Charles M. Schulz
Thursday, June 15, 2006
I put down Moby Dick for a little while to re-read my Peanuts Treasury. Toward the end i started thinking about Charles Schulz' artwork, sparked by this first image of Linus trying to choose a book:
I was contemplating what it is about certain frames that really make them stand out. Obviously some are composed to be more graphically rich than others, but i don't even think that's what it is. Even the simplest frames from his strips have this potential to really stand out. Being a comic strip, the primary objective is always about telling a story or anecdote or whatever, but what i realized was that Charles Schulz had a knack for being concise.
Perhaps its obvious in the last few paintings and illustrator drawings that I've done that I'm particularly interested in minimalism, not for the sake of being bare, but more in reducing things to their integral parts. That is something that i think really comes through in frames from the Peanuts, not only in the aspect of every line being in the right place, but also in the subtlety of the expressions.
I was a big Peanuts fan as a child. I must've had 20 - 30 peanuts books that I'd read over and over. Reading them again now, I can really tell the influence that they had on my philosophically and aesthetically. Perhaps it's just because he was from a more innocent time, or because his subject matter was always children, but Charles Schulz always managed to keep the Peanuts high-brow and good natured. So much of his work is about anxieties and self reflection, but with resilience and a sense of peace that i think most people could stand to learn a bit from.
I've always been a big fan of Linus. I think we share temperaments as well as last names.
More than any other character, i think Snoopy has this iconic potential-- not so much in his popularity and mass appeal, but simply from a graphical nature. I didn't do a good job representing this idea with these images, but in all of the different ways that Snoopy is drawn and every character he plays, the image of Snoopy always seems so perfectly composed and descriptive.
Every frame tells a story.
Recognize the similarities between this and Calvin and Hobbes?
Click for a larger version.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is showing an exhibition of comic book art, Masters of American Comics, right now, which I assumed would mean heroes and villains type stuff. But apparently, according to The Chet, it culminates in a bunch of work by Charles Schulz. I wasn't aware that he was in it at all when i was looking through the Peanuts Treasury and considering his art, but it sure does make me that much more inclined to spend WAY TOO MUCH MONEY to go see the exhibition.
A couple links for you:
Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center
The Official Peanuts Website
Charles M. Schulz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(For what it's worth, I just went through Linus' page on Wikipedia and changed all of the "van Pelt"s to Van Pelt.
posted by j. Permanent Link
