With football foibles, five-cent psychiatry and a famously flippant beagle, Charles Schulz gave the world a 50-year friendship with the Peanuts gang, drawing Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and the others for his syndicated comic strip and a host of other appearances.
For decades, he trusted no one to recreate his characters. Then he met Tom Everhart, a Yale-educated fine art painter who had never considered a career in cartoon or comic strip art.
But a freelance project in 1980 required Everhart to recreate Schulz’s Peanuts gang, then present the drawings to Schulz and his studios.
Everhart enlarged Schulz’s originals to emulate the style.
“Completely impressed with Schulz’s line, he was able to reproduce the line art almost exactly, which in turn impressed Schulz at their meeting,” states Everhart’s biography.
That line prompted a lasting friendship and artistic partnership between Schulz and Everhart, who would go on to draw most of the Peanuts characters for the iconic MetLife advertising campaign. He remains the only fine artist authorized and educated by Schulz to draw the actual Schulz line that defines the familiar characters.
Everhart began to incorporate the characters into original paintings of his own, many of which are now available at Ocean Blue Galleries, 109 Duval St., in Key West.
Everhart will appear at the gallery Thursday through Saturday, Feb. 22-24 from 7 to 9 p.m.
The familiar faces of Snoopy, Woodstock, Charlie Brown, Lucy and the whole Peanuts gang peer out from the walls of the gallery, brought to life by Everhart.
Visit oceanblue.gallery for more information about Everhart and other artists.
