Cartoonist Hopes North Korea Accepts 'Uniting Painting'

By: E&P Staff Cartoonist Ranan Lurie has been in South Korea this month in an effort to bring his "Uniting Painting" to that country and North Korea.

The sprawling indoor/outdoor painting made its debut at United Nations headquarters in New York last fall. Lurie told E&P at the time that he hoped versions of the painting would also appear in various other parts of the world -- with the designs by Lurie and the execution by local artists.

A Korea Herald article Lurie e-mailed E&P stated that the cartoonist hopes the painting in that part of the world would "convey a message of peace to North Korea."

The story continued: "The cartoonist's visit was arranged by a South Korean governmental task force to link his work with its project to let South Korean soccer fans travel through North Korea on a train to the World Cup in Germany next month. North Korea was reluctant to accept that proposal. Lurie said he plans to build a pyramid-type version of 'Uniting Painting' in nine train stations in South Korea, North Korea, China, Mongolia, the Czech Republic, and Germany."

When announcing the "Uniting Painting" last fall, Lurie said he was ending his decades-long career doing cartoons for print newspapers. Lurie -- formerly syndicated to more than 1,100 papers (most of them outside the U.S.) -- did say he might do multimedia cartoons in addition to his partly autobiographical "Cartoonist's Mask" novels.