Don Juan in Hell

Peter Steiner, Artist. Litchfield County CT

I painted this in 2018. It was kind of a cartoon idea — Don Juan and Don John are very similar, and hell is where I’d like to see him. It was fun painting it. As a painter, as soon as I decide what I’m doing, it all becomes about color and form.

About the artist: Peter Steiner is an American cartoonist, painter, and novelist, best known for a 1993 cartoon published by The New Yorker which prompted the adage "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." He is also a novelist who has published four crime novels.

On his website, plsteiner.com, Peter writes:

When I was a child of maybe five or six I found my parents’ copy of William Steig’s wonderful little book The Lonely Ones, a collection of mystifying and melancholy drawings. The moment is vivid in my mind. I was mesmerized, and I think of that as the moment I became a cartoonist. I drew cartoons for the high school newspaper and then the college paper. I did cartoons through the army and graduate school and even through my professorship, especially during faculty meetings. I got in trouble along the way for cartoons I did, but I liked that kind of trouble. I still do.

I was in my forties before I became a professional cartoonist which involved drawing regularly and earning very little money. I was fired from my first regular cartooning job—the Oconee Enterprise in Watkinsville, Georgia had paid me $25 a cartoon—for taking on what seemed like a shady deal that was being done by one of the town luminaries. He also happened to own the paper. The cartoon I did ruffled the right feathers though. I was already sending a weekly batch of cartoons to the New Yorker. After a couple of years they started buying my work, and I was on my way.