Saturday, Aug. 19, 2000 | 10:12 a.m.
Charlie Brown as art? Good grief.
But that's the way Tom Everhart sees it.
In fact, the Venice, Calif., painter has devoted 10 years of his work to nothing but taking the beloved "Peanuts" characters out of the cartoon strip and putting them on canvas.
A collection of Everhart's work will be on display indefinitely beginning Sunday at Re' Galleries/Atelier at the Paris Las Vegas. The artist will be on hand for a signing Monday afternoon.
Taking a break from painting one of the approximately 75 pieces he's working on at the moment, Everhart, 47, said his fascination with Charlie Brown and Co. began with a chance meeting in 1980 with "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz, who died Feb. 12.
Everhart had been hired by an agency to do some illustrations for presentations, which included a meeting with representatives from Schulz's studio where he was to present some of his "Peanuts" characters. With a background mainly in fine arts, Everhart was not familiar with the style in which Schulz drew the strip and had only two weeks in which to study and learn to duplicate it.
So he took the small cartoons and projected them onto a wall, and then a canvas. At 24 feet in size, Everhart could see in detail the illustration technique Schulz employed, something not as evident in the considerably smaller daily strip. It was then the artist made a discovery: Schulz's drawings looked very much like his own brush strokes.
"I was expecting something like a Disney line, where (the) cartoon is very smooth," Everhart said. "But (Schulz's) pen lines are organic; very interesting lines, very artistic."
It was, as Everhart said, "a language I was able to translate."
So well, in fact, that at the meeting Schulz was amazed at how well his work had been duplicated. He then took Everhart out of the meeting and gave him a tour of his studios. It was to mark the end of Everhart's job with the agency but the beginning of his relationship with Schulz.
And as the two began to talk by phone every other day, a fondness for each other's work developed.
"Never before had a fine artist come around and inspected his craft," Everhart said. "He liked that. The people before who had tried to copy him were always cartoonists."
A few years later Schulz asked Everhart to do some special projects for him in between his painting, such as illustrating Snoopy for the Met Life ads or drawing other "Peanuts" characters for magazine covers.
"Things that (Schulz) would have liked to have drawn," if he'd had the time.
But Everhart found he wanted to do more than that.
And in 1988 he told Schulz he wanted to take "Peanuts" and put it on canvas. The idea of drawing cartoons instead of painting was not a good career choice, Schulz opined, going so far as to call it a career "suicide."
The idea was dropped temporarily.
Shortly after their discussion, Everhart was diagnosed with cancer and spent a year in and out of hospitals while undergoing radical chemotherapy. During that period he began to think more about putting Schulz's work on canvas and would talk with Schulz about it in their bedside talks and over the phone.
After leaving the hospital, having been told he had a two years to live and to "live life to the fullest" -- Everhart decided it was time to focus on his idea.
So with Schulz's blessing he did just that. And in 1990 during a "Peanuts" exhibit at the Louvre, Schulz made sure the collection included Everhart's paintings -- marking the first time they'd been on public display.
"I never had a bigger supporter than him," Everhart said. "He would always tell people, 'You have to see these paintings.' "
Schulz even went so far as to sign a contract with United Feature Syndicate, which distributes "Peanuts," giving Everhart lifetime protection to create the paintings.
"He was always very frustrated; he thought no one looked at his work as art, which I thought odd," Everhart said of Schulz. "He had shows and medals from people from all over the world. He thought what I was doing was taking what he did and making it look like art."
But Schulz was also impressed with how well Everhart could duplicate his work, to the point of being able to reproduce his signature. In fact, at one point during their conversations, Schulz even suggested to Everhart that he should take over drawing the strip for him when he retired.
Although flattered at the offer, it was a notion Everhart ultimately rejected.
"The strip was him, and not just the way he drew it. We had the same kind of humor, I have to say that," he said. "But we had different views of politics and religion. I wasn't him. There was no way I could do the strip with the beauty and honor he did.
"I'm happy to be doing my paintings. It's almost like my interpretation of the strip."
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