Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown's phone calls, Lucy musing while Schroeder plays his piano, even Snoopy fighting his imagined foe the Red Barron – these deeply meaningful relationships were as important to Charles Schulz's Peanuts as the characters themselves. They echoed his own life, and his own way of seeing his world. This use of Peanuts's characters is one Tom Everhart has carried forward from his dear friend and artistic mentor.
The relationships we see in Everhart's paintings are of course entirely different from those of Sparky (Schulz.) These are the relationships that are from Everhart's own life. And much of that life is spent by Tom and his wife Jennifer in their part-time home of Tahiti, where they often entertain their many friends from near and far. This is just one set of relationship Everhart has offered us in his recent series of work - Starry Starry Light.
In each of the four paintings Tom has reflected on a different set of friends who come to visit him and Jenny at their island home perched at the end of a pier. Each is represented by a fitting peanuts character. Woodstock stands in for their American friends, Lucy with her olive black hair for their island friends, Charlie brown with his bald head for their French friends, and finally Snoopy, singularly representing Tom and Jenny themselves. No matter who of their friends comes to join the Everhart's at their Tahitian home, they all are treated to the most magnificent light show the universe has to offer. With no pollution in the air and being as far away from a city light as one could imagine; the stars of the Milky Way shine at their brightest and fill the sky like a blanket of bright dots over their little hut on the water. It is this very view that all of Everhart's friends are gazing into, in each of the four paintings. In not too insignificant of a way, these very stars are their own character in Everhart's paintings. They represent the universal relationship of all living things and light itself. Humans and all other animals have looked to these exact stars for as long as any of us have been here. These are the same stars that all living things coming after us will gaze upon as well. In these paintings Snoopy, Woodstock, Lucy and Charlie brown are communing at the edge of the universal campfire that unites all of us.
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