Painting 2 Post 4

This endeavor was particularly interesting, because I've painted the "Cashews" before. Much of the idea for the "strip" is based on the recurring pulled-away-football gag of Peanuts fame. I wanted to exacerbate that, removing all comedic pretense that hid any of the malice, but would still elicit cruel laughter just as any Jackass or otherwise crude or violent contemporary humor might.

Schulz himself knew that Lucy was an unlikable character, but posited that she was a necessary evil to foil Charlie's unlikeable naievety. Quoted in the book Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, he writes:

"She really can't help herself. She is annoyed that it's all too easy. Charlie Brown isn't that much of a challenge. To be consistent, however, we have to let her triumpuh, for all the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away."

Schulz professed a love of spontaneity in terms of line, ever seeking the "perfect" line that ran from the character's head to foot. This painting was less planned and more spontaneous in it's linework, which to me seems a terrible mistake, but that might be the difference between a man who invented and drew the same characters for decades and a fan who has drawn them maybe two dozen times.

Half way through lettering, my brush split. Perhaps it was not meant to run across acrylic? Regardless, a lot of time was spent simply correcting the tips of letters to seem as though they were one concise brush mark. This often involved a .01 micron.

On the topic of female bullies in his comedy, Schulz said, "The supposedly weak people in the world are funny when they dominate the supposedly strong people. There is nothing funny about a little boy being mean to a little girl. That is simply not funny! But there is something funny about a little girl being mean to a little boy."

This was of course significantly more relevant to the struggle of women and other minorities in 1967, but is largely still funny today for the same reasons. Any analysis of such humor might beg the question why any sort of antagonism is appropriate, no mater from whom to whom, but of course we all know the answer. We like seeing people suffer. And there is the gem of the human condition upon which Peanuts operates. Our malice as the viewer, far more sick than Lucy or Violet or Patty, because we come back every week to see who will embarrass or harm the well-intentioned Charlie Brown next.