Scout at Ships Wheel is in the Public Domain, as work was first published in 1913 in the U.S. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
It is a wonderful article that gives artist and non-artist alike a peek into the process of creating an illustration for publication. It shows how Mr. Rockwell created his amazing photo realistic illustrations from photographs that he created and staged as his inspiration and starting point for a rendering. He often used friends and neighbors as his models, "setting the stage" for his visual story using real people, real life and a wonderfully quirky sense of humor.
Much has been said of the fact that Rockwell used photographs to create his illustrations, tracing them onto his canvas for his sketch. I would like to point out that tracing photographs, using projectors and otherwise using shortcuts when creating a rendering is a legitimate method of getting an initial "sketch" down for a starting point. In photo realism this is just a smart way to start and it's a serious time saver for the professional illustrator on a deadline.
Photo realism is just that - a painting so meticulous that it sometimes cannot be distinguished from an actual photograph. Whether or not you like this style of painting, it is an extremely time consuming and technically difficult style. It requires an artist of great skill and ability and Norman Rockwell was an artist of that caliber. His creativity is highly evident in the tableaus he staged and in the humor and changes to facial expressions he instilled in the final illustrations.
Once upon a time the art world considered artists who painted illustrations on demand for magazines or publications not "real" artists - they were called "commercial" artists to distinguish them from "real" or "fine" artists. What a crock. Especially if you are enough of an art history buff to realize that some of the greatest "fine artists" and masters were "commercial" artists!
Exactly what would you call painting the churches, sculpting busts and bronzes of the Medici family if not "work for hire"? If it were not for "commercial" commissions of the past - like the Sistine Chapel! - some of the greatest artists of all time might never have been noticed, their work never preserved and maybe most of it not even created!
As a young girl I found out about Norman Rockwell through my father who worked for the Boy Scouts of America. Mr. Rockwell had done several illustrations for this organization over the years and my dad showed me several examples of Mr. Rockwell's work. You might be interested to know that one of these paintings of a scout, Scout at Ship's Wheel (the September 1913 cover of Boys' Life magazine for the Boy Scouts of America) , was Rockwell's first published magazine cover illustration! It seems like Life and The Boy Scouts of America might have been Mr. Rockwell's modern day Medici patrons.
Normal Rockwell was an artistic genius who had his finger on the pulse of the America of his lifetime and put that finger to work to preserve a visual memory of simpler times and even history. That is what I would call a master of art.
My thanks to The Norman Rockwell Family Agency for allowing the photos and the article on this great American artist thus giving us a look at the creative process at work.
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