I recently had the honor of meeting Tom Everhart at an opening of his new exhibition organized by the AFA Gallery. Tom is a really nice and interesting artist who’s willing to talk about his art, making himself easy to reach. It was a real pleasure for me to learn more about his art, about him and the way he works. In 1980, Tom was introduced to cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, the man behind the beloved Peanuts comic. Schulz taught Tom his signature style, and made him the only fine artist authorized to use his characters. Since then, Tom’s Peanuts-themed paintings have become as iconic as the comic. “I never made it past that first blown up drawing of his strip. I sat in front of it for hours. I don’t even remember leaving it,” Everhart said of his inspiration. Here is my one-on-one with this incredible artist:
How did you come to becoming focused on the Peanuts?
It was after a long relationship with Mr. Schulz where he shared his teachings of his strategies of process and picture making.
As an artist known for works featuring characters from Schulz’s comic strips Peanuts, would you consider yourself more like a painter or like a cartoonist?
I have absolutely no background in cartooning, so the only thing I consider myself is a painter.
How would you position yourself compared to artists such like Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings feature comic-style speech bubbles, or the Japanese artists who draw inspiration from Manga comics?
Well the only thing I have in common with Lichtenstein is that a lot of our imagery is based on cartoon subject matter but his painting were predominantly concerned with popular culture and graphics that accompanied that period of time where as my work is about events in my life.
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