In his latest series Second Nature, Los Angeles–based painter and Fullerton College art professor Vonn Cummings Sumner transcends conventional boundaries by recontextualizing Krazy Kat—an obscure yet monumental figure in American cartoon history—within the organic expanse of landscapes and environments. The character, first conceived by George Herriman and featured in newspapers from 1913 to 1944, is lauded for its whimsical nuance, surreal humor, and its trailblazing visual storytelling. Krazy Kat is hailed as one of the greatest comic strips ever created, and its influence resonates among modern artists. Sumner reinvigorates the spirit of Krazy Kat by embedding it in naturalistic milieus—lush woodlands, sparkling swimming pools, horseback trails, and even iconic iconography from Western art archives—while preserving the comic’s inherent sense of playful subversion and existential contemplation. These paintings suggest ecology, solitude, identity, and romanticism melded together in dreamlike tableaux, creating a surreal conversation between past and present.
Krazy Kat as a Fluid Archetype
Vonn Cummings Sumner’s persistent creative dialogue with Krazy Kat stems from the character’s inherent resistance to definition. Originating from George Herriman’s early 20th-century comic strip, Krazy Kat has long puzzled, enchanted, and inspired audiences with its defiance of conventional categorization. Neither clearly feline nor completely human, and unbound by binary gender constructs, Krazy Kat lives in a metaphysical gray area—one that speaks profoundly to artists exploring fluid identities and shifting realities.
Described by Herriman as a “sprite,” Krazy Kat assumes a liminal role: an ephemeral, dreamlike being who operates on the edges of the ordinary and the extraordinary. This ambiguity imbues the character with a sense of otherworldliness, a ghostly essence capable of embodying multitudes. It is precisely this quality that transforms Krazy Kat into a dynamic archetype—flexible, open-ended, and infinitely adaptable to varied symbolic uses.
For Sumner, Krazy Kat represents a kind of visual cipher through which philosophical, emotional, and cultural complexities can be filtered. As a visual artist immersed in questions of meaning and perception, Sumner doesn’t simply reference Krazy Kat as a nostalgic icon; he reactivates the character as a living participant in today’s cultural dialogue. The character becomes an empathetic mediator between the artist’s psyche and the visual landscape of the modern world.
Krazy Kat’s historical position as a favorite among intellectuals, poets, and avant-garde artists only enriches this dynamic. Throughout the 20th century, the comic became a symbol of eccentricity and creative rebellion. It stood as a cultural artifact outside of mainstream sensibilities, appreciated by a select circle for its esoteric humor, unpredictable narratives, and stylistic innovation. Sumner taps into this lineage not to merely mimic the past, but to fuse it with a present-day awareness—infusing his work with both historical texture and contemporary urgency.
A Pivotal Artistic Revelation
Sumner’s initial encounter with Krazy Kat marked a turning point in his life as a painter. While attending UC Davis as a freshman, he was introduced to the comic in a lecture led by the renowned painter Wayne Thiebaud. The moment a Krazy Kat strip was projected on the classroom screen, something clicked. Thiebaud’s reverent tone and description of the comic as a beloved work among modern painters immediately piqued Sumner’s curiosity.
That singular lecture set off a prolonged period of immersion. Sumner sought out every Krazy Kat anthology he could find. He began to study the brushwork, the compositions, and the visual language that Herriman had so masterfully crafted. As he dug deeper into Herriman’s world, Sumner also discovered that artistic giants like Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Pablo Picasso had all drawn from Krazy Kat’s surreal visual grammar and unpredictable logic.
For Sumner, this discovery did not simply spark admiration; it cultivated a kinship across time and medium. His early drawings often replicated Herriman’s creations, attempting to understand the unique rhythmic quality of the lines, the whimsy in the spatial arrangements, and the emotional undercurrents encoded within seemingly lighthearted panels. But this act of mimicry didn’t last. It slowly evolved into something far more introspective and experimental.
Eventually, Krazy Kat became less of an artistic reference and more of a philosophical companion. The character began to serve as a mirror—reflecting back Sumner’s questions about identity, the function of art, the layering of memory, and our fragile human relationship with both culture and nature. In his paintings, Krazy Kat ceases to be a cartoon and becomes a poetic surrogate. Through it, Sumner explores the messy, ineffable qualities of being human in a volatile and increasingly disoriented world.
A Symbolic Surreal Surrogate
Sumner does not treat his paintings as political banners or didactic statements. Instead, his practice is steeped in quiet lyricism and open-ended inquiry. There’s an intentional sidestepping of directness; a preference for ambiguity over clarity, allusion over assertion. This sensibility reflects his deep belief that meaning unfolds most powerfully through suggestion rather than declaration.
In this context, Krazy Kat operates as a symbolic surrogate. The character navigates the painted world not as a narrator, but as a participant—a being through whom the emotional and symbolic weight of the scene is filtered. Whether Krazy Kat is meandering beneath towering trees, submerged in the translucency of a shimmering pool, or galloping astride a horse across an undulating plain, the scenarios are thick with metaphoric possibility.
These surreal vignettes speak volumes about dislocation, wonder, and the fractured nature of contemporary life. They evoke a psychological environment rather than a narrative one. Viewers do not merely see Krazy Kat in a forest—they feel the strangeness of being small in an expansive world, of wandering without certainty. Krazy Kat becomes a proxy for anyone who has ever felt out of place, untethered, or overwhelmed by a world constantly in transition.
This resonance is amplified by Sumner’s painterly choices. His color palettes shift between vibrant vitality and melancholic undertones. Forms are rendered with a dreamlike softness that blurs the border between representation and abstraction. The landscapes themselves seem to breathe—alive with movement, temporal shifts, and visual echoes of historical styles. Within them, Krazy Kat feels like both a visitor and a natural inhabitant, blending into these mythic terrains while simultaneously standing apart.
What emerges is a dialogue between external environments and internal states. These paintings are not simply depictions of places, but manifestations of feeling. They explore how the human psyche experiences space, memory, and mythology. Krazy Kat, in this scenario, serves not just as a focal point but as a spiritual stand-in for the viewer—a guide through a visual terrain that is simultaneously enchanting and disorienting.
Sumner’s sensitivity to the liminal—those thresholds between clarity and mystery, identity and ambiguity—places his work firmly within a tradition of art that seeks not to instruct but to inspire reflection. His approach echoes visual poetics rather than illustrative storytelling. The character’s inherent openness and shifting identity serve as an ideal lens through which to explore this aesthetic territory.
By embedding this strange and gentle figure into sweeping natural landscapes and emotionally charged spaces, Sumner invites us to reconsider not only the role of comic imagery in fine art but also the ways in which we engage with imagery itself. Can a comic character embody the full spectrum of human emotion? Can it serve as an ecological witness, a mythic echo, a psychological archetype?
For Sumner, the answer is yes.
Through the ethereal presence of Krazy Kat, he has constructed a visual language that is inclusive, evocative, and transcendent. The paintings ask us to view the world not in fixed terms but in ever-shifting hues of feeling and metaphor. They call us to embrace uncertainty, to find meaning in the ephemeral, and to reimagine our place within the natural and cultural ecosystems we inhabit.
The Intersection of Memory, Myth, and Landscape
The evolution from comic-strip environments to grand, evocative landscapes in Second Nature marks a critical inflection point in Vonn Cummings Sumner’s artistic development. This visual shift does not simply represent a change in setting—it signals a deeper expansion of narrative, atmosphere, and conceptual scope. In placing Krazy Kat within sprawling, meditative terrains drawn from both personal recollection and canonical Western art, Sumner constructs what might best be described as memory-myth hybrids. These are not landscapes grounded in strict realism, but reverberating spaces where emotion, culture, and imagination coalesce.
Sumner’s approach involves a synthesis of intimate memory with art-historical resonance. He pulls from tactile recollections—grassy fields where he once sat quietly under shade trees, winding trails that led to solitude, sunlit water that shimmered during long summer afternoons—and folds them into compositional frameworks reminiscent of classical painting traditions. In this fusion, landscape ceases to function as mere backdrop; it becomes active, almost sentient, echoing both the artist’s biography and centuries of cultural memory.
These paintings pulse with symbolic terrain: meadows that suggest rebirth, twilight skies that invoke ephemerality, and mountain ranges layered with psychological depth. The natural world is rendered not just as a setting but as a reflection of inner states. In every canvas, Krazy Kat serves as both guide and guest—a spectral presence wandering through regions rich in meaning and metaphor.
Sumner deliberately constructs visual “rhymes” with historic landscape painters. Hints of John Constable’s bucolic serenity, Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime romanticism, and Nicolas Poussin’s classical idealism can be traced in compositional echoes and atmospheric tone. But rather than mimic or appropriate, Sumner reinterprets these visual traditions through a contemporary lens, embedding them with emotional ambiguity and tonal complexity that speaks directly to modern sensibilities.
Painting as a Ritual of Remembering
Sumner’s landscapes are not simple reproductions of remembered places; they are acts of transformation. Each brushstroke operates like a mnemonic device, drawing connections between past experiences and larger cultural archetypes. Painting becomes an act of ritualized remembering—one in which Krazy Kat is positioned as the central agent in a world defined by memory’s instability.
This ritual quality gives the work a dreamlike cadence. Landscapes appear both familiar and altered, composed of real textures and surreal interludes. Hills might roll into skies without horizon lines, pools may reflect nothing at all, and trees often seem both rooted and floating. Such distortions lend the work a mythopoeic atmosphere, as if Krazy Kat were wandering through a post-symbolist fable rather than a fixed geography.
Importantly, these imagined environments are not sentimental. While they carry the scent of nostalgia, they resist easy categorization. The memories embedded within them are fluid and layered, not idealized snapshots but rather fractured recollections. In this way, Sumner acknowledges the impermanence of memory itself. Landscapes fade and mutate; moments once vivid become abstract. Krazy Kat, with its mutable identity and timeless absurdity, becomes the ideal figure to traverse such ever-shifting terrain.
This approach gives rise to what might be called "emotional cartography"—a visual mapping of inner topographies, where place and feeling are inseparably intertwined. Through the lens of Krazy Kat, Sumner explores how personal geography intersects with larger cultural myths and collective visual memory. The paintings thus function not only as compositions but as psychological spaces in which viewers are invited to wander, reflect, and remember.
Echoes of Art History in Contemporary Context
While Sumner’s subject matter is deeply personal, his methodology is anchored in a deep reverence for art history. Second Nature thrives on dialogue—between the past and the present, between tradition and innovation. Rather than positioning himself in opposition to classical landscape painting, Sumner uses its familiar tropes and motifs as points of departure, setting up tensions and harmonies that expand the visual conversation.
There’s a distinct intelligence in how these references are woven into his work. A viewer might note the delicate atmospheric light reminiscent of Turner or the tranquil grandeur of Claude Lorrain’s pastoral compositions, but there is always a contemporary undercurrent—evident in the whimsical presence of Krazy Kat, in the dreamlike deconstruction of space, and in the painterly textures that oscillate between suggestion and assertion.
Sumner’s use of Krazy Kat in this context is not ironic; it’s alchemical. He transforms a character rooted in American cartoon history into a mythological cipher capable of traversing the gravitas of classical aesthetics. By doing so, he blurs the line between high and low culture, challenging hierarchies that still dominate conversations around painting, comics, and visual narrative.
In a time when art is often segmented into tightly defined genres, Sumner’s synthesis is radical. He offers an inclusive vision—where memory, myth, and nature coexist on the same plane, and where a cartoon character can become a medium for the deepest kinds of human reflection. His landscapes are filled not only with trees, hills, and water, but with questions: What do we inherit from the past? What do we carry forward? And how do these inherited symbols evolve within us?
A Contemporary Pilgrimage Through Timeless Terrain
Ultimately, Second Nature invites us on a pilgrimage—not through the external world, but through the internal realms shaped by memory, culture, and imagination. Krazy Kat leads us across terrains that are both ancient and intimate, reminding us that the boundaries between real and imagined spaces are often porous. Each painting becomes a site of contemplation, a crossroads where personal recollection meets collective mythology.
There’s a meditative quietude in these works, a stillness that draws the viewer into slow observation. Yet they are not static. Movement abounds—in the gesture of the brush, in the symbolic resonance of the spaces depicted, and in Krazy Kat’s gentle progression through each scene. The character does not command attention; it listens, observes, merges, and occasionally punctuates the landscape with gestures of surreal humor or quiet melancholy.
This silent motion reflects the act of painting itself: a slow unfolding, a process rooted in observation, intuition, and care. Sumner’s commitment to this process is evident in the detail, sensitivity, and rhythm of his work. His vision is not didactic but poetic, not anchored in resolution but in exploration.
In an era increasingly shaped by acceleration, digital fragmentation, and hyper-narrative, Sumner’s art offers a space of pause. It asks us to look again—to consider how place, memory, and image intertwine, and how a single figure like Krazy Kat can open doors to landscapes both remembered and never known.
Through its seamless blend of personal and archetypal, its deep engagement with art history, and its reverence for nature as metaphor, Second Nature positions itself as an enduring exploration of what it means to be human. It shows that landscape painting is not a relic of the past but a fertile ground for innovation, reflection, and transcendence—and that within these painted worlds, we may find not only beauty but a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Strangeness, Mystery, and Poetic Practice
Vonn Cummings Sumner’s creative practice is grounded in a quiet yet profound commitment to mystery. For him, painting is not simply an act of representation but a journey into the ineffable—a space where the familiar becomes uncanny, where perception detaches from certainty, and where beauty is found in the unresolved. In his own words, he is always “searching for strangeness”—those rare and irreplaceable moments when reality flickers and gives way to something more enigmatic, more alive.
Strangeness, in this context, is not alienation but invitation. It is the kind of bewilderment that heightens awareness and expands one’s inner field of vision. Sumner’s use of Krazy Kat as a central figure in these canvases intensifies that pursuit. This character—rootless, fluid, eccentric—wanders through dreamlike landscapes, becoming both the subject and the witness of the painting. Its very presence infuses each work with an ambiguity that challenges the viewer to pause, reconsider, and feel more deeply.
These paintings do not provide answers. Instead, they serve as visual poems—each one a layered composition of emotion, memory, visual rhythm, and intuitive gesture. They embody what might be called “visual poetics,” using line, color, and space not to describe but to evoke. Sumner’s brushwork is sensitive yet searching, never overworked. He frequently leaves room for open space and tonal breathing, allowing silence to be part of the composition.
Chromatic experimentation also plays a pivotal role. Earth tones are interrupted by sudden bursts of pastel; fields of rich greens bleed into dusky violets; skies hover in impossible shades between dusk and dawn. These color fields do not imitate nature; they reinterpret it, reconstructing it through a psychological and metaphorical filter. In this process, perception becomes elastic, and imagination finds new forms.
In this synesthetic environment—where color resonates like sound, and space unfolds like memory—Krazy Kat becomes a liminal figure, simultaneously within and outside the narrative. The paintings become psychological terrains, not bound by chronology or logic, but animated by emotion, intuition, and symbolic association.
The Painted Image as an Emotional Instrument
Sumner’s work reminds us that painting, at its highest potential, operates as an emotional instrument—a way of translating feeling into form, silence into texture. His landscapes and character studies are never simply aesthetic compositions; they are emotional architectures, built slowly and with reverence for nuance. Each work begins in silence and emerges as a kind of visual utterance.
The presence of Krazy Kat in these works enhances this sensitivity. This cartoon figure, rooted in American comic history, becomes more than a character—it becomes a conduit for presence. The figure functions like a poetic device, a stand-in for the ineffable self. Krazy Kat walks, stands, sits, floats. There is little narrative, no drama. And yet, these gestures carry emotional gravity.
What emerges is a form of visual empathy. Viewers encounter the world through Krazy Kat’s wide, uncertain eyes. The character never dominates the scene; instead, it participates, observes, and reacts—like an introverted oracle. It is as if the figure is listening to the landscape, feeling the sky, or absorbing the mood of a distant tree. This interaction between subject and setting creates a meditative tension, a field of emotional resonance that quietly invites introspection.
Sumner’s paintings resist spectacle. There is no forced iconography, no demand for interpretation. The power of these works lies in their quietude, their lyrical restraint. They call us to slow down, to pay attention to the internal weather of the scene, and to discover a form of awareness that unfolds gradually.
In doing so, Sumner returns painting to one of its oldest roles: that of ritualized observation. The paintings are less about showing and more about seeing—about cultivating the kind of vision that perceives the world not just through the eyes but through the whole nervous system, the whole history of memory and longing. The result is not merely aesthetic pleasure but a kind of quiet awakening.
Krazy Kat and the Cultural Lexicon of Ambiguity
At the center of Sumner’s project lies the enigmatic figure of Krazy Kat, a character born in the early 20th century and originally penned by George Herriman. While Krazy Kat’s original comic strip was defined by surreal humor and formal experimentation, Sumner brings this idiosyncratic character into the world of contemporary painting as an enduring metaphor.
Krazy Kat’s ambiguity is its greatest strength. It is not defined by gender, species, logic, or even linear narrative. This openness makes Krazy Kat endlessly adaptable, an ideal symbol for our current era—where identity is multifaceted, where the boundaries between human and animal, real and imagined, are constantly being redefined. Sumner embraces this elasticity, using Krazy Kat not as a nostalgic callback, but as a living emblem of transformation, empathy, and emotional transparency.
In a time when visual culture is increasingly bound to clarity and definition, Krazy Kat offers a rare invitation: to dwell in the undefined. The figure becomes a portal through which questions of belonging, vulnerability, identity, and even ecological interconnectedness can be gently examined. It allows the viewer to project, reflect, and imagine—without demanding resolution.
Sumner’s use of Krazy Kat taps into a powerful cultural thread that values ambiguity not as a lack, but as a richness—a space where multiple truths coexist. In this way, the character serves as an axis for a larger conversation about how we navigate a world that no longer adheres to fixed categories. Through Krazy Kat’s soft gaze, we come to see that art doesn’t need to dictate meaning; it only needs to hold space for it.
Art as a Mirror of Contemporary Consciousness
Sumner’s paintings, with their fusion of poetic suggestion, landscape tradition, and character-driven metaphor, speak directly to the emotional climate of our time. They resonate with viewers who are navigating a world in flux—where meaning is increasingly fragmented, and where the need for personal reflection is more urgent than ever.
Krazy Kat’s enduring relevance is not an accident. It reflects a cultural hunger for symbols that can hold complexity without collapsing into cliché. The character’s soft vulnerability, its strange optimism, and its refusal to conform become acts of quiet resistance in a culture often saturated with certainties and spectacle.
These paintings offer no grand conclusions. Instead, they act as subtle emotional compasses. They help orient the viewer not toward resolution but toward curiosity—toward the kind of presence that recognizes the strangeness of being alive and welcomes it. They remind us that art, at its most powerful, doesn’t close the door on interpretation—it opens it.
In the spaces Sumner paints, we find not just a reinterpretation of a classic cartoon character, but a reimagining of what art itself can be. Not merely decorative, not dogmatic, but essential: a tool for navigating consciousness, connecting with memory, and embracing the unnameable aspects of life. Krazy Kat, wandering across canvases of color and silence, becomes an emblem of this essential uncertainty—a timeless figure for a timeless mystery.
Between Worlds: The Artist, the Character, the Viewer
At the core of Second Nature lies an intricate and profound triangular relationship between the painter Vonn Cummings Sumner, the character Krazy Kat, and the audience that engages with his work. This triadic interplay forms the essential architecture of the entire series, elevating it from a conventional visual project to an immersive experience of philosophical, emotional, and cultural engagement. Sumner, as the artist, does not assume the role of narrator or controller; rather, he becomes a facilitator, channeling his internal worlds—dreams, memories, philosophical musings—into painted form. Krazy Kat, in turn, acts as an emissary: a vehicle of ambiguity, a figure at once present and spectral, representing the artist’s psyche and also transcending it.
For Sumner, the act of painting is an ongoing negotiation between the conscious and subconscious, the real and the imagined. His personal topographies—emotional landscapes shaped by lived experience—intersect with Krazy Kat’s inherited narrative oddity. That encounter gives birth to a canvas where identity, time, and space are fluid. The viewer completes this triad, not as a passive observer but as an essential participant. Invited into this layered environment, the viewer navigates myth, memory, and metaphor in real time, constructing meaning from suggestion and texture rather than fixed interpretation.
These paintings do not conform to expectations. They unfold slowly, urging the viewer to engage in sustained contemplation. Time seems elastic within these visual compositions. One moment, the viewer feels submerged in a deep past; the next, they're thrust forward into an imagined, almost post-human ecology. The imagery floats between poetic surrealism and anthropocentric reflection. Trees may whisper, pools may shimmer, but nothing stands still. Through Krazy Kat’s meandering presence, the viewer is invited to pause, reflect, and question not just what they see, but how they see.
The Role of Visual Interlocution
In traditional narrative art, characters often serve as archetypes within a broader storyline. In Second Nature, however, Krazy Kat resists such containment. Rather than illustrating a story, the character acts as a visual interlocutor, engaging the viewer in a silent dialogue. This is not storytelling in the literal sense; it's a lyrical unfolding of thought-forms, emotional undercurrents, and conceptual echoes. Krazy Kat becomes a surrogate consciousness—a companion that moves through layered space as a proxy for the artist, and at times, for the viewer as well.
This dynamic creates a unique feedback loop between painting and perception. The ambiguity of Krazy Kat's identity—neither male nor female, not fully animal nor human—opens a broad channel for empathy. The figure is simultaneously everyone and no one, an icon of marginality that elicits projection and resonance. This openness makes Krazy Kat ideal for navigating the terrain of personal and collective ambiguity.
Sumner’s methodology supports this approach. His brushwork is deliberate, meditative, and non-linear. Each composition invites closer inspection—not for hidden meaning, but for the subtle interplay of gesture, tone, and emotional cadence. The work does not simply rest on the canvas; it seems to breathe. Through strategic ambiguity and soft visual poetics, the paintings initiate a form of psychological attunement between artist, character, and viewer.
This relational ecosystem creates a new kind of viewing experience. The canvas becomes a reflective surface not only for the artist's interior life but for the viewer’s as well. In this sense, the artwork becomes more than an object of observation; it transforms into a site of mutual inquiry, where empathy, memory, and imagination coalesce.
Ecologies of Transformation and Inner Wilderness
The very title Second Nature invites layered interpretation. On the surface, it implies a familiarity with the natural world that becomes instinctual—something so deeply embedded in human experience that it feels automatic. Yet within the context of Sumner’s work, the term carries a more expansive resonance. It suggests an altered or reimagined ecology, a reflection on how both humans and environments undergo transformation—sometimes parallel, sometimes in conflict. These paintings are not simply scenic vistas; they are ecosystems of thought and feeling.
In these vividly rendered spaces, Krazy Kat functions as both participant and observer. Their presence imbues the environment with narrative potential without binding it to a single reading. A forest becomes more than a forest—it is a liminal zone where memory and nature collide. A pond becomes a mirror of psychological states. Mountains loom not as geography but as symbolic thresholds. This multidimensional approach turns the canvas into a living organism, rich with metamorphosis.
Environmental themes are embedded rather than asserted. There is no didacticism, no overt moralizing. Instead, Sumner’s practice hinges on invitation. The viewer is encouraged to consider their own relationship to landscape, to the non-human world, and to the transformative power of imagination. The fluidity of the work supports an ecological perspective that is not grounded solely in conservation or critique, but in communion. Krazy Kat’s seamless integration into these worlds models a kind of belonging that transcends species, ideology, and linear narrative.
As the viewer traverses these visual ecologies, they are confronted with their own role within larger environmental systems. The paintings do not present nature as a backdrop to human drama but as an active, evolving matrix. Through color, spatial composition, and symbolic layering, Sumner proposes a vision of nature as dynamic, responsive, and deeply interconnected with the emotional interiority of the human condition.
Painting as a Contemporary Sanctuary
In an age increasingly dominated by technological saturation, accelerated visual consumption, and ideological polarization, Sumner’s Second Nature offers a necessary alternative: slowness, subtlety, and reflection. These paintings serve as sanctuaries—spaces where silence is not emptiness but presence, where ambiguity is not confusion but potential. The emotional resonance of these works lies in their refusal to close meaning down. Instead, they open it up, like a field at dawn, inviting viewers to enter, wander, and inhabit.
Krazy Kat’s place in this sanctuary is crucial. The figure is not heroic, not tragic, not even central in the conventional sense. It exists on the periphery, on the margins of both the landscape and the visual hierarchy. And yet, it carries the emotional weight of the scene. Its quiet companionship suggests that strangeness can be intimate, that displacement can lead to insight, and that absurdity can be a path to truth.
Sumner’s painterly touch reinforces this ethos. His canvases never overwhelm. They invite breath. His colors carry mood rather than message. His lines are gentle but decisive, like the gestures of someone speaking not with words but with memory. This quality is rare in contemporary painting, where the demand for visual spectacle often eclipses subtlety. In contrast, Sumner builds a world where restraint becomes revelatory.
Second Nature is not about resolution; it’s about resonance. It asks questions rather than giving answers, and in doing so, it restores something often lost in our interaction with both art and environment: the capacity to feel deeply, attentively, and without the need for certainty. Through the interplay of artist, character, and viewer—through the ecological transformation of perception and space—Sumner reclaims painting not just as a visual act, but as a philosophical one.
Aesthetic Syncretism: Tradition Meets Experimentation
Sumner’s compositions embody aesthetic hybridity. The grand tradition of landscape painting—rooted in notions of grandeur, sublimity, pastoral—merges with experimental color palettes and whimsical figuration. Bright, unexpected hues nod to both comic-strip lineage and contemporary painting. The spatial compositions often dissolve conventional perspective: day bleeds into dusk, forest appears beside poolside vista, mountain silhouettes echo comic panels. Like Herriman’s own surrealist play—where time and space shift unpredictably—Sumner’s paintings destabilize pictorial logic. Each painting thus becomes an enactment of painterly experimentation, an aesthetic bricolage that honors tradition while rupturing expectation.
The Personal and the Collective, United Through Play
Sumner’s impulse is to position Krazy Kat as a locus for reflection—on identity, solitude, belonging, environment, memory. Yet the paintings remain infused with humor, buoyancy, playfulness. Krazy Kat splashing in a pool or glancing skyward from a forest clearing evokes delight as much as philosophical inquiry. Viewers may feel invited to laugh, to reflect, to recall their own childhood memories. The aesthetic strategy is relational: to suggest that serious emotional or existential reflection need not be solemn; that poetry and play are natural partners.
Expanding the Conversation
In reactivating Krazy Kat within contemporary painting, Sumner extends a century‑long conversation. His work acknowledges Herriman’s surreal innovation and the modernist italicization of the cartoon form, while recharging it for ecological and existential concerns in the 21st century. In that sense, Second Nature participates in a lineage of visual dialogue—like a duet across history—between early 20th‑century cartoon art and contemporary ecological, identityfocused painting.
Implications for Art and Culture
Sumner’s project gestures toward a broader cultural phenomenon: the resurgence of quiet, reflective, concept-driven painting that inhabits both art‑historical lineage and contemporary urgency. His embedding of Krazy Kat within naturalism marks a turn back toward art that is meditative rather than spectacle‑driven. The series invites galleries, museums, viewers, critics to rethink the boundaries between cartoon and fine art, nostalgia and innovation, whimsy and weight. It posits that serious cultural reflection may be poetic, associative, and humorous.
Final Reflections
Vonn Cummings Sumner’s Second Nature is more than a series of paintings—it is an introspective journey, a philosophical meditation, and an artistic inquiry into the nature of identity, perception, and belonging. At the center of this exploration stands Krazy Kat, a character born from early 20th-century comic strips but reborn here as a mythic figure wandering through painterly worlds of memory, nature, and transformation.
Sumner’s ability to draw from both personal experience and collective cultural imagery creates works that are simultaneously intimate and universal. By setting Krazy Kat amidst natural landscapes—rather than the original comic’s surreal desert towns—Sumner reframes the character’s existential playfulness within an ecological context. Forests, pools, horses, and expansive skies offer more than just visual variety; they serve as metaphors for inner landscapes and shifting emotional states. In these spaces, Krazy Kat becomes a reflective presence, a solitary yet hopeful figure navigating a world in flux.
What makes Second Nature especially compelling is its rejection of easy classification. These are not simply nostalgic tributes, nor are they ironic pop-art rehashings. They are earnest, searching works that use the familiar form of a cartoon to dig into deeply unfamiliar feelings. Krazy Kat’s inherent ambiguity—free from the strictures of gender, species, or fixed identity—allows Sumner to speak across boundaries. The character becomes a vessel through which viewers can reflect on their own uncertainties, desires, and connections to the natural world.
In an age dominated by noise, clarity, and certainty, Sumner’s paintings champion nuance, contradiction, and mystery. They suggest that truth can be elliptical, that meaning often arises not in clear messages but in the spaces between symbols. The balance between strangeness and recognition, between personal memory and collective mythology, is where these works thrive.
Ultimately, Second Nature reminds us that art remains a vital space for empathy, introspection, and transformation. Through the gentle absurdity of Krazy Kat and the vivid emotionality of landscape, Sumner creates an open, generous dialogue—inviting each of us to wander a little more slowly, to see a little more clearly, and to feel, once again, the world’s quiet and enduring wonder.
