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Wearing Jim Dine (Snoop Dogg Wearing Jim Dine)

How does it fit?

Like many others, I’ve always understood that there were more important reasons for making art than just art world approval. Nonetheless, from the beginning I couldn’t’ help but wonder how uncomfortable the fit was going to be in the very small art world’s established taste of what art was at the time.

Would my robes of camouflage constructed through Sparky’s (Charles Schulz) abstracted cartoon forms ever be understood as something more then just cartoon translated into painterly process?

By 2008, 20 years into my Schulz-influenced work, it began to feel like the fit was becoming more comfortable. But, I knew as well that there was still the necessary discomfort. So at this 20 year point I began a limited series based on a Schulz strip drawing featuring a large robe supporting a small floating Woodstock Head.

For me, it was speaking to Jim Dine’s robe paintings that were created around the same time period as the strip. The robe paintings made a dignity possible between a state of visual dress and undress. They related to my thinking of usual art and new un-art. Thus, the construction of my titles “Wearing Jim Dine.”

It was always my practice, from the very beginning of this body of work to reference art history and it’s arist. It was my method of giving notice to the art world’s small contemporary circle that I was bringing in this new very different kind of art. Examples of this process can be seen in some of my very early works, such as “Lucy’s Scream” featuring Sparky’s character of Lucy with a wide mouth scream,. Referencing Edward Munch’s “The Scream” 1893.

– Tom Everhart

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