I grew up with The Muppets. My husband Andrew and I are the right age because Sesame Street came in 1969, about when we were about four or five. Maybe we were slightly older than the regular toddler viewers for Sesame Street, but The Muppet Show I was definitely there for, when in 1976 it first premiered–I was ten, the perfect age, Then The Muppet Movie came out in 1979 when I was 13.  I went and saw it a million times when it first came out.

This painting is from the was the last scene of The Muppet Movie, where the camera pans out after retelling—in a totally fictional way—their story with props in a soundstage and the Muppets are singing “The Rainbow Connection,” and there’s this deux ex machina where they’re trying to reinvent, with the set, what happened in the movie, but then the set collapses and there’s literally a hole in the ceiling in which a rainbow bursts through. And as they’re all singing the song, the camera pans out and shows all the Muppets at that time, including the Sesame Street gang. And with this painting I’m trying to capture the initial sublime woosh it felt as a child to see the whole Muppet universe, standing in symbolically for ours, when I was young and had an almost religious awakening at this moment.

It was fun going back into Sesame Street and watching it, along with many favorite Muppet Show episodes and the films. I know all the characters well. The reference photo for this painting wasn’t a film still, but was an outtake for the press or something, where they show the puppeteers. You can see, if you closely in the painting and the phot, that there are faces of the actual puppeteers manipulating the puppets. While painting, some of them came up unconsciously, and then some that were obviously there. But I love the idea the puppet being alchemized, brought into life, by the transcendent acting of the puppeteer. To me, cartooning is really close to puppetry. Because obviously with the Muppets are just pieces of Muppet felt that have Jim Henson’s hand up Kermit’s butt, who makes Kermit animated and alive. And that’s what you do with cartooning—the alchemizing of ink into characters and being, and now what I try to do when I paint, at least for iconic cartoon-like figures.  For real life personas, I try to channel their energy and “talk” to them like a barber cutting their client’s hair, to spend time with them, learning and hopefully honoring them while I paint them, hopefully complimentary and respectful portrait, but also in this process, try to animate the scene as if they were alive and talking with the viewer.

I always tell my student that cartoonist Bill Waterson was just making Calvin & Hobbes with ink, but he’s thinking his thoughts and he animates Calvin and Hobbes like a puppeteer would. I think the same thing is true for a painter, in the way that we’re talking about. They animate something. So, it’s funny to me to create this image of all the puppets of the Muppets, but to also have the puppeteers projecting themselves into the Muppets to make them come alive. An allegorical situation—and the shape of their form that reminds me of the island of Manhattan and its people.

Fraggle Rock is in there, too, and Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas and more. This Emmet Otter gang are in the painting’s rawer moments, I want to leave them, because to me, it does spill into some weird, subconscious abstraction. But then where it coheres—where the light was better in the image—had some of the more popular Muppets. And then I realized, they must have had some sort of rainbow effect in the actual studio. If you step back and squint your eyes looking at the work, you see the rainbow where the colors are coming through with the more rendered characters. It was fun to paint.

My best friend from childhood died—my great friend, Dan Knapp. And sometimes when I’m trying to get to sleep, I think about him guiding me into what heaven might look like, and I try to go with him to some sort of Dante version of heaven by way of Durer. So, on the upper-right hand corner of the work is my little heavenly moment in the set, where it breaks into the little window of some sort of iconic heaven—perhaps there are little spirits in there.

Sesame Street and the Muppets were my entry into a larger cultural universe.  Growing up in suburban Colorado, the ideology of the Civil Rights and Human Rights movement reached me at an early age through the vehicle of Sesame Street, which was born out of that moment, specifically to have the effect it did on me and most of Generation X.  I feel that the empathy and compassion for all others, especially in Sesame Street that had a DEI cast of real-life actors on an urban set, gave birth and consciousness from a cultural point of view to my awareness of being within the world and wanting to care for others and environment.  The major theme of Sesame Street was “cooperation,” which in a fundamental, base way to teach young children, is about working together with acceptance, tolerance, and love.  This translates well into most Henson creations, the epitome of which is the Muppet Show, where a cavalcade of characters are within the community headed by the queerified “it’s not easy being green” Kermit the Frog.

I have always related to Kermit, all the more so now as the Chair of Painting, Drawing, Printmaking at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where I am also starting a Visual Narrative Art program.   The politics of academia are well-known, and no need to go through them here—however this painting, as I truly live through my work, helped me through a rough patch trying to “herd kittens” in my job revolutionizing my part of our great art program.  Children, college students, adults (and faculty!) have all our little super egos, battling for needs and happiness with manic persistence, much like Muppets who express themselves with gleeful anarchy.  It was personally cathartic and edifying to regress a bit to paint this work, to spirit child memories and dreams and feelings and remember what I wanted to be when I grew up, which hopefully I now live, trying my best to make the world a better place in the humble way I can.  While it’s not easy being green, green is all there is to be.

I grew up with The Muppets. My husband Andrew and I are the right age because Sesame Street came in 1969, about when we were about four or five. Maybe we were slightly older than the regular toddler viewers for Sesame Street, but The Muppet Show I was definitely there for, when in 1976 it first premiered–I was ten, the perfect age, Then The Muppet Movie came out in 1979 when I was 13.  I went and saw it a million times when it first came out.

This painting is from the was the last scene of The Muppet Movie, where the camera pans out after retelling—in a totally fictional way—their story with props in a soundstage and the Muppets are singing “The Rainbow Connection,” and there’s this deux ex machina where they’re trying to reinvent, with the set, what happened in the movie, but then the set collapses and there’s literally a hole in the ceiling in which a rainbow bursts through. And as they’re all singing the song, the camera pans out and shows all the Muppets at that time, including the Sesame Street gang. And with this painting I’m trying to capture the initial sublime woosh it felt as a child to see the whole Muppet universe, standing in symbolically for ours, when I was young and had an almost religious awakening at this moment.

It was fun going back into Sesame Street and watching it, along with many favorite Muppet Show episodes and the films. I know all the characters well. The reference photo for this painting wasn’t a film still, but was an outtake for the press or something, where they show the puppeteers. You can see, if you closely in the painting and the phot, that there are faces of the actual puppeteers manipulating the puppets. While painting, some of them came up unconsciously, and then some that were obviously there. But I love the idea the puppet being alchemized, brought into life, by the transcendent acting of the puppeteer. To me, cartooning is really close to puppetry. Because obviously with the Muppets are just pieces of Muppet felt that have Jim Henson’s hand up Kermit’s butt, who makes Kermit animated and alive. And that’s what you do with cartooning—the alchemizing of ink into characters and being, and now what I try to do when I paint, at least for iconic cartoon-like figures.  For real life personas, I try to channel their energy and “talk” to them like a barber cutting their client’s hair, to spend time with them, learning and hopefully honoring them while I paint them, hopefully complimentary and respectful portrait, but also in this process, try to animate the scene as if they were alive and talking with the viewer.

I always tell my student that cartoonist Bill Waterson was just making Calvin & Hobbes with ink, but he’s thinking his thoughts and he animates Calvin and Hobbes like a puppeteer would. I think the same thing is true for a painter, in the way that we’re talking about. They animate something. So, it’s funny to me to create this image of all the puppets of the Muppets, but to also have the puppeteers projecting themselves into the Muppets to make them come alive. An allegorical situation—and the shape of their form that reminds me of the island of Manhattan and its people.

Fraggle Rock is in there, too, and Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas and more. This Emmet Otter gang are in the painting’s rawer moments, I want to leave them, because to me, it does spill into some weird, subconscious abstraction. But then where it coheres—where the light was better in the image—had some of the more popular Muppets. And then I realized, they must have had some sort of rainbow effect in the actual studio. If you step back and squint your eyes looking at the work, you see the rainbow where the colors are coming through with the more rendered characters. It was fun to paint.

My best friend from childhood died—my great friend, Dan Knapp. And sometimes when I’m trying to get to sleep, I think about him guiding me into what heaven might look like, and I try to go with him to some sort of Dante version of heaven by way of Durer. So, on the upper-right hand corner of the work is my little heavenly moment in the set, where it breaks into the little window of some sort of iconic heaven—perhaps there are little spirits in there.

Sesame Street and the Muppets were my entry into a larger cultural universe.  Growing up in suburban Colorado, the ideology of the Civil Rights and Human Rights movement reached me at an early age through the vehicle of Sesame Street, which was born out of that moment, specifically to have the effect it did on me and most of Generation X.  I feel that the empathy and compassion for all others, especially in Sesame Street that had a DEI cast of real-life actors on an urban set, gave birth and consciousness from a cultural point of view to my awareness of being within the world and wanting to care for others and environment.  The major theme of Sesame Street was “cooperation,” which in a fundamental, base way to teach young children, is about working together with acceptance, tolerance, and love.  This translates well into most Henson creations, the epitome of which is the Muppet Show, where a cavalcade of characters are within the community headed by the queerified “it’s not easy being green” Kermit the Frog.

I have always related to Kermit, all the more so now as the Chair of Painting, Drawing, Printmaking at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where I am also starting a Visual Narrative Art program.   The politics of academia are well-known, and no need to go through them here—however this painting, as I truly live through my work, helped me through a rough patch trying to “herd kittens” in my job revolutionizing my part of our great art program.  Children, college students, adults (and faculty!) have all our little super egos, battling for needs and happiness with manic persistence, much like Muppets who express themselves with gleeful anarchy.  It was personally cathartic and edifying to regress a bit to paint this work, to spirit child memories and dreams and feelings and remember what I wanted to be when I grew up, which hopefully I now live, trying my best to make the world a better place in the humble way I can.  While it’s not easy being green, green is all there is to be.