Tom Everhart

Tom Everhart was born on May 21, 1952, in Washington, D.C. He began his undergraduate studies at Yale University of Art and Architecture in 1970. In 1972, he participated in an independent study program under Earl Hoffman at St. Mary’s College. He returned to the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1974, where he completed his graduate work in 1976, followed by post-graduate studies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. He taught Life Drawing and Painting, briefly from 1979 to 1980, at Antioch College.

In 1980, Tom Everhart was introduced to cartoonist Charles M. Schulz at Schulz’s studios in Santa Rosa, California. A few weeks prior to their meeting, Everhart, having absolutely no education in cartooning, found himself involved in a freelance project that required him to draw and present Peanuts renderings to Schulz’s studios. Preparing as he would the drawings and studies for his large-scale skeleton/nature-related paintings, he blew up some of the cartoonist’s strips on a twenty-five-foot wall in his studio, which eliminated the perimeter lines of the cartoon box, leaving only the marks of the cartoonist. Schulz’s painterly pen stroke, now larger than life, translated into painterly brush strokes and was now a language that overwhelmingly connected to Everhart’s own form of expression and communication. Completely impressed by Schulz’s line, he was able to reproduce it almost exactly, which, in turn, impressed Schulz at their meeting. It was at this time that Everhart confirmed his obsession with Schulz’s line art style, his ongoing friendship with Schulz, and his education in line construction. Read more