Willie Ito, Michael Maslin, Vonn Sumner, Charlie Daniel, Ed Steckley, Trina Robbins, Lee Mars, Jules Rivera, more
Long time animator (1954 – 1999) who frequently dabbled in other comic arts …
I also was involved with magazine cartoons (Car-Toons magazine in the 1950s), comic strips (four episodes of the annual Disney Christmas comic strip for King Features), comic books (the five Beany and Cecil comic books 1962-1963) and doing subcontract work for other production studios.
One of the many things I’ve liked (alright, loved) about working for The New Yorker is the absence of pressure the magazine places on its cartoonists. The absence itself is purposeful: we (“we” being the cartoonists) are allowed complete freedom to pursue our work.
Second Nature is a curiously familiar solo exhibition of brand-new paintings on paper and canvas by artist Vonn Cummings Sumner. Familiar, that is, if you’re a follower of George Herriman’s influential comic strip character Krazy Kat and her unrequited love for brick-throwing Ignatz the Mouse.
That is a really interesting question. I think that has to do with the times—the difference between Modern and Postmodern, perhaps? But also it has to do with the medium: A cartoon strip has its history/language/conventions and a painting has its history/language/conventions. I hold humor very high in the hierarchy of artistic values.
It is fitting that his talents will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award during the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame ceremonies Friday, March 24, at The Foundry.
Saturday Evening Post: “(Your work) is not quite suited to our needs.”
Growing up, Ed Steckley dreamed of contributing to MAD Magazine and being a part of “Saturday Night Live.” The 2018 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater graduate achieved both goals through a varied career that he attributes to a message on the campus bulletin board.
Comics artist and historian Trina Robbins and cartoonist Lee Marrs were the BIG NAMES at the Cartoon Art Museum‘s Women’s Comics Marketplace earlier this month. Jules (Mark Trail) Rivera and a dozen other women cartoonists were also there.
In 1972, Robbins, a San Francisco resident, wrote and drew a short story called “Sandy Comes Out,” starring the first lesbian comic-book character outside of pornography. Shifting gears, she began drawing for DC Comics in the 1980s, and since then has authored several books and continues to write and draw comics.
“Krazy Pumpkin” by Vonn Cummings Sumner, included in his exhibit “Second Nature.” (Vonn Cummings Sumner/Morton Fine Art)
Seeking an everyman as a focus for his recent paintings, Vonn Cummings Sumner found a cat — or kat, as the word was spelled in George Herriman’s 1913-1944 comic strip, “Krazy Kat.” Sumner had been introduced to Herriman’s work by his teacher, noted painter Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1990s. But it wasn’t until 2020 that Sumner began painting Krazy as the bemused observer of dumpster fires both actual and metaphorical. Two years later, the California artist dispatched the cartoon feline into the great outdoors for the paintings in “Second Nature,” his latest Morton Fine Art show.
The original Krazy Kat was usually portrayed in a highly stylized version of Arizona’s Painted Desert. Summer’s recent paintings place him — or her, as Herriman declined to specify the character’s gender — in greener, more naturalistic climes. Krazy’s cartoonishness contrasts the realistically rendered grass, trees and sky, as well as animals such as the horse Krazy rides in two paintings that echo Degas equestrian sculptures. There are exceptions to this schema: In a few pictures the backdrops are flattened and streamlined in the manner of Matisse, and the most vivid canvas places a tiny Krazy in the surrealistic presence of a massive orange pumpkin with a red sun on the horizon of a fuchsia sky.
Sumner toys with Krazy’s persona, giving him a carrot for a Bugs Bunny-like prop in “What’s Up, Kat?” Yet the foreboding of the dumpster-fire paintings seems to have followed Krazy into Eden, where the cat is sometimes trailed by a snake. Perhaps the serpent’s undulating shape is just a visual echo of Krazy’s tail, which is as jagged as the cartoon lightning bolt that bisects the sky in “Krazy Storm.” In Sumner’s paintings, the symbols are open to interpretation, as they are in the work of another Herriman fan, Philip Guston. (“Second Nature” was scheduled to overlap the current Guston retrospective at the National Gallery of Art.) What’s clear, though, is that Sumner’s Krazy occupies a world that is as uneasy and off-kilter as Herriman’s.
Vonn Cummings Sumner: Second Nature Through April 8 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.
Vonn Cummings: Second Nature March 11 – April 8, 2023 Morton Fine Art 52 O St NW #302 Washington, DC 20001
Second Nature is a solo exhibition of new paintings on paper and canvas by artist Vonn Cummings Sumner. First rendering Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s influential comic strip character during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sumner returns to the wandering, curious avatar with Second Nature, escorting the titular figure through newly verdant, water-pooled landscapes, open spaces and art historical-coded landscapes, longing for escape and a reconnection with Nature. Genderless and endlessly depicted, Krazy Kat stands in for “everyman,” but rarely has their roaming path seemed to follow a strange inner voice that might be its own, but also Sumner’s—raising the question “who’s following who?” as both go about a grand tour of references, past and present.
Krazy Storm (after Giorgione), 2023. Oil on panel, 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
Second Nature finds Krazy Kat (and Sumner) on a heavy, if much-needed retreat, anxiety hanging about and lightened by the exhibition’s antithetical moments of enigma, colour and joy. Sumner’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, Second Nature, will be on view from March 11 – April 8, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW#302).
Introduced to Krazy Kat by his longtime mentor and friend, the late artist Wayne Thiebaud, Sumner’s character has become a fertile prompt, both for working through existential atmospheres and more painterly notions of colour, composition, control, gesture and mark-making. Where Sumner’s first body of work with Krazy Kat placed the internationalist “everyman” in horizonless, all-white backgrounds ripe with psychological references, and a subsequent 2022 exhibition watched Krazy Kat pass by inflamed trash cans and looming aerial anvils—partly a response to the time’s deep atmosphere of instability and loss—2023’s Second Nature features Krazy Kat back out in the open world, or perhaps removed from it, tramping through vivid, almost day-glo rendered deserts, forests, fields—and much of Western art history.
Returning back to colour in full force, Second Nature revives Sumner’s ongoing balancing act between “cartoon” and “painting.” Colours surge with an agency of their own, sometimes running counter to the narrative elements of the works. The graphic boldness of Night Bathers’ (2023) rectangular blue and green landscape, touched by two black trees and deep orange moon, is contrasted by the painterly chevron brushstrokes depicting waves on Krazy Kat’s bathing pool. Destabilized by colour, the work could reasonably be decoded as a night for day setting, turning the work on its head—or placing it back in a cartoon and cinematic tradition.
Horse and Rider, 2023. Oil on canvas, 48 x 65 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
Belonging to a series of “Bather Kat” works ( River Bather, Green Bathers), these works are new explorations of acrylic paint on paper and may be read for a preoccupation with scrubbing oneself clean, particularly in the aftermath of the past few years and in light of Krazy Kat’s previous adventures with Sumner.
Reverie, 2023. Acrylic on paper, 22.5 x 30.25 in, Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
But longer engagement with the works draws out Sumner’s expert, playful eye for form, color and history. Capturing the airy, open tactility of the beach—depicting clouds and a sandy bluff in similarly rough, scratchy applications of paint—Beach Stretch (after Cezanne) (2023) is also a sort of pun, alluding to Cezanne’s famed bathing series. Horse and Rider (2023), drawing from Edgar Degas’ series of horse sculptures, is all speed and movement, the surface paint seeming to blur in fast motion. Grass, tree and horse alike are pulled and smoothed out—except for Krazy Kat’s tail, forever jointed in a “z” shape.
Like that zig-zagging tail, Krazy Kat cuts a pensive path, inviting us to join the existential reverie found in these unfolding spaces of rich forms and loaded marks, where Sumner offers his painterly meditations.
Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.
Thank you to Le Monde Diplomatique for featuring a potent handful of works by VONN CUMMINGS SUMNER accompanying articles in the April 2023 edition. More info can be found by visiting http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr
American artist Vonn Cummings Sumner has revisited the classic cartoon strip character Krazy Kat in his latest solo exhibition, Second Nature, which is currently on view at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C. space.
Krazy Kat is the legendary creation of cartoonist George Herriman, who entertained newspaper audiences daily during the strip’s original run from 1913 to 1944. Thanks to its surreal humour and innovative use of the comic strip format, Krazy Kat is often regarded as the greatest comic series of all time and continues to influence artists to this day.
One such artist is a Los Angeles-based painter and professor of art at Fullerton College in Southern California, Vonn Cummings Sumner. Having previously used Krazy Kat in paintings created during the pandemic, his latest series of works titled Second Nature sees the character follow in everyone else’s footsteps by once again stepping outside and exploring the world around them.
Depicting Krazy Kat walking through forests, swimming in pools and riding horses, Second Nature also sees the enduring figure explore iconography from Western art history. Retaining the sense of existential reverie and anarchy in the original strip, the exhibition also gives Vonn a chance to respond to the current world and follow up on themes he’d established in his previous Krazy Kat paintings.
The reason for Vonn’s continued fascination with Krazy Kat is partly down to the innocent and hopeless romantic qualities of the character itself. Without a set gender or even a set species, Krazy Kat acts as the perfect blank canvas onto which different topics and concerns can be projected.
“Herriman described Krazy as a ‘sprite’ – so there is something almost mystical or mythological about Krazy: an ideal empathetic effigy,” Vonn tells Creative Boom. “Also, the strip began in 1913, and there is some anarchic kind of energy that it communicates; it’s non-conformist, to say the least. Therefore, it became a kind of cult favourite among artists and writers, intellectuals and eccentrics during the 20th century. So, for me, there is an association with a certain strain of American bohemian counter-culture.”
When he first started using Krazy Kat in his paintings back in 2020, Vonn started to think more deeply about the unique opportunities it presented. “I realised that Krazy Kat is a human-animal hybrid, which is arguably the oldest/most-used subject or theme in human art, going all the way back to cave paintings. I think Krazy Kat (and a lot of our cartoon characters) is part of that lineage.”
The character made a strong impression on Vonn when he first encountered him. He can even remember exactly where he was. “I was an 18-year-old freshman at UC Davis, sitting in the back of Prof. Wayne Thiebaud’s ART 148/Theory & Criticism class,” he reveals.
“He started class one day with an image of a Krazy Kat comic strip projected on the screen and spoke with obvious affection for this odd, dense, unorthodox cartoon that painters had loved: Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Picasso. That had a huge impact on me, being introduced to Krazy Kat in that setting, at that impressionable stage.
“After class, I went straight to the campus library and checked out their only book on Krazy Kat, an anthology with an introduction by E.E. Cummings. I was obsessed from then on, reading everything I could get my hands on – drawing from it, copying the drawings. There was a real sense of discovery, a whole world of creativity, poetry, humour, and history. Profoundly pleasurable!”
Copying the strip could only satisfy Vonn for so long, though. Even though he loves it and is informed by art history, he says he has no interest in simply recreating something or indulging in nostalgia. “I want to make paintings that are relevant to people now, to communicate something about being alive now,” he explains.
“Painting is not so much about ‘self-expression’ to me as it is about a kind of self-discovery or self-questioning. So in a way, I am using Krazy Kat as a proxy, a stand-in for myself or for all of us in a larger sense, perhaps. I think that if I try to go too directly towards an issue or subject, then it comes out too literal, too predictable, and too cliche. But, if I can come at something sideways – from an odd angle – then I feel like I can touch on some deeper things. Krazy Kat is so specific and so unusual that it becomes a way of talking about things with some extra layers and some humour.”
Another reason why Vonn finds Krazy Kat so interesting to paint is that everything keeps changing. “The world has obviously been going through many big shifts and changes – culturally, technologically, politically, pandemically, environmentally, etc. – and in the Krazy Kat strip, everything is changing all the time.
“For example, from frame to frame, within each strip, the time of day will change, the landscape/background will change, and the language will change. In Herriman’s Krazy Kat, everything is subject to change all the time. So it feels very appropriate to have Krazy Kat help me process the world.”
It’s not just the world that’s changed; Vonn’s art style has had to adapt as well. By putting Krazy Kat in the natural world, Vonn has changed not only his colour palettes but also the kinds of situations and settings that the character will experience. And from there, the dynamic of the artwork followed.
“In these paintings, I am trying to find a balance between specific landscapes that I have known intimately in my own life and archetypal/mythological/art-historical landscapes – combining my personal sense memories with the collective cultural memory of art,” he reveals.
“That is the goal, at least. These things are hard to talk about, but essentially when I am painting, I am searching for a feeling, and that feeling is something like ‘strangeness’ or ‘mystery’, something that feels familiar and yet mysterious at the same time.
“There is a richness, I believe, from the kind of rhyming that can happen with other paintings and stories from art history. Just like a writer writes in the context of all the other things they have read, or a musician composing in relation/reaction to all of the music they have heard/played – I am making paintings in the context of all the other paintings that I have seen. I get a lot of creative energy from that interaction.”
As for why Krazy Kat continues to appeal to wider audiences after all these years, Vonn reckons it’s because the strip is so inventive. “I would place Herriman up there with Louis Armstrong and Walt Whitman on the shortlist of American originals. I could go on and on about that with comic lovers.
“But from a more general audience point of view, I think there is something special about Krazy Kat as a character, and I think it has something to do with ambiguity and vulnerability. Krazy Kat is not a ‘cat’ and not a ‘human’, and not a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’ in any kind of set way. That kind of non-binary ambiguity has great energy somehow. It is very inclusive, allowing anyone to identify and empathise with Krazy.
“The world around Krazy Kat is full of change, danger, and conflict, but Krazy stays totally sincere and open-hearted. Who wouldn’t love that?”
Second Nature is on view until 8 April 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Second Nature is a curiously familiar solo exhibition of brand-new paintings on paper and canvas by artist Vonn Cummings Sumner. Familiar, that is, if you’re a follower of George Herriman’s influential comic strip character Krazy Kat and her unrequited love for brick-throwing Ignatz the Mouse.
Born of COVID-19, Sumner turned his pandemic loneliness to the form of Arizona’s most renowned “wandering avatar.” The seasons changed, the days turned into nights and nights into mornings, as Sumner imagined a 21st-century Krazy in verdant dales, wide-open spaces and art historical–seeded landscapes, evoking longing for a connection with nature without Ignatz, brick or jail in sight. Sumner’s sixth solo exhibition with the Morton gallery,Second Nature will be on view through April 8 at 52 O St. NW, #302, in Washington DC.
Introduced to Krazy Kat by his longtime mentor Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021), reviving the character enabled Sumner to focus on existential concerns and painterly notions of color, composition, gesture and mark-making. “Lightened by the exhibition’s … moments of enigma, color and joy, Second Naturefinds Krazy Kat (and Sumner) on a heavy, if much-needed retreat.” The work’s employ of a familiar, beloved character can have that effect on all.
I very much enjoyed the following conversation with Sumner, if only to focus on something other than the strife caused by real (and fake) post-COVID ‘Merica. Second Nature is neither real nor fake, but it sure is refreshing.
Kat Hole, 2023. Oil on panel, 18 x 18in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
I’m assuming you are a comics fan. Or is it just Krazy Kat that captures your fascination? Yes, of course. I am a lifelong comics fan. My favorite, as a kid in the ’80s, was the X-Men. I also loved the Marvel Universe comic books that just had a page for each character. When I was a kid, I was making my own comics (which weren’t very good). My friends in elementary school were into it too. We would sit around and draw from comics together. We had subscriptions at the local comic book store, where we would go once a month when the new issues came out. I loved a lot of the weird stuff, though. From Mad Magazine’s comics to Groo the Wanderer. And there was one called Plop! Then I got older and discovered R. Crumb, and then Dark Horse Comics and other things. I was obsessed with Daniel Clowes for a while; he was very influential on me. Art Spiegelman, of course.
Melancholy Kat, 2022. Oil on panel, 18 x 18 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
You remove Krazy’s cohorts from your work, substituting other artistic features like landscape and pattern. What is your motive for devoting your energies to transformation? It’s very appropriate that you use the word “transformation”— that feels right. This is hard to articulate, but I have this gut feeling that if I included Ignatz or Offisa Pup, then it would be a totally different kind of thing. I’m not interested in reenacting the comic strip literally; it’s more I feel connected to Krazy Kat, like Krazy is an old friend, a timeless soul. It’s like Krazy Kat comes from another time, but is also timeless somehow. As a painter, I am interested in the world as it is now; how we make beauty and meaning and life now. So I am trying to summon the spirit of Krazy Kat, to accompany me in this time and to see what happens in this context, here and now. Personally the fast few years have been a time of pretty intense transformation. And globally, of course, the past few years have been transformational (for better or worse). Krazy Kat comes from that world (of the strip) where things are transforming all the time, so this pairing feels appropriate somehow. Sometimes I think: What if Krazy Kat were the last being on earth? Or, what if Krazy Kat was the first of a new species, after a mass extinction? Sometimes I think of Krazy Kat almost like a child, mimicking what we do. None of it is that literal, of course, since it is a visual medium and I am working largely by following instincts, impulses, intuitions—trying to stay ahead of my rational mind so that the paintings remain a little bit of a mystery even to me. You are right, though, I am searching for some kind of transformation via Krazy Kat.
Your reinterpretation of Krazy Kat is an inspiring take on a classic character who is particularly associated by art historians with the early marriage of cartoon and modern art. Where did your passion for Krazy come from? I think that is part of why Krazy Kat feels right to me, to paint this character that is intertwined with the development of modern art in general, and especially in the U.S., the link to the Armory show of 1913. It’s all connected, artistically. My passion for Krazy comes from my time at UD Davis: I was an 18-year-old freshman, sitting in the back of Prof. Wayne Thiebaud’s ART 148/Theory & Criticism class. He started class one day with an image of one of the Krazy Kat comic strips projected up on the screen, and spoke with obvious affection for this odd, dense, unorthodox cartoon that had been beloved by painters: Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Picasso. That had a huge impact on me, being introduced to it that way, in that setting, at that impressionable stage.
River Bather, 2023. Acrylic on paper, 22.5 x 30.25 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
You’ve captured the spirit of Krazy without copying the tropes. In your paintings, she is her own character in a new but not entirely alien landscape. Why did you adapt her in this way? What inspired you to take Krazy out of her natural environment? Long story short: I had been painting figures for several years, pretty realistically, and most of the time I was painting myself—or at least using my own body/face as a “figure” that I would costume in different ways. Eventually I got really sick of painting myself and needed a change. I painted a series of trashcans and dumpsters—often on fire—on sidewalks and alleys. In a few of those paintings, I included an ‘alley-cat’—again, realistically. One of my painter friends, Randall Cabe, was doing a studio visit with me. We were talking about those paintings and he said he really liked how the cats functioned like a “figure” to help bring the viewer into the space. He knew my love of Krazy Kat, and the connection to Thiebaud, and he said, “why not make that cat into Krazy Kat?” So I did it a couple of times, just to make my friend laugh. I painted Krazy Kat in the alley and on the sidewalk. Then I showed those first two paintings to Thiebaud and he said such interesting, encouraging things that I felt like it was worth exploring some more. Then the pandemic hit and it was during that first week or two of lockdown that it just seemed obvious/inevitable: a Krazy Kat for a crazy time.
Horse and Rider, 2023. Oil on canvas, 48 x 65 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
You’ve also reconfigured Krazy, elongating her, seemingly taming her while maintaining the essence of the original (especially the ‘Z’ tail). She seems more mature. What went into your decision to create this physical type? I think it relates back to Herriman’s strip, actually: If you look at Krazy Kat from the beginning, around 1913 to the end in the early 1940s, there is quite a shift in how he draws Krazy. So that is built into the character, in a way—the ability to shift and change and transform. Again this all feels appropriate on a gut level. So then I was painting Krazy Kat—and partly it is just my own mistakes, or limitations, in trying to depict them—but at some point I will just go with it, and accept the way that I have painted them. And then that leads to the obvious question: Why not give Krazy a little more anatomy/structure? All the countless hours that I put in drawing from the model then comes into play. I kind of can’t help but make Krazy a little bit more “human.” To do otherwise, to just be totally faithful to the cartoon, would be too “cute” in my opinion. I am not going for cute. I am interested in the human-animal hybrid tradition of art, going back to the caves, the Lion-Man Hohlenstein-Stadel sculpture, all the way through the great Egyptian versions, the Hindu and Buddhist versions. I’m very interested in Krazy Kat as a kind of modern extension of that tradition—the human/animal hybrid is one of the oldest and most popular themes in the history of art, and that is definitely part of the point of the whole project for me.
What’s Up Kat…, 2023. Acrylic on paper, 22.5 x 30.25 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
I love the nuanced and overt parodies (especially the Bugs Bunny reference). When Herriman drew Krazy there was wit and humor but not parody per se. What are you saying about art, life, comics and existence through your Krazy Kat? Thank you. I hadn’t thought of it like that yet. That is a really interesting question. I think that has to do with the times—the difference between Modern and Postmodern, perhaps? But also it has to do with the medium: A cartoon strip has its history/language/conventions and a painting has its history/language/conventions. I hold humor very high in the hierarchy of artistic values. And Thiebaud used to say that an artwork without a sense of humor was probably lacking a sense of perspective. So on a very basic level, I take humor very seriously, and I trust it: If a painting can make me laugh, that is enough. I trust that. As for larger messages or explanations, I think that is better left up to each viewer.
How long will you continue to make this otherworldly Krazy Kat? As long as it feels right. I don’t have a set timeline or anything. Painting, art, etc., doesn’t run on the clock. Sometimes I like to think that Krazy Kat is with me, visiting me, like a spirit or a muse. These are the things that artists should never talk about, haha! We get very carried away.
Krazy Desert, 2021–2023. Oil on panel, 18 x 18 in. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the artist
I own a latter-day daily original (four-panel) Krazy Kat, hanging on the wall in front of me. It seems like Herriman drew it on the fly. In fact, I think he’d disavow it now. How do you think Herriman would take to your interpretations? Wow, that is really cool, I would love to see it. Wayne had some originals in his collection, which he showed to me. In addition to the amazingly skillful drawing, of course, I was struck by how big they were!
As for your very interesting question, that is very funny to contemplate! The greatest compliment, of course, would be to get his positive stamp of approval. But he might take issue with all of the liberties that I am taking! I understand that Herriman himself did some plein-air painting in the Southwest, and was a great admirer of painting, of course. I think he even did a painting or two of Krazy Kat? He was very hard on himself, very humble and self-depricating. My hope is that, at least, Herriman would see that I have genuine respect and affection for Krazy. But as a painter, I also have to be willing to offend, make mistakes, do it ‘wrong.’ That is the spirit of freedom that Herriman infused the Krazy Kat comic strip with, so I hope he would understand.
Moments after finishing the interview, Vonn sent in a bonus response. . . I’m still thinking about those questions and wanted to pass along some thoughts spurred by our conversation.
We are wired, it seems, to want to think of the world as stable and knowable—but of course it’s not. Everything is changing all the time, and we actually seem to know very little. Krazy Kat seems fine with that changability, that instability. I’m trying to learn from Krazy, in a way, trying to absorb that ability to accept and navigate the instability of life. Humans like to convince ourselves that we know what we’re doing and we make all kinds of laws and rules and systems to reinforce that illusion; which, of course, is the human-folly that Herriman was commenting on in a very sophisticated way, with humor and affection and almost unparalleled inventiveness. That is very appealing to me, that kind of theater of the absurd. I loved Beckett and all of the more contemporary things influenced by his work, including Bugs Bunny and Charlie Brown. The Great Pumpkin is like Waiting for Godot for children! So I do think that very serious and profound ideas can be approached through things like cartoons and comics and paintings. It’s all about the human-scale, the intention. I’m wary of getting too pretentious, and it’s also probably folly to ask too much of paintings, but these are some of the things I think about. Albert Camus said something to the effect of “humans are the only animal that doesn’t know what it is”—Krazy Kat is like that, somehow. The tension is that humans seem very uncomfortable with that uncertainty, while Krazy Kat seems perfectly fine with it.
Steven Heller has written for PRINT since the 1980s. He is co-chair of SVA MFA Designer as Entrepreneur. The author, co-author and editor of over 200 books on design and popular culture, Heller is also the recipient of the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award for “Design Mind,” the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement and other honors. He was a senior art director at The New York Times for 33 years and a writer of obituaries and book review columnist for the newspaper, as well. His memoir, Growing Up Underground (Princeton Architectural Press) was published in 2022. Some of his recent essays are collected in For the Love of Design (Allworth Press).
Vonn Cummings Sumner, Krazy Mirror, 2021. Oil on panel. 10 x 8 inches. Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Morton Fine Art.
The passing of celebrated California painter Wayne Thiebaud was confirmed by his gallery Aqcuavella on Sunday. “Even at 101 years old, he still spent most days in the studio, driven by, as he described with his characteristic humility, ‘this almost neurotic fixation of trying to learn to paint’,” the statement said.
Thiebaud’s now legendary practice expanded the Pop Art movement, being particularly known for his unique focus on paintings of everyday subject matter – cakes, pies, gumball machines, and highways – inflected with pastel hues and a sense of Americana. These works were staples at major auction house sales; Four Pinball Machines (1920) sold at Christie’s for a staggering $19,1 million in July 2020 and Sotheby’s holds the record for his cakes when Encased Cakes netted $8,46 million in 2019.
Though highly celebrated for his mastery over the painted medium, this last interview reveals the lesser-known influences of cartooning on both his oeuvre and that of peers such as Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston. Particularly loved by his cohort was Krazy Kat—the mid-20th century icon created by George Herriman—in 1990 Thiebaud collaborated with choreographer Brenda Way on a ballet based on the strip in San Francisco.
Krazy Kat reappeared as the titular character of Thiebaud’s former student Vonn Cummings Sumner’s solo show Krazy Times at Morton Fine Art in Washington, D.C. this past November. “I have been so incredibly fortunate to have Wayne as a kind of confidant, a co-conspirator,” says the painter, for whom studio visits with Thiebaud continued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. On the occasion of Cummings exhibition, he and Thiebaud conducted an interview. Emphasizing the significance of artistic exchange across time, space, and generations and reflective of their decades-long friendship, this conversation dives deep into the trajectories of both artists’ practices, highlighting Thiebaud’s illustrious career and the influence of his mentorship on Sumner, his former student, and their shared interest in Krazy Kat.
Portrait of Wayne Thiebaud in Vonn Cummings Sumner’s studio, featuring Sumner’s Krazy Kat paintings in the background. Image courtesy of Vonn Cummings Sumner.
Wayne Thiebaud: How did we get into this Krazy business in the first place?
Vonn Sumner: Well, you introduced Krazy Kat to me, when I was in your Theory & Criticism class. But, I wondered if you remember where and when you first saw Krazy Kat?
WT: When I was in the Army Air Force doing a little strip of my own, about a nondescript, dogface, Army Corporal, who was getting into all kinds of trouble a fellow by the name of Bob Crosby introduced me to the cartoonist George Herriman, the creator of the Krazy Kat strip. Bob tthought my strip was repetitive, full of cliches, and that I should shape up and become acquainted with Krazy Kat. To me it looked like a bunch of nonsense. I had just been to war and was, I guess, 20, 21 years old it was 1942 or 3.
VS: When I was a child, my introduction to any kind of pictures, really, were through children’s book illustrations and then comic books.
WT: For most American painters, that was their experience. They all talked about it, even, of course, Philip Guston. A lot of the people around the New York group were early cartoonists, and fed on American cartoonists and illustrations.
VS: Do you think it was a particularly American phenomenon to grow up looking at those things?
WT: I’ve heard that Picasso and some of the Surrealists were interested in Krazy Kat, but I have no documents to back this claim. They were certainly following Tin Tin, the Belgian cartoon. Regardless of which character we are talking about, the idea of humanity is central. How we can get them somehow to touch on that aspect? Not so much comic, and pratfalls, and actions, but just the aspect of when they are most human. For instance, I never found Nancy [a comic strip character that the artist Joe Brainard used in his artwork] very humane. But humanity runs all the way through Krazy Kat: his vulnerability and his wiseness in the face of naiveté. Such loving characteristics. So, you’ve done some, I think, quite remarkable paintings bringing him into little vignettes, and, mostly him with—and I haven’t seen all of them—but usually he’s somewhat alone, with some action, or with an elephant, or with something. I think they’re very, very well done, and very humane.
VS: When I showed you those first two little Krazy Kat paintings that I did, you spoke about the idea of “painting for the millions.” You quoted someone saying you shouldn’t pick up a pen to start writing without considering the millions, or the masses – the audience.
WT: I think that was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German.
Vonn Cummings Sumner, The Sky is On Fire, 2021. Oil on panel. 18 x 18 inches. Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Morton Fine Art.
VS: Why is does Krazy Kat lend itself to such popularity?
WT: Well, because it’s hard to understand Krazy Kat. What is going on? What is his/her gender? Why is the Southwest such a powerful environment for him? The wide open spaces? The wonderful, unpredictable-ness of the landscape, in terms of particularly American history. So why is that, rather than a more ‘normal’ environment, for Krazy Kat? I think it’s because of the unending possibilities that something like that open space can achieve.
VS: I don’t know if you remember this, Wayne, but you once sent me a postcard, or a little reproduction card from a Morandi show that Paul [Thiebaud] did in San Francisco. You put a Krazy Kat cartoon folded up inside of it and then you made a little note on the envelope, you said: “Krazy Kat and Morandi, an ideal dialectic!” I thought it was exciting as an idea. What if you set up those two as a dialectic, what comes out of that space in between them?
To point it in another direction: I wonder what it is about cartoon characters that allows people to identify with them? In your teaching, you emphasize the role of empathy, in both making paintings and also in looking at them, perceiving them. How do you see the role of empathy relating specifically to Krazy Kat, or why do you think we feel so attached to that little character?
WT: Well at center, it seems to me, is vulnerability. Not ‘sob story’ vulnerability, not too obvious, because he is determined, usually, never to be vulnerable. He resists vulnerability, it seems to me, which is quite a curious characteristic. You hit him on the head with a brick—could not care less! It is as much a ‘love-tap’ as a pain in the head!
VS: Part of what has been the challenge and the goal of doing these Krazy Kat paintings, for me, is to fully leave all of those photographic reference kind of crutches behind, and just work from drawings or memory or invention.
WT: I think that is where the gold lies.
VS: Why? What does memory painting allow for?
WT: It is not fixed. If you think about what you are getting from your memory, and as you begin to use it, all kinds of other things come into it, suddenly; mistakes, aberrations; ‘Gee, I didn’t know that little bump was so effective.’ You start out with one sense, one memory, and it becomes almost a kaleidoscope. There are suddenly all these variants of that one memory. That is the way I think of memory. And, I do not think it depends on just getting something fixed, but almost the opposite. Getting something which allows you to expand, to contract, to change, to color, to enlarge, all of the possibilities of that instance.
VS: So that you can discover something that you did not set out to know, or so that you can surprise yourself?
WT: Exactly. You can know, generally, in advance; but you cannot know, or deal with the surprises, the accidents that inform the work differently than you thought. Some of that can come into Krazy Kat. I do not think he has to be grand and clear. You are doing that, I think, with some effect.
Vonn Cummings Sumner, Ghosts, 2021. Oil on paper on panel. 12 x 12 inches. Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Morton Fine Art.
VS: I am interested in the idea of this singular character or figure that is both something that we know, something that we can agree on while being built into the world that Herriman was creating that is always changing. This process of becoming or unbecoming and unraveling lends itself well to uncertainty and open-endedness.
WT: Yes.
VS: Returning to incorporating humanity in painting. Ironically, it is through painting this strange cat that is not a cat, actually somehow you are trying to get at our own human vulnerability and hopes and dreams and whimsies and daydreams and nostalgia. All of the things that this amazing character can embody, right?
WT: It is not a simple problem; it is fascinating, challenging, and wonderful to see what happens. So, it is a treat to think of just ‘what is this painting going to look like?’ And, I am trying to make it look as interesting as possible. So that form– the formal order– is sustained, celebrated, and used ruthlessly, to make those paintings special, whatever the direction, whatever the intent. That is more likely than anything to get them into the canon, and the celebration.
Wayne Thiebaud, Boston Cremes, 1962. Image courtesy of Crocker Art Museum.
VS: I have decided that I like the question that kind of lurks next to the Krazy Kat paintings– can you even paint this? Or is it really ridiculous and not even worthwhile at all!
WT: [Laughter] That is the confrontation. That is exactly the way I felt trying to paint those damn pies. I could not believe anyone would be interested, on the other hand, I was just like, wow this is fun.
Editor-in-Chief and Principal PR/Digital & Curatorial Services, Cultbytes Building on her experience as an art critic and digital strategist, Anna Mikaela founded Cultbytes to promote interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical cultural criticism. By attracting the leading emerging museum professionals, artists, and art-critics to cover topics close to their heart her aim is to inspire cultural consumption in the public. As the Principal of PR/Digital & Curatorial Services, Anna Mikaela leverages her knowledge, network, and team to find new ways to innovate communications and curatorial practices to benefit her clients. She has held curatorial positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She holds dual MA degrees, in Design History, Material Culture, and Decorative Arts from Bard Graduate Center and in Art History from Stockholm University. She undertook her undergraduate studies at Stockholm University, Paris-Sorbonne IV, and London School of Economics and Political Science.
In his celebrated seven-decade career, painter Wayne Thiebaud has created a body of work that continues to captivate and inspire new viewers.
A pre-Pop Art innovator and figurative artist known for his elevation of everyday objects, Thiebaud has intersected with generations of students, beginning in 1960 when he joined UC Davis’ then-fledgling art department as a professor. Although he officially retired in 1990 (he continued teaching until 2002), he remains a professor emeritus at the school.
His larger reach in the world of painting is the subject of an exhibition at UC Davis’ Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, titled “Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation,” on view through Nov. 12 — closing just three days before he turns 101. The Sacramento artist, who still paints every day, will be honored along with the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, which will receive the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion at the museum’s annual gala the weekend of Thiebaud’s birthday.
For the Manetti Shrem Museum’s associate curator, Susie Kantor, there was a desire that the exhibition not just look back at the 100 years of Thiebaud’s life and work, but also “look ahead to the next 100 years” of art inspired by him. Of special interest to Kantor was work by students from his more than 40 years of teaching at Davis.
“He describes himself as a painter and a teacher, and I think they’re equally important to him,” Kantor says. “He gets so much from the teaching and from his students. He talked about it keeping him young, so maybe that’s longevity’s secret.”
“Wayne Thiebaud Influencer” features work by 19 artists, 13 of whom have been his students, who have been inspired by different aspects of Thiebaud’s canon. Their work is presented in conversation with Thiebaud’s own, allowing viewers to make comparisons and connections and see the chain of influence from one generation to the next.
Among the artists presented are Christopher Brown, April Glory Funcke, Grace Munakata, Bruce Nauman, Vonn Cummings Sumner and Patricia Wall, who all studied with Thiebaud, along with Andrea Bowers, Robert Colescott, Alex Israel, Jason Stopa, Jonas Wood and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Many of the artists featured became teachers themselves.
“A lot of the artists who studied with him talked about the idea of a daily practice,” Kantor says. “Many of them still do sketchbooks. That rigor in the daily practice, this idea of process is really key, but the value that they place on it comes from working and studying with Wayne.”
Sumner, who is based in Santa Ana and Palo Alto and has seven paintings in the exhibition, chose to attend Davis because Thiebaud was a member of the faculty. He earned both his bachelor’s degree (in 1998) and his MFA (in 2000) with an emphasis on painting from the school.
“I wanted to study with him because I loved his paintings, and to my surprise and good fortune I discovered that he was a truly great teacher,” Sumner says. In graduate school, he became Thiebaud’s teaching assistant and developed a deeper creative dialogue with the older artist. The two have maintained a “close mentor/mentee relationship” for 20 years.
Among Sumner’s works featured in the show is the 2020 oil “The Elephant in the Room II,” a work in which Sumner sees Thiebaud’s influence. It’s a memory painting created with no photo reference, a practice Thiebaud also employs.
“Wayne teaches his students how to see, essentially,” Sumner says. “This kind of ‘seeing’ includes critical thinking, developing our own questions, setting up tensions and problems to solve with paint.”
Munakata, a mixed-media painter based in Berkeley who has three works in the exhibition, also studied with Thiebaud as both an undergraduate and graduate student in the 1980s and was his teaching assistant for his beginning color class. She still remembers seeing Thiebaud’s painting “Yellow Dress” in 1974 and shows it to her students at Cal State East Bay “to help students see color within a single ‘color,’ and sense the human hand and intelligence in the choices he made.”
Munakata’s 2019 acrylic painting “Reykjanes,” an abstract inspired by an Icelandic landscape, is one of two works of hers in the exhibition. She notes: “In Thiebaud’s city- and riverscapes, impossible combinations of planes and scale converge, though unlike my work, his devices read as a single, crazily knit landscape.”
Berkeley painter Christopher Brown, whose 2017 oil “Twice Over” is in the exhibition, says the influence of Thiebaud’s “Cityscape” series depicting San Francisco remains meaningful even 50 years after he first viewed studies for the work in a show at the Davis student union. The tension between organization and chaos represented in the grid-like patterns of the “Cityscape” works is evident in the architectural subject matter of “Twice Over.”
“When you’re a young artist, you see the most obvious, alluring things in any other artist’s work,” says Brown, like technical skills you may not yet have mastered. “But, you learn by just looking at it: ‘Oh, that’s how he put that together, that’s how he made the paint, look at the way he uses color.’ His paintings are about those fundamental things. What’s beautiful about his work is the way that he takes those things, those elements, and he intensifies them.”
“Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation”: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Through Nov. 12 (closed Nov. 11 for Veterans Day). Free; reservations recommended. UC Davis’s Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, 254 Old Davis Road, Davis. 530-752-9623. manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu
Vonn Cummings Sumner’s contemporary depictions of Krazy Kat’s titular character build upon the comic strip’s longstanding influence on the art world at large.
About Krazy Times Morton Fine Art is pleased to present Krazy Times, a solo exhibition of new paintings and watercolors by artist Vonn Cummings Sumner, on view from October 9–November 3, 2021. Reflecting the artist’s longstanding interest in the career of famed American cartoonist George Herriman, Sumner’s recent works render the eponymous protagonist of Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip in settings and circumstances evocative of contemporary life.
Sumner was first introduced to Krazy Kat while under the tutelage of painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose love of Krazy Kat was shared by peers such as Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning. Appearing in newsprint from 1913 to 1944, Krazy Kat remains a keystone in the history of American cartooning, memorialized in part by the works of those it influenced. In the present decade, Krazy Kat has long since ceased publication; yet, the reinvigoration of its visual vocabulary by Sumner highlights its utility as a vehicle for investigating 21st-century themes.
Drawing from the original comic strip’s mediations on humanity—previously executed through tragic humor in a series of panels—Sumner depicts the titular character of Krazy Kat being followed by ghosts, peering at balloons floating just out of reach, and gazing at his reflection in a cerulean blue oasis, among other narratives collapsed into a singular image. Rendered in oil on panel as well as ink, gouache and pencil on paper, Sumner removes Krazy Kat from the landscapes of the comic strip, instead presenting such encounters in fields of seemingly endless white. In this sort of alternative dreamscape devoid of horizons, Sumner enables Krazy Kat to act as a projection of the artist or the viewer, embodying allegorical scenarios akin to lived experiences.
Partly created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sumner describes Krazy Kat as an “empathetic effigy” for processing a moment of great global change and loss. Sumner asks, “What do you paint when reality seems to be an absurd satire of itself?” Naturally, the answer is Krazy Kat, upon whom Sumner bestows new life. Bringing forth Krazy Kat’s curiosity and innocence, Sumner intertwines existential feelings with an earnest playfulness, producing accessible avenues into thoughtful contemplation. While the contemporary moment warrants heaviness, Sumner’s Krazy Kat paintings offer welcome reminders of optimism, inspiring joy in the face of Herculean challenges.
About VONN CUMMINGS SUMNER Vonn Cummings Sumner grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended the University of California, Davis, where he studied closely with the celebrated painter and teacher, Wayne Thiebaud, among others. Vonn has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1998, and his work has been featured or reviewed in many publications, including: New American Paintings, Elle Décor, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, L.A. Weekly, Art Ltd., Riviera magazine, Hi Fructose, Juxtapoz, Cartwheel Art, The Painter’s Table, Boom magazine, and Quick Fiction. Vonn’s work has been the subject of two solo museum shows: The Other Side of Here, at the Riverside Art Museum in 2008, and Stages, in 2011 at the Phillips Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. In 2021, his work was featured in the first museum survey tracing the influence of Wayne Thiebaud on contemporary art at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis.
Vonn currently lives and works in Santa Ana, CA, and is a Professor of Painting at Fullerton College.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2010.
About Morton Fine Art Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum- quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.
The profound influence of longtime UC Davis art professor Wayne Thiebaud on a new generation of contemporary artists is the focus of a multi-faceted exhibition currently on view at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at the University of California, Davis.
The professor emeritus, who turned 100 in November 2020, first joined the university’s fledgling art department in 1959. Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generationexplores how Thiebaud forecast the future of painting through his personal journey to find meaning and reinvention in the medium’s history — and inspired his students to do the same. “He found his voice at a very volatile time in the art world,” said Manetti Shrem Founding Director Rachel Teagle. “Painting as a medium and practice was dead. Wayne championed a new path forward.”
Think of this group exhibition as Thiebaud’s classroom operating across time and place, where works of art reverberate with the flow of shared ideas.19 exhibiting artists reflect the breadth of Thiebaud’s influence and honor his dedication to practicing the fundamentals; his penchant to paint the people, places, and objects of daily life; and his passion for looking to the history of art as a source of inspiration.
Andrea Bowers, Robert Colescott, Alex Israel, Jason Stopa, Jonas Wood, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye are featured alongside 13 mid- and late-career artists who studied with Thiebaud in the classroom and independently: Julie Bozzi, Christopher Brown, Gene Cooper, Richard Crozier, April Glory Funcke, Fredric Hope, Grace Munakata, Bruce Nauman, Vonn Cummings Sumner, Ann Harrold Taylor, Michael Tompkins, Clay Vorhes, and Patricia Wall.
Together these artists chart an alternate course of how painting makes meaning in the 21st century.
On view through November 12, 2021. Book a timed ticket to visit or experience the exhibition through its digital companion website at manettishrem.org.
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Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 