We were lucky to catch up with Tom Everhart recently and have shared our conversation below.
Tom , appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?
From the beginning of my 35 year, body of painting work, I have used the vehicle of camouflage. My immediate visual content and each work is actually nothing more than to entertain the viewer and capture their seeing. The actual subject matter of the work is somewhat buried and hinted to in the titles and the imagery.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I first got into what I do (painter) as a young child being taken to weekly gallery trips with my grandmother. Years later, that would be followed by 7 years of art academia, and then the streets of lower Manhattan.
I just recently finished a rather large body of paintings under the title of “working on my brand”. This was because I have never wanted to have a brand or even look like I have a brand. I want the work to be fluid and move from audience to audience organically, regardless of any kind of branding image. I guess my favorite aspect and what I am talking about is that most viewers will look at the popular cartoon imagery in the work and view it as a brand even though it is not.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
35 years ago, I was diagnosed with stage four liver colon cancer, and was given only a few months to two years to continue living. Prior to this diagnosis, I was working on ideas for my present body of work, but really didn’t have the inspiration or the courage to carry out the plans. But after realizing I only had a few years to live nothing else not even criticism seemed to matter and it created this entire body of work.that still thrives today.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Fresh out of art school, in 1980, I had the privilege of meeting cartoonist Charles M Schulz creator of the peanuts comic strip. This was a time in my life where I had been completely educated, on art history, ranging from the Baroque to the abstract expressionist, and even up to the minimalist and conceptualist. But, when I met Mr. Schulz, Sparky, he showed me that he was able to do with just a few lines express intense, emotional human behavior and activity that would take any other art movements in art history months even years to create. At that very point I realized that pictorial space, form and line could be something much different than what I had just studied over the past years thus inspiring an entirely new body of work for me.
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Image Credits
Alan Shaffer & Jennifer Everhart