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Late Afternoon Doghouse Cathedral in the Rain, 1993 oil and enamel on canvas, 96" x 128"
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At about the same time, in my studio, the previous skeleton based paintings were being replaced by a new body of landscape paintings. This work would attempt to reconstruct and bend the reality of actual landscapes into a new way of seeing them as artificial puns of the same landscapes. Although I would work full-time on these paintings for the next several years, it was obvious to me that I was becoming more and more motivated by the supplemental drawings for Sparky.
By the latter part of the 80s, I was convinced that his influence on my act of painting was inevitable. Even the backgrounds and colors in some of my 'Schulz-like' drawings were becoming a little painterly, especially relative to the conventions of cartooning. Neither of us could envision what it meant or how it would ever work in a balance. I was really confused and stuck.
Then, in the summer of 1988, the brakes jammed and came to a screeching halt. Surprisingly, I had been diagnosed with the very late stages, probably too late according to the hospital's consensus, of colon and liver cancer. Due to its late discovery, it had spread to many areas. All this as friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, devoted artist to the cartoon as an artistic painting language, was being buried in Brooklyn.
What I should like to convey about extreme cancer is short - everything stops. But, much like when one period comes to an end as another begins, one's internal reality is re-thought as things start to relate and cross-relate into a new way of seeing things. As I unexpectedly made it through the two 10-hour surgeries, Sparky's images and influences, that had long before been made my second nature, and my demands of painting, blended together into a new way of seeing. My future Schulz inspired paintings began to develop themselves, one after another. Immediately I told him and he couldn't wait to see the first piece.
In another attempt for recovery, I spent the next year in radical chemotherapy at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. During this time period, I was heavily involved with preparing drawings and concepts, and filled a thick sketchbook with crayon colorfield ideas for the new paintings. Above all, my most important consideration, in creating and thinking about this work, was Sparky's expectations and approval.
Sparky expressed, and very emphatically, that the paintings should be something different from what he would do or think. If not, they would be nothing more than a facsimile of his work. He stressed that it had to spring from my own individual feelings and insight - inventing a new way of seeing the same.
Thus, my goal, in this new work, was to strike an effective balance between altering the conventions of his comic strip, without undermining its fundamental verity, and my thinking about painting. If cartooning, in principle, is once removed from real life, then my paintings were to be once removed from cartooning.
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