RESHAPING MY VISION OF NORMAN ROCKWELL
Growing up during World War II, one of the things I most looked forward to was running to our roadside mailbox and greeting the weekly arrival of the Saturday Evening Post. Each issue was sure to feature a cover by Norman Rockwell. I didn’t realize it then, but those incredible magazine covers – and the associations they represented – were to become an indelible part of my life.
In the course of nine years of long haul truck driving – the main purpose being to gather information for my recently published novel, 3 ACES – I often ran trips to New England, each time routed up I-84 to reach the eastern portion of the Mass. Turnpike. Only once did I run the western section, unaware, at the time, that I had passed a few miles north of Stockbridge, Mass. and the Norman Rockwell museum.
Last Saturday, returning home in my car from a holiday visit in Boston with my son’s family, I found myself driving west on Mass. Route 102. I decided to both reawaken a few childhood memories and make up for that occasion I’d missed visiting the Rockwell Museum. At Route 183, a bit beyond Stockbridge I turned left, then left again less than a mile down the road, into the tree-shrouded Museum drive.
The day after Thanksgiving clear, the mountain air of the Berkshire foothills sweet and warm, a minute’s walk from the overflow parking lot brought me to a two-story structure blended artfully and unobtrusively into one of the low-lying hillsides of the 36 acre property.
The museum was founded by Norman and Molly Rockwell in 1969. Rockwell lived and painted in downtown Stockbridge the last 25 years of his life. His studio was later moved onto the museum grounds. I wanted to take a look, but was informed that feature was open only during the months of April through October.
Upon entering the main building, the crowd it contained – and the reach of the interior beyond the front desk- came as a bit of a shock. Spacious galleries took off in every direction. As I paid my $15 visitor’s fee, a patient docent delivered a thorough explanation of the museum spaces and the free lectures available. A moment later I was drifting through a world of Rockwelliana.
The building contains over 570 original Rockwell paintings and drawings, most of the original Saturday Evening Post covers, and at least 100,000 archived Rockwell items – such as the the original photographs of live models shot by three favored professionals. Rockwell took this route in the composition of his paintings after observing his models tire of holding the difficult positions he wished to portray. Rockwell demanded perfection. It was much easier on himself and his subjects, many of them neighbors and local residents, to precisely recapture a pose after examining a number of photographs than it was to nail down a fleeting moment once the model tired and began changing position and expression.
After several hours of meandering through the galleries, I began to draw a parallel between the artist’s work and my own effort writing 3 ACES. I felt a gradual identification with Rockwell’s love of the specific scene and his use of photography to capture it. He had evolved this way of working in order to reconstruct reality and visibly present it, at his own pace, in his chosen media – oil on canvass, or pen and sketchpad. I sensed that I had gone through an experience similar to his, again and again, in shaping the scenes of my book. My “photographer” was memory – the memory of scenes I had packed away in my cranium during nine years of long haul trucking. When I finally left the road and began writing, those memories were transposed – the computer my palette – into the scenes which grew to Chapters…5,12, 6, etc. And like Rockwell with the stroke of his brush, I rearranged the images and words of those scenes dozens of times – fleshing out, reducing, cutting to the minimum what was needed to portray the effects I wanted to present my readers.
Especially fascinating to me were two of a group of four paintings in one gallery known as “The Four Freedoms.” In his painting, “Freedom of Speech,” Rockwell forces the viewer to look upward at one enormous Lincolnesque figure almost filling the canvas. Around him are the faces of townspeople exhibiting various attitudes of puzzlement and rebuke, questioning what this plainly clad workman has to say, but he is firmly resolved in his message. For the writer, the lesson here is in making your main character distinct, clarified, and pure in purpose despite the competing subplots and minor characters that threaten to reduce the star quality of that main character.
“Freedom From Want,” the second painting, provided me with an unexpected insight into Rockwell’s art. Here is a Thanksgiving family, arranged around a resplendent turkey, but Rockwell leaves the rest of the table totally barren of food. The starkness of what he has done here is intensified when you face the actual canvas – a ghostly pallor seems to have fallen over the empty plates, the glistening silverware, and the squeaky clean table linen. Yet that succulent turkey draws your eye. The effect is jarring, upsetting, and shattering – pure genius. A vision of plenty, yet nothing – juxtaposed, on a day that should kindle a feeling of well being and satisfaction.
That second painting held a great lesson: As an artist, if you want to stir an emotion in the viewer or the reader, chose details carefully! Cut the detail down and focus on what does the job. The key is in your selection of what TO include and what NOT TO include.
Every canvas, every exhibit, every lecture in this outstanding museum will bring something new into your life. The only way to enjoy all this is to absorb the sights and sounds of the place for yourself. Put a visit to the Norman Rockwell museum at the top your list!
