‘Tooned in

Seattle artist Karen Ganz cites some unconventional influences: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett and Martin Amis. Even more surprising are the images that actually end up in her paintings: Popeye, Pluto, and even a bit of Snoopy.

“I’ve stolen from all kinds of things,” said Ganz, who comes to Spokane next week to discuss her work as the first speaker in this season’s Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

“I use these little parts – a leg or a toe – and piece things together Frankenstein-like. I even steal a little bit from Disney.”

It all makes sense once you see the images she has created over more than two decades of painting.

Ganz, a fixture at the Kidder Smith Gallery in Boston and numerous other galleries, uses old cartoons – many of them newspaper cartoons from the 1910s through the 1930s – as a point of departure for her large-scale expressionist paintings (including a mural-style work above the North Terminal subway entrance at Sea-Tac International Airport).

Clearly, Ganz is comfortable with injecting humor into her paintings, especially of the edgy kind. When she moved to Seattle from California to teach at the University of Washington, she became influenced by what she calls “the Northwest Noir, the sick, dark humor of the Pacific Northwest.”

Her humor is accompanied by plenty of psychological depth, as well.

“I should add that my mother is a Freudian psychiatrist and my father is Jungian psychologist,” said Ganz. “That was definitely part of my development.”

Lately, she has been watching old Charlie Chaplin movies for inspiration. She said she’s been watching them frame by frame, soaking in the gestures and the images.

Ganz started watching Chaplin and Keaton after learning that one of her literary heroes, the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, was influenced by them.

Her other literary influences include authors Amis and Margaret Atwood, who like to, in her words, “take things apart and piece them back together.” That’s similar to what she does in her paintings.

As for the cartoons, she has been working with them ever since she found an old how-to-draw-comics book from the 1930s. That sparked her interest in all kinds of cartoons.

“A lot of it has with the way they were drawn,” said Ganz. “The loopy paint-handling that I have fits those images.”

Her images have a sense of fun, but she is digging away at serious themes. Her most recent show, “Guns & Money,” dealt with war.

“My interest in all of this is power,” said Ganz.

“I think power relations – people who have too much power and too little power – that’s where everything comes together.”