"Since all of my paintings—almost every single one except for the figure paintings—are done from memory, I rely specifically on the memory of..."

"... working in restaurants, or of visiting farms on which I worked as a young person. I try to recall the look and feel and love of what I have experienced. The same goes for my landscape paintings. Utah was full of wonderful red earth, mesas and mesa-type outcroppings. When I moved to Southern California, I spent a lot of time on the beach—I loved the beach bluffs. And then, in Lake Tahoe later in life, the High Sierras were a great inspiration. Recalling all of them from memory gave me the option of working on the mountains, for example, more abstractly."

From an interview with Wayne Thiebaud — "one of America’s greatest painters, and certainly its premier painter of food... still going strong" at 99 years old — about his New Yorker cover this week.



Thanksgiving is coming up — not this week but next week — and it's a very food-based holiday.

The food-based painter paints a roasted turkey. Just the platter of meat. Also some vegetables on the side. But no table surrounded by human beings aglow with thanks. None of that Norman Rockwell scene or any latter-day spoof of such. Just the food. An interesting painterly blue shadow along the right edge of the platter.

Hmm. I don't know. If you look at it long enough maybe deeper meaning comes through. We're told the title of the painting is "Stuffed," but the neck end of the turkey is turned toward the viewer, and it's stitched closed as though the cook had taken the trouble to pack stuffing in that secondary compartment, but it but doesn't bulge out. It's concave.

Thiebaud is invited to compare his turkey to the turkey in the famous Norman Rockwell painting (which is called "Freedom from Want," after one of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms"). Thiebaud says:

That’s a marvellous turkey! I don’t know if anyone could compete with that. That’s a beautiful, American, wonderfully felt family get-together. Everyone is right there, including the turkey.

Yes, it's even wonderful for the cooked carcass... in the memory's visualization of the look and feel and love of what has been experienced. But the memory of Thanksgiving doesn't have to be stuffed with family happiness. It can be empty and concave, like the neck end of Thiebaud's turkey.

Indeed, that title, "Stuffed," is ambiguous. Stuffed is the feeling that you've had more than enough. All those Thanksgivings, looked back on in memory. Thiebaud has 90+ Thanksgivings in his memory to try to recall the look and feel and love of as as he paints a New Yorker cover that can never escape comparison to the Thanksgiving idealization Norman Rockwell found in his head three-quarters of a century ago.

We're all in the blue shadow of that image.



Or I should say we're all in the blue shadow of our memory of that image? Looking at it now, I'm surprised that it seems so dim and gray. The turkey is a dismal mound, and the other food on the table is celery and a couple of pickles. Yes, there are people, but are they really happy? They look gaga and manic. Disembodied heads.

And I don't believe that frail grandmother could, without strain, hold a 25-pound turkey off to the side at an angle like that. Grandfather is the dark eminence, presiding, but he should move aside so grandma can keep that load in balance. Maybe that's what all those other characters are cackling about. Grandma's pissed. I bet 1 second later she loses her grip and 25-pounds of cooked bird drops on the table and that cackling comes to an abrupt halt.

ADDED: Move up one decade from Rockwell's Thanksgiving, get to the 1950s (where I grew up), and the look and feel and love of Thanksgiving in your memory could be...

Do we need another Norman Rockwell?

If we do, this guy's in the running: "Artist Illustrates His Sweet Childhood Memories, And The Results Are Heartwarming" (Bored Panda).

At the Questionable Artwork Café...

... you are invited, once again, to examine the political significance and possible offensiveness of a painting. This time there's no hiding the name of the painter. Even if I smudged out the signature, I think you'd know it's Norman Rockwell. I'll add that it's from 1926 and titled "Love Song." The rest is up to you. I especially encourage you to discover the 5 things that are egregiously wrong with this picture.

The so-called "town hall" debate.

It wasn't much of a "town hall" debate was it? I felt sorry for those people who had to sit and be background for 90 minutes. There were so few of them. Each one stood out and had to sit still and look alive, but though they were few, most never got called on. Those who did get a shot asked the most simple, pathetic questions. As I try to recall the questions this morning, they all seemed to be a short plea: What will you do to encourage people like me?

The candidates mostly ignored the person and even the question and plugged in something they wanted to talk about. They never did any of the sort of emotive, bonding-with-the-questioner performance that we are urged to think of when we hear the words "town hall debate." They ran out the clock, and then one of the moderators — in the guise of a "follow-up" question — would replace the "town"person's question with something more specific.

Here's the transcript of last night's debate. I'm going to read the questions and test myself. Am I right about what I just said? (Or do you need me to talk about the fly that landed on Hillary Clinton's face or the way Trump and Hillary didn't shake hands at the beginning and did shake hands in the end? Meade wanted me to rewind and get a video of the fly's antics. I could be first with the news of the fly! Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. We rewound and laughed a lot, but I left it to the internet to take the pictures.)



Question 1 came from a teacher. She wanted to know if the candidates "feel" they are "modeling appropriate and positive behavior for today’s youth." Hillary, going first and setting the tone, boosted the ego of the townswoman by pronouncing her question "very good" and "important." She then proceeded to ignore the question and go into her standard line "our country really is great because we’re good." That's been her pat answer to Trump's banal "Make America Great Again." So when Trump got his turn, he knew where to go: His "whole concept" has been "to make America great again." A typical cascade of short sentences flowed out of that mental prompt, and nothing got back to the townswoman's question.

"My first reaction was, Norman Rockwell’s from New York City?"

"You really understand Rockwell’s work in a whole new way when you realize he grew up on the West Side. He formed a view of the world that can be traced right back to 103rd Street. You’ve got to imagine he was struck by the great disparities of wealth in New York City even then, and that awareness stuck with him through his career. You can see it in subtle but important ways in so much of his work."

Said Mark Levine, chairman of the New York City Council’s Parks Committee, who was part of the process of getting West 103rd between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue renamed Norman Rockwell Place. (Some high school students got it started, and they were pretty impressed by the artwork: "The first time I went to the museum, I was like, this can’t be a painting.")

We tend to think of the same few Normal Rockwell paintings, and they're not the ones that show the city, like this one, called "Homecoming" (1945):

"Mary Doyle Keefe, who modeled for Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter painting and became a true figure of 20th century Americana in the process..."

"... died on Tuesday in Simsbury, Connecticut. She was 92 years old and succumbed to a brief illness, the Associated Press reported."



Goodbye to an icon.

"Reading Brooks’s laments about Snowden and 'the fraying of the social fabric,' I found myself thinking about Norman Rockwell..."

"... if not in the same way Brooks might. (In 2008, after what he saw as a rhetorical triumph by Sarah Palin, Brooks wrote, 'Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.') The image that came to mind was one of the panels from Rockwell’s 'Four Freedoms' series: the one on freedom of speech, in which a man stands up at what looks like a town meeting. He might be about twenty-nine. He is wearing a work jacket, so maybe he’s a high-school drop-out. There are better dressed people in the hall. And they are listening to him."

Writes Amy Davidson in The New Yorker, with the sentimentality that Rockwell haters loathe about Rockwell. Here's the referenced Rockwell painting:



I was going to snark that there's no way that guy is 29, but then I asked Meade, "How old does this guy look," and he said, "29." And, "That's what guys who work on the farm look like when they're 29."

Then I tried my other idea: "How do we know he's not a communist, dressed that way to trick the naively idealistic Norman-Rockwell-loving folks of that small town? He's dressed like a folksinger. He could be Pete Seeger." And Meade said: "You can tell by that greasy dirt on his jacket. That guy does real work."

We talked about the difference between this idealized farmer — with his real dirt, in a real place, with real people — and Edward Snowden — who operated within computer networks and evanesced into Asia. But it's 2013, and maybe that Rockwell character does need to be a man detached from the American soil, floating out there in unmediated space. And yet — as Meade said — "He's Tea Party."

Can you believe there's a fuss about a Norman Rockwell painting?

And it's not that Norman Rockwell is too sentimental/bland/cliché to take seriously?

Rosie the Riveter, AKA Geraldine Doyle...

... has died at the age of 86.

[T]he woman in the patriotic poster...

... was never named Rosie, nor was she a riveter. All along it was Mrs. Doyle, who after graduating from high school in Ann Arbor, Mich., took a job at a metal factory, her family said.

One day, a photographer representing United Press International came to her factory and captured Mrs. Doyle leaning over a piece of machinery and wearing a red and white polka-dot bandanna over her hair.

In early 1942, the Westinghouse Corp. commissioned artist J. Howard Miller to produce several morale-boosting posters to be displayed inside its buildings. The project was funded by the government as a way to motivate workers and perhaps recruit new ones for the war effort.

Smitten with the UPI photo, Miller reportedly was said to have decided to base one of his posters on the anonymous, slender metal worker - Mrs. Doyle.

For four decades, this fact escaped Mrs. Doyle, who shortly after the photo was taken left her job at the factory. She barely lasted two weeks.

A cellist, Mrs. Doyle was horrified to learn that a previous worker at the factory had badly injured her hands working at the machines. She found safer employment at a soda fountain and bookshop in Ann Arbor, where she wooed a young dental school student and later became his wife.

Oh, the irony! She couldn't do it. But she could inspire others to do it. And she could do other things, like play the cello and rear 6 children. "We" can do it, each in our own way. You work the machines, I'll help people find the right books.

Here's the Norman Rockwell version of Rosie, who's not nearly so glamorous and is clearly not based on Mrs. Doyle:

The 52-by-40-inch oil on canvas depicts "Rosie" on lunch break, her riveting gun on her lap as she uses a dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf as a foot stool.

Great symbolism, Norman. And I don't mean the book. I mean the manly power tool.

Rockwell's Rosie is posed as an homage to Michelangelo's frescoed depiction of the prophet Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Here's Michelangelo's Isaiah, who's more respectful of his book, which is about God, not his struggle against lies, stupidity and cowardice.

"Norman Rockwell would get the boot... if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents..."

"... which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from 'Hide/Seek.' Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it."

Writes Blake Gopnik about the ants-on-Jesus to-do.

Rush Limbaugh reacted:

Now, what is there to hate about Norman Rockwell? Very simply answered question: pro-America. Classic Americana. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate the flag. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate biscuits and gravy. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate breakfast. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate farms. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate grandmother. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate the family. What in the world is there to hate about Norman Rockwell?

Ha. I remember when everyone hated Norman Rockwell... and not just because he was regarded as an excessively literal illustrator and not a real artist.

(And by "everyone," I mean that in the sense that everyone voted against Nixon.)

The world is so pretty and all a-glow...

... when you're drunk.

ADDED: Via commenter Seven Machos, the AV Club says:

Landscape painter Thomas Kinkade—known as the “Painter Of Light” because he trademarked that phrase for himself, and as a purveyor of patriotic and Christian-themed images that are meant to contain a “larger moral dimension”—has been busted for drunk driving. It’s part of a pervasive pattern of self-destructive behavior for Kinkade, whose innocuous, assembly-line images of peaceful cottages, Jesuses, and snow scenes have made him the nation’s self-described “most collected artist,” which is sort of like Velveeta bragging that it’s “America’s most sought-after cheese.” As Kinkade himself once said, “We have found a way to bring to millions of people an art that they can understand,” which just about sums up his Norman Rockwell-meets-Walmart approach.

Go to the link to see a few attempts Photoshop the mug shop into a Kinkadesque vision of light.