My husband and I love everything Snoopy (and Peanuts!), and I have been a lifelong Charles Schulz fan. Living through our tumultuous times sometimes everything seems spinning but it’s important to keep our cool, taking a breath to enjoy our days and to keep hope and joy alive and our own sense of agency to forge our place into a brighter future. Schulz was spiritual, and Snoopy was his guiding spirit, an avatar to depict freedom and the ideal of living one’s life to the fullest with humble intensity.

I want to portray Snoopy and pay homage to the master, but also to suture into his avatar and have him take me on a journey into his peaceful realm. I love Warhol and Lichtenstein, too, but instead of Duchampian maneuvers of bringing in the readymade of a comic into a painting embracing the commercial aesthetics of the comic strip, I want to bring warmth, emotion, and painterly abstraction to transcend the Ben-Day dots and Schulz’s signature style to make it a vehicle to transcend into other realms.

I’m hoping that the painting is my own take on things, a virtual reality into a synesthetic space of how I feel in the 21C, hoping for the triumph of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to bring us into a new era of living our dreams instead of our nightmares, and to be able to live our own potentials to the fullest. Snoopy on his doghouse is an iconic tribute to meditative self-awareness and mindfulness, and Schulz’s famous strip carried with it his spiritual values.

On Nov. 4, 1978, he published his comic strip haiku that I quote for the title of this work, and I hope that he would approve this posthumous collaboration! I have taught comics for the last 30 years, and when Schulz passed he appeared to me in a dream–I remember his Mr. Rogers-like humble warmth and sensitivity, and he seemed glad I was spreading the comics gospel to new generations. I am a child of the Pictures Generation, and love painting, narrative allegory, abstraction, & hope!