Who is Tom Everhart

The larger-than-life paintings of Tom Everhart straddle the line between the comfortably familiar and a new way of seeing. He is the only fine artist educated by Charles Schulz, and granted lifelong permission by the Peanuts creator to use his characters to make extraordinary fine art. Everhart utilizes the instantly recognizable image of Snoopy to communicate a new sensibility--one that is at once accessible and exotic.The element that originally drew Tom Everhart to Schulz was a fascination with the "brilliant architecture of Schulz's black ink line," and its potential for monumental shifts in tone and scale. Tom Everhart's love of Schulz's line--and his remarkable ability to capture it with his own vivid interpretation--impressed Schulz and launched a friendship that continued until Schulz's death in 2000.

Tom Everharts signature style is a lively and profound hybrid of pop and expressionist visual elements, infused with an art historical perspective and a cheeky sense of humor. As a contemporary of Warhol, Haring, Scharf and Basquiat during formative New York City years, Everharts work in that zeitgeist was nevertheless more than just bright and cartoonish. His closeness since 1980 with the late, legendary Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz not only garnered Everhart firsthand training to create and perpetual permission to use those characters in his own work, but it also sparked a lively conversation about how flatness, color, texture, and a uniform gestalt defines modern visual art. In fact, Everharts first major exhibition was at the Louvre in Paris in conjunction with a Schulz survey." Shana Nys Dambrot LA WEEKLY