Memoirous

At times we can feel blocked. I know July is an especially hard time for me when it comes to posting blogs. Before I know it another week has gone by and I won’t have posted. According to my stats I only average about 8 posts in July. So when I get to Friday often I’m left wondering—where to start? As I mentioned earlier I just read a VERY GOOD biography by Deborah Solomon about Norman Rockwell. Here was a guy who had deadlines. While he was at the POST he made a total of 356 covers. That’s 356 paintings—many the size that goes over the mantel or above the couch. (In case one thought they were the actual size of a magazine.) Here was a bit of advice I gleaned from the book. Two nights a week Rockwell would go into a spare room devoid of distractions and stay there from eight to eleven, when, more often than not, he’d leave discouraged—not having gotten any new ideas—remember he worked on a frantic deadline, a new painting every 2 weeks “The second night, after a few minu...

I’m a in a summertime non-fiction stage. Losing myself into pages upon pages. That’s the nice thing about non-fiction—you can read as fast as you want and not have to worry about the thread of a story or the outcome of certain characters. We already know what happened to them, we only care about how they got there. Right now I’m immersed in the life of artist/illustrator Norman Rockwell. American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon is a highly readable and enjoyable biography that doesn’t seem to gloss or get lost in the controversy of whether Rockwell was a true artist or the definitions that separate an artist from an illustrator. The high attendance that accompanies exhibitions of his work have taken care of that. He is popular, so was Jackson Pollack. He was the stuff of headlines, so was Mapplethorpe. Warhol bought several of Rockwell’s paintings. Perhaps he shared an affinity with Rockwell as Warhol started off his career as a commercial ar...