Works: The Art of Tom Everhart runs March 24-April 24 at Off the Wall Gallery, 5015 Westheimer, Suite 2208. Everhart will appear at two artist receptions on Friday, March 27 and Saturday, March 28, from 5-8 pm. RSVPs requested by registering HERE or emailing contact@offthewallgallery.com. For more information, call 713-871-0940 or visit OfftheWallGallery.com.
For more on Tom Everhart and his work, visit EverhartStudios.com