Los Angeles, CA – January 2016 –Artist Tom Everhart, world renowned for his Charles Schulz influenced paintings and widely known for his color pieces, will debut his first ever, rare Black & White exhibition called Raw: Black and White Works From 1998 – 2016 just one night before the Oscars.

Tom Everhart’s Schulz influenced body of work has been in progress for twenty-seven years and was begun nine years after he and Charles Schulz met in 1980. The black- and-white work is rare, but has existed since the very first works. The black- and- white work organized for this first time exhibition of black- and- white works only, was selected from 1998 to 2016; of which fifteen new works created solely for this exhibition. This body of black and white work was produced on canvas and paper, as well as more raw materials like raw wood, medium density fiber panels, plastic cups and polyester pom-pom balls.

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In the same manner that Schulz started each of his cartoon strips in black and white, Everhart begins each of his fine art paintings in black and white. Although they are usually not intended to be black and white paintings, if Everhart feels that the painted black line drawing that starts the painting can stand alone at the scale of a painting rather than a small drawing, it is considered to be a finished work. For him, it is when drawing becomes an act of painting. This normally only happens a few times a year. It is some of his favorite work, as it refers back to Schulz’s black and white drawings, as well as his other influential footnotes of fusing drawing and painting.

The Raw exhibition is not only intended to examine the raw beginnings of black and white painting, but also what opens the artist mind to its creative thinking. The large 16 ft. wave painting, titled, Surfing With Franz and Willem (2016), actually explains the exhibition. You could say it’s the exhibition’s search engine. Its visual articulation was designed to express the waves of raw influences from the early blank black and white pages of the child’s coloring book that opened the young raw would-be artist to the later academic influences of the black- and- white abstract expressionist paintings, that opened the mind of the post student artist, to the creative thinking of Schulz’s raw beautiful line constructions. Franz and Willem refer to abstract expressionist Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.

Surfing With Franz and Willem is the first work in a new body of work, Waves of Influence.

The nine works in the show, eight on paper and one on canvas, titled, Psycho Cyclone, originated in Everhart’s Taha’a studio in Tahiti, where cyclones are common. They continued and evolved back to his Venice, California studio in the real world, where psycho events are more common.

The three works on paper, titled, Snoring In My Big Black Boot (Day 1 – Day 3), truly meld drawing and painting. They were inspired after the first three nights of trying to sleep in a boot cast with wife Jennifer after his foot surgery.

Everhart is one of the few living artists to be exhibited in the Louvre and he joins the likes of Roger Ballen and William Sweetlove in the elite club of acclaimed artists to showcase contemporary pop culture art in the world’s most visited and prominent museum.

Mouche Gallery in Beverly Hills is honored to present this exhibition and is thrilled to add Tom Everhart to its prestigious roster of internationally acclaimed artists and continue the tradition of featuring museum quality art and works at the forefront of culture.

View Tom Everhart’s collection here