Spring Break in Santa Rosa

M had spring break last week and I had Friday off, so we took advantage of the long weekend to visit Santa Rosa and Napa Valley.

The point of visiting Santa Rosa was to stop in at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. I first visited it four or five years ago, when it first opened, and I had been wanting to return.

We arrived at the museum in the early afternoon. The traffic on the main roads around the museum were busy, but the museum itself was quiet, which meant we wouldn’t have to fight crowds to enjoy the exhibits. By the way, for those who might want to visit, admission is $8 per person.

The first thing I spotted when I got out of the car was the giant version of Snoopy's house in the lot next door. It serves as the information kiosk for the adjacent baseball field complex.

The museum is housed in a two-story building across the street from Snoopy's Home Ice, the Warm Puppy Cafe, and Snoopy's Gallery & Gift Shop. I didn't take a picture of the museum's front, but I did take one of its back.

The first floor of the museum is home to two permanent installations and two rotating exhibits. Both installations were created by Yoshiteru Otani, a Japanese artist. One is a massive wood sculpture called "Morphing Snoopy". It is 9.5 feet tall and 26 feet long. It also weighs 7,000 pounds, which means it must have been fun trying to hang. I have trouble hanging simple picture frames. I'm wondering how many people it took to get it up there and who was the lucky one who stood far back and said, "I think it needs to be a little higher on the left. No, your other left."

While the sculpture was impressive, I liked the tile mural more. It is 17 feet wide and 22 feet high and consists of 3,588 different Peanuts strips printed on 2" × 8" ceramic tiles.

These were the only two indoor exhibits we were allowed to photograph. Everything else was off limits.

The two rotating exhibits included Peanuts Lives: A Tribute to Charles M. Shulz and Changing Seasons. The tribute featured the work of other cartoonists. Some of the more familiar strips included Cathy, Garfield, Bloom County, and Beetle Bailey. They also had political cartoons on display. It was interesting to see how cartoonists used familiar images (Charlie Brown's futile attempts to kick the football, the kite-eating tree, etc.) to get across their point. Overall, it was incredible to see the influence Schulz had on other artists.

There were many quotes on the wall, but two stand out most in my mind. One was by Bill Watterson, who praised Schulz's "graphic shorthand and stylistic economy". The other was by an artist whose name escapes me at the moment. He compared reading Schulz's strips to reading a haiku. I'm sure that comparison has been made by others about other comic strips, but it does seem especially appropriate to Peanuts.

The other exhibit featured Peanuts through the seasons. I think I've always been aware of the cyclical nature of the strip - baseball in spring, camp in summer, school and football in the fall, and snow in the winter, but I never really stopped to observe it.

The upper floor featured the obligatory biographical exhibit complete with a time line and trophy cases. It also featured a replica of the studio where Schulz drew Peanuts every day.

After visiting the museum, we went across the street to visit the gift shop, which has some artwork of its own on display...

After getting a couple of small souvenirs, we dropped by the Warm Puppy Cafe for some coffee before getting back on the road and continuing on to Napa.

The final thing I'll leave you with is the sketch I drew at the museum. On the second floor, there's a classroom where anybody can go in and try their hand at drawing. I grabbed a book called How to Draw Peanuts and this was the result...