Artist of the Day: Norman Rockwell

I very nearly wasn't going to get three posts up this month.  In fact, if it weren't for a random idea that occurred to me while laying in bed one night last week, I probably wouldn't have even got  more than one. (For those of you who follow me from Facebook, I never posted a link to that post, but you can find it down below).

Anyways, I was getting kind of discouraged that I wouldn't have time to write an artist post this month, what with midterms and projects and my new/old early morning custodial job.  I was resigned to being a blogging failure, but then I remembered something.  I already had an artist I could feature that I'd already done all the research for.

Let me explain - I'm taking a class this semester called Exploring Teaching Art Education.  I randomly decided last semester to attempt to get my teaching license (in addition to my Anthropology minor and a BFA in Studio Art . . . pretty much, I'm never gonna make it out of college).  Anyways, we had to do this project last week where we researched an artist and created a presentation and activity that we'll have to teach to the class.  And so I decided that it really wouldn't be that much more work to turn my presentation into a blog post.

So, without any further huggermugger, hulabaloo, or frackus, I present to you (one of my all-time favorite artists/illustrators), Norman Rockwell.

Triple Self Portrait

I cannot pinpoint the exact time I first encountered his work (even today his illustrations still decorate myriads of Christmas cards, notebooks, and all sorts of ephemera), but I can tell you the first time I came face to face with one of his originals.

I was at the BYU Museum of Art (a year or so ago, I don't exactly remember why . . .) and I was wandering the galleries, somewhat bored to be honest.  Then I stumbled upon a Norman Rockwell exhibition (which, by the way, I just discovered is still going on).  I looked at the paintings and realized they were very familiar to me, though I wasn't really sure why.  When I read the name "Norman Rockwell," something clicked in my head.  I knew this artist, I recognized this artist, I liked this artist.  It sounds really ridiculous now that I'm trying to explain it, but I connected with Rockwell's art and I've always remembered that feeling.  Since then (even more so in the last week) I've learned more about Rockwell and his art and he's become one of my artist heroes.

Born in New York in 1894, Rockwell began his artistic training at 14 in a fine arts high school.  He finished his schooling while still in his teens and was practically immediately hired to illustrate Boy's Life magazine.  At 20, Rockwell was commissioned to create a number of covers for the magazine he's now most often associated with - The Saturday Evening Post.  Rockwell created over 300 covers for the magazine during the next 47 years.

It was during this time that Rockwell painted one of his most famous series: The Four Freedoms.  They were created in response to a speech given by Franklin D Roosevelt during the Second World War.  They appeared first as covers of The Saturday Evening Post, and then they toured the United States in effort to raise money and sell war bonds.

Left to Right: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Fear, and Freedom from Want

Later in life, Rockwell worked for Look magazine, and his work focused more and more on controversial issues of the time - civil rights, poverty, etc.  He died in 1978 in Stockbridge, MA, where there's now a museum dedicated to his life and works.

While researching Rockwell's life for this presentation I have to do, I came across two quotes that sort of encapsulate the reasons I like Norman Rockwell so much.

"Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed."

 and

"Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn't the perfect place I had thought it to be, I unconsciously decided that if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be, and so painted only the ideal aspects of it."

I think some people I know in the art program would be somewhat disgusted with that last quote, or at least a little condescending of such an attitude.  It seems that many artists (and just people in general) would say an attitude like that is cowardly or unintelligent.  They might say Rockwell is ignoring life as it is.  I don't think that's true, though.  From looking at Rockwell's illustrations I'd say he knows very well what life is, for everyone.  His illustrations aren't about being rich or powerful, that isn't the ideal world he's depicting.  His illustrations celebrate the everyday, the comical, the peaceful, the exciting, the disappointing.  They celebrate life.

To me, Norman Rockwell was the perfect patriotic.  He isn't the kind of person who shows their patriotism by posting hateful articles about the state of the government or education or foreign relations to your facebook wall,  He focused on the good things that were happening.  And that doesn't mean he ignored the bad.  Rockwell often depicted New York slums and the escapades of immigrant children and their families.  One of his most famous paintings was of Ruby Bridges, one of the first African Americans integrated into an all-white school.

Yes, the painting is about racism in America and how it's a bad thing.  You can see offensive words scrawled on the wall behind her and tomatoes that have been thrown, but the sentiment is about moving forward.  Nowadays, I feel like people think that anger is the only motivation that will actually inspire change in the world, but I feel like Norman Rockwell focused on inspiring people in more happy ways.  By informing his audience and showing the progress that is being made and that can be made.  Anger might be an effective tool to stir someone's emotions, but what does one do with those emotions?  Cause more violence?  Add more hate to the world?

I didn't really intend for this post to take this direction, but I'm glad that it did, because I've just made a connection.  I think people like Norman Rockwell are difficult to find nowadays, but there is one person that I know of who I think does something very similar.

If you have a Facebook account you've likely heard of the page Humans of New York.  It's run by a photographer who takes photos of people he meets on the streets of New York (and sometimes around the world).  Along with the photo he adds quotes from the people.  Sometimes they're funny one-liners, but sometimes they're life stories that are sad or inspiring or just plain interesting.  Brandon, the photographer, never adds in his own opinions or things other than maybe supplying a little context for the photo or quote.  He shows people as they are, or as they want to be, and he's been able to do some amazing things because of that.  Just this past week he met a kid in Brownsville, New York who talked about his principal.  The next day, Brandon met with the principal and photographed her.  Now, social media has exploded in support for this school.  They've raised over a million dollars in less than a week to send the sixth graders of this school on a trip to Harvard and to establish a scholarship fund.  It's a really inspiring story from a seedy part of New York city that isn't about hate or violence or crime that started with a photograph, a piece of art, and is making a difference.  Here's a link to their fundraiser: "Let's Send Kids to Harvard"

People are good, guys.  And that's what we should be focused on.  That's what I want to focus on, and that's why I love Norman Rockwell.

Hope your January was great (I'm feeling pretty accomplished) and here's to a fantastic February!

A Metaphor

Ideas in Art (and probably in general) are like dates.

You can't just sit on your couch waiting for some dashing idea to sweep you off your feet and carry you away.  He won't know where to find you.  He may not even know you exist.

I've heard (and used) all the excuses before:
 

My hair isn't quite long enough yet for an idea to be able to climb my tower.

All the good ideas have already been taken.

I have too much cleaning up to do before I can go to the ball and dance with an idea.

Even if I had an idea, I wouldn't know what to do with it.

I've been cursed to live as a sheep.

All tried and true, but the fact remains they're still excuses.

An idea isn't something you wait around for.  You have to go looking for it.  You have to be bold and courageous.  You need to try.

Sure, there might be ideas that look very spiffy in a cravat and spats, and then turn out to be dead ends in the end.  But there will also be other ones with nerdy t-shirts and distracted expressions that turn out to be fantastic friends that lead you on adventures to whole universes full of ideas.

Sure, you might get bumped and bruised from time to time, but you'll also learn things about the world and about yourself.

And in the end, you might finally come across an idea that never ends, an idea you love and that loves you back.  An idea that was worth all the searching.

But you'll never know until you try.

A Note on Art and My Religion

While I was in Germany I remember having this revelation one evening spent alone in my apartment.  There I was, sitting at our ridiculously tiny table, thinking very hard over my bowl of fancy European Ramen.  I was surrounded by artists and people who had known they were going to be artists since before I even gave up on my dreams of being an astronaut because I thought you had to go through the army first.  As my Ramen began to cool, I began to stew, and I decided to start looking at my life like a puzzle.

I try to avoid lame metaphors, especially when they liken themself to life in general.  But this one's actually stuck with me for longer than 10 minutes.  So maybe it's a good one.

The only problem with my puzzle, though, is that mine is not even close to being put together yet.  I just have a giant box of random pieces.  I don't even have a lid for the box to see what it's supposed to look like, or how many pieces it is.  I have some bits put together.  The really large and especially well-put-together looking bits are the ones I wish everyone would see, but there aren't many of those and they often get buried in piles of more pieces while I try to sort through things.  I don't like people knowing that I have an unfinished puzzle because I'm worried they're going to judge me and stare over my shoulder while I try to put two pieces together that clearly don't seem to belong together.  However, I also really enjoy puzzles.  There's an excitement to connecting dots and slowly seeing how things might turn out.  When I was younger, I always wanted to be the person to put the last piece in.  But, as I've gotten older, I've developed a fear of endings - putting the last piece in means no more excitement of hunting through the box to find that one piece with the funny swoopy corner, or methodically arranging each piece first by shape and then by color.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I've come to grips with the fact that my puzzle isn't put together.  I'm enjoying putting it together and I'm okay with people seeing my progress (for the most part).  Of course I'm still scared of the snooty stares and I'm still trying to shove the wrong pieces together, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Recently, I have put a few more pieces into my puzzle and connected two rather large sections.  I had a hard time believing that they would ever connect.  At times I was worried they'd come from two separate puzzles, but as soon as I put one piece in, dozens more seemed to fit obviously into place.

And that brings me to the actual, real-life subject of this post (which is no longer a metaphor).

Ta-Dah!  I made a painting.

It was for a semester-long project I had to do in my New Testament class.  We each had to come up with some sort of creative project and work on it for an hour each week.  This painting in and of itself, isn't really all that great or special, but as an object it kind of represents the connections and things I discovered this past semester because of that class.

Again, this story has it's beginnings in Germany.  I thought harder about art while I was on that trip than I ever have before and I think I had my first major life crisis.  I knew I enjoyed art and that it was what seemed like the only form of communication I was somewhat good at.  However, at the same time I also felt incredibly selfish.  As many of you know, I'm Mormon, and I love my religion.  But I suddenly couldn't figure out how art would fit into the grand scheme of things.  I don't make religious art and personally I don't even really like it.  (I'm not saying it's bad, it just doesn't do much for me).  But I couldn't help but feel like if I wasn't creating blatantly religious art, then there was no use to being an artist.  This sort of feeling had manifested itself before in my life when I struggle with the amount of space finished art takes up and not having anything to do with it.  I feel like I'm being wasteful and unproductive.

After many wonderful and heartening late-night conversations with roommates I found myself reading Matthew 25 one night, wherein the parable of the talents can be found.  I took a lot of encouragement from this parable.  If art was a talent that the Lord had given to me, then it was my duty to find ways to increase it and put it to good use.

For the time being, this satisfied me, but it came back to my mind the following semester when my teacher explained this creative project assignment.  I decided I wanted to study more deeply the parables of the New Testament and create illustrations for them.  I only ended up with time to do this one painting but the project and this class helped me better resolve this block I have between religion and art.

I started with studying the parable of the sower.  To be honest, I didn't get much further than this in my personal study, as the rest of my time I spent on the illustration.  But I did gain a lot more appreciation for the parables in the New Testament from studying this.  I had always been confused by why Christ taught in parables and in Sunday School classes they always seemed to make it sound like parables were more like tricky riddles that only really smart people could figure out, but I realized that wasn't the case.  Christ taught in parables because those who had a desire to understand would apply themselves and be able to understand the meanings, while those who chose to harden their hearts (and be like the stony ground) wouldn't allow the seed of faith to take root and grow.

Thus began the second part of my project.  I wanted to do these illustrations not just because I'm an art major and that's what art majors do, but because I wanted to see if I could actually make religious art.

Well, while I don't necessarily regard this painting as a failure, I didn't really have the same connection to it while working on it that I do with other works.  I still don't think religious art is for me.  However, over the course of the semester, many small insights and little verses here and there helped me realize that I can still be religious and have a firm faith in Christ and God while creating art that doesn't portray religious events or themes.  It's cliche, but one of those verses that helped was Matthew 5:16

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

Nowhere in the verse does it say that you can only let your light shine by doing a, b, and c.  I want my art to make people happy and to connect with them and I think that is a good work.

While I was feeling much better about my life choices at this point, I still also had this fear that this life would be the only time I had to create art, and such things would be obsolete in heaven.  However things were rounded off pretty nicely when we had a class discussion about the parable of the talents.  Most of the things we talked about were insights I'd heard before and things I'd found in my own studies, but one thing stood out to me.  When the lord returns and inquires what the servants have done with their talents, he gives to the "good and faithful" servants the money that they made.  I hadn't noticed before, but the servants were expected to return all the money to the lord.  This isn't doctrine or anything, but for me I felt like it was saying that my talents and the things I enjoy doing will continue with me after this life if I use them to help build the kingdom of God in this life.  It was a very comforting thought.

Anyways, I'm sorry if this all sounds corny and poorly-written.  I don't usually write about religious things, but as it is a big part of my life I really wanted to try.

I do believe in God and Jesus Christ.  I know that they love all of us and really do want us to be happy.

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I'm sorry for my month-long hiatus in December, but I'm ready to start this year off right and hope to continue with my three-posts-a-month plan.

In the meantime, my sister and I created our own vlog over on Youtube.  It's about books and stuff.  Check it out, like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC157ivjEm5HC_vDupNP0YVQ