Originally published as a Sunday Peanuts comics strip on August 14th, 1960, this strip was adapted for the opening scene in the film “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” as well as an entire musical number for the show “Snoopy!!!”, and the animated special “Snoopy the Musical” (1988) from which I appropriated the film still. For the painting, I also added Franklin, to represent a broader spectrum of characters that reflect our world, who is discussing with the others what he might find in the stars. Most dynamically, instead of merely looking at clouds, I superimposed a section of an image from the amazing James Webb Telescope of a star-studded cluster from 2024 of a globular cluster in the Sagittarius constellation, roughly 28,000 light-years from Earth.
I love and teach comics (in addition to painting, drawing and MFA students at the USC Roski), and the Kantian version of the sublime, where one feels a small part of a much larger cosmology, so much so that one feels their own objectivity, and become aware of their own consciousness. Kant feels that one might be able to have this overwhelming sensation looking at the ocean, but I feel this also looking into the stars in the night sky. Kant writes that humankind might not be able to create artworks that could achieve this sensation, but I hope that we might. Comics have the ability to create essentialized iconic avatars that we can suture into and (according to Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics) “mask into” or become, as they are rendered so simply that we can transfer our own consciousness into the drawn characters, and experience what they characters are feeling on their journey–which is something that easily can happen with any of the Peanuts gang. No matter who we might be or where we come from, these characters have proven themselves some of the most popular in the world, given their design and the warmth that their creator Charles Schulz brought to them.
I’m hoping when viewers gaze upon my painting, they might suture into the characters and their world, looking transfixed onto the glorious uncanny world of these cosmos. It was fun not only to paint them, but to meditate upon the incredible details of these many stars and formations. Every painting for me is a talisman to my own thoughts, feelings, and meditations. I find it incredibly edifying, especially in our own tumultuous times, to be able to see the grander picture of how we on our planet in this short moment of time seems so inconsequential given the vastness of the galaxies. Somehow all of this will work out, and as we are our own bits of stardust, we are all connected to one another, and the flora and fauna of our own planet Earth, a spinning sphere, one of billions in the galaxies of the many universes.
I hope, like looking at clouds and finding faces and forms like the characters do in the original strip, that my own unconscious was able to spill into this world of my painting, finding abstracted dream worlds that viewers can relate to and find, as they spin their own unconscious musings into the atmosphere of the work. Hopefully in this process the viewer can become conscious of how their own unconscious might be affected by the painting, invoking the sublime feelings of looking at the real cosmos in their own personal journey of living life on Earth.
This new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features NGC 6440, a globular cluster that resides roughly 28 000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The object was first discovered by William Herschel in May of 1786. Globular clusters like NGC 6440 are roughly spherical, tightly packed, collections of old stars bound together by gravity. They can be found throughout galaxies, but often live on the outskirts. They hold hundreds of thousands to millions of stars that are on average about one light-year apart, but they can be as close together as the size of our Solar System. NGC 6440 is known to be a high-mass and metal-rich cluster that formed and is orbiting within the Galactic bulge, which is a dense, near-spherical region of old stars in the inner part of the Milky Way. This image was obtained with 2023 data from Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) as part of an observation programme to explore the stars in the cluster and to investigate details of the cluster’s pulsars. A pulsar is a highly magnetised, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. To us, that beam appears as a short burst or pulse as the star rotates. Pulsars spin extremely fast. Astronomers have clocked the fastest pulsars at more than 716 rotations per second, but a pulsar could theoretically rotate as fast as 1500 rotations per second before slowly losing energy or breaking apart. The new data obtained by the science team indicate the first evidence from Webb observations of abundance variations of helium and oxygen in stars in a globular cluster. These results open the window for future, in-depth investigations of other clusters in the Galactic bulge, which were previously infeasible with other telescope facilities given the significant crowding of stars in the cluster and the strong reddening caused by interstellar dust between the cluster and Earth.