Speaker OK.
Speaker Corn on the cob, corn on the cob. Well, the first time I remember posing was in the first studio in West Arlington, the one that burned down.
Speaker And it was one of those, I think it was a jolly green giant and jolly green giant, I think still exists. But anyway, it was corn and corn on the cob. And I was supposed to be sitting there deliciously eating the corn on the cob. And so they had this whole thing of corn on the cob. Cooking. And I would go up like this and then they’d say, all right, stop now let’s think about it and pass the corn off. And my brothers would sit there eating the corn on the cob happily away. And my father would say, don’t worry, there’ll be corn left for you. Everybody knows my favorite food. And we got to the final shot and the fun here. And I went like this. And he said, OK, maybe that one’s good. Gave ear to my brothers.
Speaker And I looked around, said there isn’t any more corn. And it developed, I’m afraid.
Speaker Well, it didn’t because they had developed a dislike opposing it, didn’t develop a dislike of. But just as any child remembers certain resentments. I remember that I didn’t get my corn on the cob.
Speaker But then one time later, my brother and I had a contest and he was Thomas, three and a half years old, older than I am. So I think he had an advantage. And he eight, 13 years one night at dinner. But I eat well.
Speaker So I’ve got it. I guess I’ve gotten over that. What was that for?
Speaker The picture was, I think, an ad for Jolly Green Giant. You know what I forget what for what kind. But Jolly Green Giant was one of the it’s one of the canned things. I think I once ran across the picture. And it’s a pretty unsensational picture, but it’s my first memory. I didn’t pose that much for ads that I remember, but I posed for four post covers. I was cute until I was 15 and so are cute or useful at the age of 15. I cease to be cute. Never posed again. It’s, you know, like your life is great until you’re fifteen. It’s all downhill from there. Except I don’t. Anyway, I was.
Speaker So I would do things like I was the kid sitting in the dining car counting out his change. I was a kid on the diving board. One of the more frightening experiences, the time because they ran this board from the top of the balcony, railing over to it, took Pops easel and rounded up the top and put the board across the top and then sort tied it and then said, crawl out there and look frightened.
Speaker And I was frightened before I crawled out there, let alone how I felt once I got out there so that the pictures were, I guess, very accurate. Although I have since read that my father said that that was a mistake, that he should have taken us down to the real thing to get the real effect and had me crawl out on a a real diving board and that that somehow I would have done something to what also is not a terribly sensational picture when you come right down to it.
Speaker The I mean, the kid, it was one of those kinds of. Americanah, which make people laugh because of the humor of the kid crawling out. But we don’t have enough of the detail thing going on behind it. That make the really fascinating story is that he sometimes played around with I I’m much happier to say with the last when I posed for which is the soda jerk, which is this kid leaning on the counter, who’s the soda jerk?
Speaker And three girls looking adoringly at him and another a boy, you know, looking jealous. And the kinds of details that go on around in that and the little details and this incredible ability, he had to understand what was the right detail and to keep out details that were extraneous. May I reveal a family’s secret? The only time my wife Cynthia got into a postcard was the rear end of one of those girls, and that’s her only place ever in a post. That’s not much of a family secret, is it?
Speaker But he is the family law. Right? Tell me about.
Speaker Well, yeah, well, he used the family a lot.
Speaker It wasn’t until I became much older that I realized that he also ideas came from the family like he did that diving board cover the summer after I went a hole through a whole thing of getting up my nerve to jump out of the window of the covered bridge. That was a sort of a sign of being a big boy that you had the nerve to jump into the river from the window of the covered bridge. And I think one afternoon I spent an hour and a half standing there working up my nerve. And only now looking back do I notice that he did that cover the winter after that.
Speaker And the soda jerk cover he did the winter after I was a soda jerk in Bennington, Vermont. So I think things that happened in the family became sort of sparks for ideas because he used to talk about the fact that that one of the hardest things he had was getting ideas. I’m I’m not sure how how how totally true that was, but getting ideas that worked because he had this incredibly detailed process that he went through in order to paint, especially a post cover.
Speaker And he had he said that he got ideas by starting out with a drawing of a lamp, post them sailing, leaning on the lamp post and then thinking what hit his mind next and doing that and going on and on and on through until he started to hit an idea that seemed to go somewhere. And that’s probably his conscious technique. But if I look back over the things that I remember from mine or my brother’s childhood, I notice an interesting side, a kind of relationship between things that happened in the family and ideas that suddenly took fruit, you know, a few months later to fruit separate.
Speaker Do you think it was looking for a stray or looking for an image?
Speaker I mean, in terms of his creative ideas, I was looking for a story because he was a storyteller.
Speaker And the image, one of his great abilities was his ability to tell a story as an image. He was, in a funny way, a visual intellectual in the sense that he thought through images, but thought very precisely. And his way, for instance, of the famous Thanksgiving cover of the of the couple. Who are the couple excuse me, the little old lady and the kid who are saying Grace, the way he constructed that in getting the different kinds of characters in, they’re getting the detail in their deciding that that that the view through the window of the Albany, New York railroad station. What might be just the right thing.
Speaker It.
Speaker It’s a story, but it’s a story thought of in terms of images, not in terms of words. Not that he was that bad with words, but but but that it’s a kind of a storyteller in images.
Speaker Did he talk about them, about how he felt, about the importance of telling the story?
Speaker Well, it’s a little hard to say. You know, you think of what I mean when your father talks about the dinner table when you’re a kid isn’t necessary. I mean, he did talk about his work, but it’s certainly storytelling. He was very conscious that that was his thing after he came out of illustration, out of book illustration, when he started up. Book illustration was probably more important than magazine illustration because he started working as a commercial illustrator in 1916 and book illustrations, story illustrations. So story was a natural part of it. And it’s a whole natural part going back in in the history of art. I mean, he looked back in his mind to people like Hogarth’s or to or to Dickens illustrators of things. He he had a very thorough all out. No, not thorough isn’t the right word. Quite a large knowledge of the history of art and a way of using it. I mean, if you look at the books here in the studio that he had, one of the interesting things is to look through them and see how many pictures were cut out because he would cut the pictures out, pin them on the on his easel to give him some sense of the way he was going. And he felt himself very much part of the history of art and was very conscious of it.
Speaker There are actually references to some of the old masters and some of his work, right? Oh, all the time.
Speaker I mean, and it’s all in fun and games with references to the old Masters athing from the the one one of the ones that is both most obvious and most fun is the Rosie the Riveter, which in which the poses a direct take from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Speaker And and and but then he used it.
Speaker There’s this.
Speaker He used them in various ways. I mean, there were references like the Shackleton’s barbershop, which is really there is no specific reference to a picture, but that is really a 16th century Dutch genre painting turned into America. It’s the looking through the dark room into the light room, which is exactly like Peter to hook.
Speaker And it’s it’s a kind of a deconstructing a great genre painter and reconstructing it in an American scene. And there was at but then he liked the reference. He had this funny way of of putting pictures in a picture and then making the picture more alive than the people in the picture. And in a funny sort of way, there’s there’s a there’s one which is has the art student staring at the jewel in the cleavage of a Rubins woman. And the Rubins woman is looking down like this. And the and the there’s a painting beside it’s the beer drinkers of another Dutch painter and they’re looking over shocked.
Speaker And the art student is just staring at this object with no attention to the world around him. And the paintings are alive and looking at the world around them.
Speaker And he did this earlier in another painting where you’ve got a guard in the museum carrying a frame and the guard is a perfect profile and everything. And the paintings behind them are all sort of looking out and looking around. And it’s a it’s a sight kind of very fascinating thing if you sort of think of it. If you, sir, stop thinking of Norman Rockwell, quintessential America Americana painter, and start thinking of him as somebody who was very conscious of the art of painting and very interested in it, that he should start making paintings more real than people within the paintings.
Speaker Seems to me I have kind of a fascinating way of the things that were going on with him as well.
Speaker Yeah. I want to talk more about some of the surprises, probably the general public about probably more complicated in the war. But I wanted to.
Speaker Well, as my brother said recently when he was interviewed about his own work and somebody tried to put on him something about simple Norman Rockwell, you just said he’s a whole lot more complicated. He was a lot more complicated than that. He was a workaholic. He worked seven days a week. One of the things I remember is little family fights because he would try to go out to work on Christmas Day afternoon.
Speaker And my mother would say she had used bad language, but if she had, she would have.
Speaker She just got mad. I mean, that you don’t work on Thanksgiving and Christmas. You may work seven days a week with that. But he would somehow or other fate figure out a way to sneak out there and work.
Speaker And he was very intense about his work and could get very upset about it. People now writing in the books talk about his depression of the 30s and his depression of the 40s. Well, I don’t know about the 30s, the one in the 40s. I don’t know. It wouldn’t have looked to me as a kid like a depression because he never stopped working. But I suppose it was a depression because the sense that there was one not terribly good.
Speaker I mean, not terribly good.
Speaker Not very good postcard cover about the facts of life, which if I remember right now, he spent 11 months doing it, repainted it three times, had to take out bank loans because as he was somebody who tended to spend the money he earned, he was not a big saver.
Speaker He just stopped earning money for eleven months while he tried to get this painting right. And in that sense, I suppose that’s a form of depression. And he would. Well, one of the stories about that, about that saying Grace covers, he got so mad at a threw it out into the snow one night. And then, of course, five minutes later when I brought it back in, wipe the water off it. But he had a lot of the intensity of an artist and the perfectionism and a very considerable lack of self-confidence. Every time he sent a picture down to the post, he would be in a state of jitters that they might reject it. When he I mean, by the time he was 42 when I was born, so that by the time I was conscious of anything of this, he was so successful that the idea that they would reject something is sort of nonsensical. But he was petrified that they might reject it. He once told me that he went through a whole period when he was petrified he would go blind with no reason at all. When the doctor would say, this is nonsense. Of course not. He he had a lot of the emotional tensions of being an artist. Well, on the other hand, a public image of folksiness. And because he was a commercial artist and the viewpoint in the 40s, in the 50s and the 60s and still to some extent is that commercial artists found have the kind of emotional conflict or emotional violence that that fine artists do. Maybe he didn’t feel quite so easy with the amount of emotions, but they were there and and then he had this perfectionism. I can also remember my mother saying, Norman, for goodness sake, it’s done. Stop it. That detail isn’t going to make any difference. He’d say, no, no, no, no, no. I got to get just this little detail right. And it’s all that self-confidence that we all feel is a lack of self-confidence that we all feel as artists. But we treat it. I mean, I suppose I’m an artist still. I’m one things I learned from watching him was that it’s often better to stop working for a week than it is to just keep trying to get it right, because often it gets right in your mind much better if you just stop working and relax. But he never relaxed, relaxed in that sense.
Speaker I mean, there’s just a little bit of spittle.
Speaker You know, I’m getting so excited that I’m starting to spit in foam at the mouth, sort of say we are shooting high definition hairs. First it’s my nose, then it’s my nose was fine. I mean. Yeah, like water or something.
Speaker No, I’m fine at the cos he was somebody fighting who he really was. I mean did his art match who he really was as a person or was that was the in some way. I mean, would he have liked to be a different kind of artist?
Speaker No. And he had he was a person with great, good sense on that level that he knew where he was most of the time. His only sort of.
Speaker Sort of pushes towards I want to be a greater artist were when he would do something like the holy.
Speaker What is it, you know, do unto others as you’ll have doing the way he sometimes guided into his mind. I’ve got to do a great painting and do something like that. But most of the time, he knew quite well who he was. And that was one of his real qualities. It’s just that he was he although he would never mostly admit it, he really did want the admiration of the fine arts world. He really did feel that he was good on one level. He also was a person who intensely needed.
Speaker Support, admiration. You know, he really intensely needed people to say, I know I need the same thing, and my wife complains, she said, your God, stop it.
Speaker You know, but.
Speaker So I think those things. And he intensely loved art. I mean, he he just adored Rembrandt.
Speaker I remember one of my first memories of a museum was something like nineteen forty six. So it was a show at the Metropolitan of Art from European museums and thanks to America for the saving of art. And I remember my intense embarrassment because he got so close to the Rembrandt, so intensely pointing at the guard, told him to get away. And, you know, as a kid, I mean, there I was, 10 year old kid having your father told by a guard to get away from the painting.
Speaker But it just the intensity of his love, of the art of painting, I think.
Speaker Was one of the complications into the mixture.
Speaker And then another complication was this kind of public image that he built for himself, which was at least a partially conscious, partially unconscious. I think any person probably who becomes famous builds a public persona that helps them deal with their fame and his public persona of being the folksy, nice, everyday person. Was in some conflict with the intensity of the perfectionist and workaholic and lover of of great painting. But on the other hand, that fed things into his painting, which would have been there otherwise, because I think this whole thing, which has become to fascinate me of his use of painting of his own most deconstructionist way of being able to take a painting apart, show elements of things going on in the same painting. The the idea of the Rubins woman looking down at the art student, looking intensely at the thing the the the way he could pay to Rubins, which is not a copy of any Rubins. All of these things were things that fed in because of the intensity and wouldn’t if he really were that folksy American person wouldn’t have been there.
Speaker But I mean, I know the characters like that and ways Mark Twain, you start reading Mark Twain, some of his nonfiction and you realize how fascinated he was with English grammar and with correct English usage. But that’s not part of our image as Mark Twain, as the sort of folksy writer. But. And so I think it’s it’s also how would I put it? It’s a it’s one group for type of American artists find it worthwhile in the mixture that helps get their art out to present themselves as much less complicated than they are.
Speaker That’s true, comprehensible. I mean, that’s true, the man and of his work for labor.
Speaker The work was also more complicated than yeah, the work is much more complicated than I think one of the wonderful advantages of working for the Saturday Evening Post and that people are now, I think, beginning to study the Saturday Evening Post more is that the the market of the Saturday Evening Post was much larger spread than any than than a magazine normally would be now. It spread from the farmer in the Midwest through to the business man in New York. It had the Alsop brothers writing about politics. It had funny stories, but it also would have some things on art. I remember a poet telling me about 20 years ago that the best paying magazine for serious poetry in the 40s and 50s was the Saturday Evening Post. They only may have had one or two poems an issue, but they paid well so that they they saw themselves as covering a much larger area so that he could, to his audience, make references to painting and some of them might get it and enjoy it.
Speaker Some of them might not get it as long as the references were not done in a sort of intellectually looking down way, as long as they were done with a kind of a humor so that it didn’t seem like like anyway was was looking down on anybody.
Speaker People were perfectly happy to have these references and some of them found them fun and some of them. I mean, I’m sure that some people looking at the Rosie the Riveter said that is from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Other people had no idea, but it didn’t conflict didn’t create create a conflict which would make the painting unhappy, but it made the painting almost deeper for that fact.
Speaker So I have and clearly I can you just sort of restate this concept. You no one could take his paintings on many levels. They are more complicated on the surface.
Speaker Well, I think, for instance, that A started starting in 1936 when he did a a self-portrait of himself with his back to you thinking about. He started doing a series of paintings in which in some ways they discussed the art of painting. That is the sense in which you you do a paintings. A simpler one might be the one of the painting of the fireman with a cigar and the smoke coming up and the fireman sniffing at it. I mean, you’re discussing the art of painting because you’re talking about because you’re saying the painting is alive or is the painting alive?
Speaker What’s going on in here? And so you’re you’re discussing what art means to people, because we think of paintings as kind of things that are sitting there and not moving.
Speaker They’re an image of a they. They go on. But if you’re saying that the painting is actually alive and is sniffing, what what are you doing with our images of it? Or again, he took a painting. He did the first split cover, which and the first split cover is the people going out for the sun and coming back for the sun. Well, it’s it’s not a comic strip. It’s a painting with some very interesting oil painting going on in it. And I think this is something to emphasize to is that what he was doing was oil painting, which I know a lot of painting conservators.
Speaker And when they see him, they say, oh, this is perfect Dutch technique. He was a very good technician with oil paint. And even though that shouldn’t be important for a reproduction, it’s important for him. And so that to comes becomes into it. But you take and you split the image in a painting and have it going and coming. And then the changes, the people, the the veil, the grandmother doesn’t change at all. She’s saying or spiff expression going out the same way coming. But the kids exhausted, the father angry as he’s going out, exhausted, and you suddenly move time into something that most people don’t think of as having time. Then he’d like to use mirrors. And one of his favorite paintings was the little girl looking into the mirror. And she’s got her back to us. She’s looking into the mirror. So we’re getting the reflection of her front mirror. She’s got a doll down here. She’s got on her knees a film magazine with. Is it Rosalind Russell? I forget. But anyway, what he’s done there is a painting which which is a typical Renaissance type painting, which is the three ages of man. It was called in the Renaissance. There’s a Titian in which you have three faces, the young man, the mature man and the old man. And you represent the life cycle by showing these what he’s done there is there’s the girl with her back to us, looking in the mirror, seeing herself, looking at herself and thinking about herself. And she’s right at puberty. There’s the doll down there, which is the baby, and there’s the mature woman here. And will she become that or what will she become? He’s taken something which in the Renaissance was a kind of a symbolic way of dealing with the life cycle. And he’s turned it into somebody meditating on the life cycle. If you see what I mean. But he’s also because it’s a framed in a mirror. The Herr who is meditating is a picture within a picture. And it’s the same sort of thing you might say as when a playwright does a play within a play. It starts to be a meditation upon what’s going on. Now, to me, one of the fascinating things with this is that he could succeed in doing this without moving out of the ambience of I am Americana and this is not really serious art. And so he was able to do something which in some way was serious art, but which nobody felt put off by it being serious art, because very much in, I think American culture, if it becomes too serious, we do get kind of put off by it.
Speaker Was say, by what you wrote about the April Fool’s covers to the you know, it was what it made, you know. Was he a real lost? Was he not a realist? And was he commenting on, you know, the fact that he wasn’t really hero?
Speaker Well, I think more he is also commenting on the fact that realism doesn’t depend on realism. Realism depends on the quality of detail.
Speaker If I could have you start over since we didn’t hear the question of what painting we’re talking about.
Speaker Oh, I’m sorry. We’re talking about three paintings. We’re talking about the three April Fool’s covers, which started out with basically and he said they started out with the notion that since people were always writing into him saying, you’ve got this detail wrong, you’ve got that detail wrong. He decide to do a painting which would have every detail wrong and see and and and see what happened. But what what comes into it is you first look at it and there’s nothing wrong in the sense at first sight because it’s a Norman Rockwell with all the detail of a Norman Rockwell. And then you sort of start to look and there’s the fish jumping up the stairs. There’s all these little but every detail in itself is intensely realistic so that it is still realism. It’s just a kind of surrealism.
Speaker Which brings you into a kind of a funny statement. Vladimir Nabokov is supposed to have said that Salvador Dali was Norman Rockwell’s trend, twin brother stolen by gypsies at the age of two. And if I could find you. I mean, I know that I read that as a quote from him.
Speaker April Fools covers are a little bit Norman Rockwell saying, I could have been stolen by gypsies, too. And because of the joke. What is fascinating to me is that the least popular one was the last one, which is a little girl in an antique shop with an old man. And that one almost becomes a nightmare. If you look at it and think about it and a little girl is holding a doll which has the old man’s head. The old man is holding a doll which has the little girl’s head. There are all sorts of things. It’s dark. It has many bits of memory in it. It has it has also little in jokes like a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with with a halo. Now, how many people who look at New York Post, New York, not New York Post, Saturdays plus covers now are can bring to mind that the Mona Lisa is a portrait martyr, not a saint, and therefore the halo doesn’t belong. If you see where all these references but if you look at it and think about it in the darkness and the switching identity and all this going on, you realize that it wouldn’t take an awful lot for that to become a nightmare rather than a funny a funny situation. And I often wonder if the reason he didn’t go on. Part of the reason was I think he just got bored. But if also that approach to that darkness, which was something that he didn’t want to get in too, may have made him not want to go on with what was going on in that.
Speaker You know, in an off on another subject, if I may, from one of the things that I admire about what he did was the fact that he.
Speaker Did a great deal of patriotic painting in World War Two, but he only did one painting of people fighting. He succeeded. He created a character, Willie Gillis, and took it through something like nine or 11 covers.
Speaker And Willie Gillis is never shooting a gun and never firing.
Speaker And he was able.
Speaker It isn’t just a question of seeing the humor in war. It’s a question of being able to be patriotic without going into and an emotion of destruction.
Speaker And I really I have great admiration for his ability to to to do something that way, to not fall into that kind of passion of of fighting that people fall into in wartime system.
Speaker Yeah. I mean, as he didn’t really deal with even like the problem we all live with. I mean, it was about violence, but it didn’t really show the violence well or that wonderful.
Speaker Well, not that is the problem we all live with, I thought.
Speaker Is that the two families. I mean, I’m thinking of the kid going, yes, sorry. But I mean, I guess maybe you have the tunnel now. You’re right. I was anyway. I admire that painting immensely. Also just a sheer painting. The cutting off of the people’s heads so that, you know, he’s got four men walking and they’re headless. To concentrate on her and then how can anybody hate a little girl dressed like that for going the first day of school? I mean, he makes it absolutely impossible to to hate her.
Speaker Whatever the situation, because she’s so eagerly going to school. And so it’s a it’s a really interesting painting in the sense of dealing with a problem without allowing people to to hate or get angry with it.
Speaker And but I think he himself had a certain amount of problems with getting angry about things so that it could be at times a problem for him to deal with it, which I think he dealt with by the intensity of his technique.
Speaker I think his own moments of anger and things would go into the intensity of perfectionism.
Speaker How do you mean? He had a problem with anger, that it was like two intense.
Speaker So it really does sometimes feel angry about things. And and when you when you when you keep an emotion out of your art, you tend to have to pay for it in other ways.
Speaker At least that’s my feeling about it.
Speaker We jumped around a level of just let’s go back to family life for a few moments, and it was interesting what you said about the holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving, and were they very different in your memory as a child from the way he painted them?
Speaker I mean, I guess I’m asking is, you know, I mean.
Speaker I mean, we had. Christmas and Thanksgiving, we usually had in Arlington, the other illustrator’s, the Athans, the. And I think also the hugest but usually they are victims of the Schaefers came and had Christmas dinner with us. It was a great big table and a great big turkey. There was somebody I don’t know from Connecticut who sent us a 30 pound turkey every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas. So we always had a big enough turkey. What was different about the holidays was his desire to go back to work right afterwards.
Speaker Our life was built around my father working because that was how he defined himself, was as a painter. And I think he he stopping painting would be almost like stopping his own self definition. And so we didn’t take long vacations, which involved going away from painting. I remember one summer we went down to Provincetown, but we went down to Provincetown and he had a studio and he painted in Provincetown. We went out to California. I mean, we actually traveled a lot because about every three or four years, I think my father would get sick of the Vermont winter and we’d all go out for Southern California. But he always had a studio out there to do to paint in. He was wonderfully relaxed about people, or at least his family wandering around in his studio and he was painting. I don’t have any clear memories, memories of being thrown out. I probably was a couple of times because I was fairly obnoxious as a small child.
Speaker But by and large, you could wander in and out and lie on the couch over there and read or look through books or go up and look at the life magazines or something. And often my mother would be reading to him, or at least in the forties I. The funny thing is to think if everyone think about that, that some postcard covers were painted while he was listening to my mother reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to him.
Speaker So but so that that it wasn’t the sense that I was that we were in any way isolated from him.
Speaker But it was absolutely clear that everything worked around his arm, around his painting and that.
Speaker He was something of a child. About everything else in the sense that he didn’t want to have to worry about it. Other people had to worry about taxes and everything else. And he worried about the painting. And there was a system whereby if people came on to see him, we had a phone. We could call and say, what would you see this? But it was a sort of a defensive system that went on, because I remember one time when this man came to the door and said, I’d like to talk to Mr. Rockwell. And I said, well, I’ll have to call out and see who will I say call? And he said, Walt Disney. I went and picked up the phone, said, that is what? And they just said it was that sort of thing. I was impressed by Walt Disney.
Speaker Did he enjoy his fame? Sorry. We loved him. OK, sorry. Sorry. What were you going to say? Am I babbling too now? That’s great. It’s fantastic.
Speaker Somewhere I read that somebody remarked on like paintings, like the discovery where he actually took kind of a cynical point of view towards Christmas. I mean, is that anything you’ve ever thought about? You know, Santa Claus isn’t real. You know, the myth of Christmases. He sort of debunked the myth of Christmas like.
Speaker I don’t think he particularly debunked the myth of Christmas. But if you’re painting paintings of Santa Claus and you see your father painting them, it’s not I don’t remember ever particularly believing or disbelieving in Santa Claus. What I believed in was FHL Schwartz, because up there in Vermont, there aren’t very many toy stores like there weren’t any.
Speaker And so the arrival of the FEMA Schwarz toy catalog around the 1st of November was one of the great moments of my life. And I would become totally absorbed in it, trying to let them know what it was, that it was very important to me. So my memory is that I knew perfectly well where Christmas presents came from. However, that sort of sense of Dickensian exuberance and exuberance of food for Christmas, like the freedom from want, was very much part of the family’s sense of celebration. The big turkey, the the food and everything.
Speaker I don’t think my father was particularly cynical about Christmas or not cynical about Christmas.
Speaker I don’t I don’t remember. I mean, he was not sentimental about a lot of things, but he enjoyed things like Christmas, although he did use to talk about what he claimed was a great uncle who was sane and always except he messed up holidays so that he would arrive at Thanksgiving and set off firecrackers. And on the Fourth of July, he would bring Christmas presents to everybody. And I never really did know whether that was one of my father’s true stories or one of his developed stories, because my father loved to tell stories and he told stories a lot at the dinner table and.
Speaker He was from him that I learned that the truth is not as important as the enjoyment of your audience. I was a tour guide for many years off and on in Rome and discovered that that is also true, that it’s more important that they enjoy themselves than to actually get the facts right. What’s that saying? No mess up a good story with with the facts. Exactly. You know, my brother Tom, when he did a second edition for the as told to autobiography, started researching some of the things and found that my father’s stories were not always a correct statement of what went on and. But that’s part of being a storyteller, too, and that’s part of his way of. Looking at the world and at least the world he displays in his painting, displaying it as something where good things are going on. Sometimes sentimental, not always not necessarily sentimental, but where good things are going on and where bad things tend to be excluded, not tend to be are excluded. And he did that intentionally, right? Oh, certainly intentionally. I mean, he was perfectly willing to admit that bad things went on in the world. But he just that was an intentional part of his painting. That’s what I was saying. This thing about admiring the way he treated World War Two. I mean, my sense. I was five when the U.S. went into World War Two, my first sort of memories of things are then and my father would come in every evening for dinner and tell us about the news, because he listen to the radio all the time when somebody wasn’t reading to things, listening to the radio and tell us the news and the war news and things like that.
Speaker And he didn’t try to pretend that that wasn’t going on. It was a conscious act in his painting as a part of his view of the way things went on. And also as part of his wanting to be loved. That is one of the reasons I think he would have found it very hard to say.
Speaker Do a unpleasant portrait of a person would be that he might get worried that they wouldn’t like him if he did that and he really did like to be liked very much. I mean, I don’t think it went so far that it falsified things in his painting, but he really did like to be liked.
Speaker But we all do.
Speaker I’m sure. Just before we move on, and the more his story on my nose, the FBO force, the more you have to be bribed for the for the well.
Speaker No way am I. That’s not fair to call it bribery.
Speaker But for it for doing the little boy counting out his change, which incidentally, I think came from just that less than a year before that, we came back across the country by train.
Speaker And we had a little sequence in which I had one of my few victories over my older brothers, because in leaving Los Angeles, I said, there’s a Basco Bridge and everybody in the family said Basco. Bre-X says no such things as Basco Bridge. You’re just kidding. I was known as the Junior Encyclopædia because since I’ve since, well, my brothers could easily beat me up. My only way of fighting back was talking fast and having lots of facts. But I discovered that if you don’t have a fact, it’s better to invent it then.
Speaker But there really is a bascule bridge. Let me tell you in a way I said, and for, you know, the time it takes to go from Los Angeles to Chicago, I was being teased about the Basco Bridge. And then we were sitting in the dining car having breakfast coming into Chicago. And the head conductor comes by here and over there there’s and I grabbed him and I said, what’s that bridge called? And he said, Oh, that’s a Basco bridge. And my brother’s wilted. And it still happens if I say Bascule bridge to Tom or Jarvis. They still get this slightly wealthy expression. And so I think that may have gone into the idea of the kid in the dining car, you know, with.
Speaker But anyway, it was it was the hottest day in August of 1946, I believe.
Speaker And he he had arranged that New York Central would have a dining car in the yards in the Bronx. I think it was. And we got down there and it wasn’t air conditioned. And so he was having to make me sit. And, you know, you went over things that it wasn’t like movie filming in the going over, but it involved going over, trying it a different way, sitting a different way, trying different different expressions and took a period of time. And I was obviously griping like any sensible 10 year old would gripe about having to be in that heat. So he kept saying, look, just fill it now and then I’ll take you to FBO Schwarz and let you buy anything you want. And and he did.
Speaker We finished and we went to FEMA, Schwarz and I could still remember sitting in the car, driving up the West Side Highway with these wonderful tanks sitting on my lap looking at them. And it’s very nice, you know, in a way, when you have a memory of your father keeping a promise. And so that was, you know.
Speaker Tell me about his work process. Like, how did he go about creating that image?
Speaker Well, like I said, he started out.
Speaker He claimed that he never used other people’s ideas and in fact, there was a conflict with the Saturday Evening Post at one point when they tried to get him to use their ideas and his traditional way had been to work up a group of ideas and take them down to the editor. And the editor would approve a few of them.
Speaker And he said he would try to arrange it so that there would be a few sketches that he didn’t like at the beginning, which would allow the editor to reject things. And then by the time the editor was in a mode where he would feel that he could accept things, those would be the ones my father would like to do because he said then when Ben Hibbs came in in the 40s, the problem was that he took these ideas down and Ben approved them all.
Speaker But then there was a time when where the art editor there was a problem, the art editor was trying to kind of take a little more control.
Speaker And my father didn’t want that.
Speaker And so he had to develop his own idea so he would start out.
Speaker There would be sort of a time when he would. All right, now I’ve got to develop ideas. Today’s the day. And he would he claimed that what he did was start out with his drawing of a lamp post, then a sailor leaning on. What does that think?
Speaker A girl going by and almost that kind of a I forget what the psychological world word would be, but a kind of stream of consciousness, way of just sketching until he got to something that seemed interesting. And then he’d try to develop it into what seemed a good idea, working in fairly fast sketches. And he got a series of those.
Speaker And then he would usually pick the models and set things up and try the different and get whatever details he wanted and set things up, take the pictures of the models and take the pictures of the place if it was necessary. I remember for the soldier coming home, going down to Troy, New York, to take pictures of the tenements from the railroad tracks for the right thing, get all the pictures, photographs. Now, this is, of course, since the 30s, sometime in the 30s, when he started working with photographs. Before that, he worked with live models, but getting all of these images together. Then he would produce a full charcoal sketch, which was really a drawing and detailed, careful drawing of what the cover would be and very carefully detailed. And then he would transfer that to the canvas, often by taking a photograph of the charcoal and using a block taken, which is a kind of a magic lantern, not using a slide, but using an a regular photograph projected on the canvas and put the outline there and then start painting.
Speaker And he would also excuse me, in the process of working up, he would do a color sketch or several color sketches due to work. And he I mean, it a process of painting by which you went very carefully, step by step through building up to the final act of painting. But then in the final act, the painting, there would come moments when things didn’t work out right. And he would he would make changes or he would even sometimes reject and start over again. But it was it was it was a process in the, you might say, old fashioned sense of painting, of process where where you process yourself through from the first idea into the refined final work. It was totally unlike more contemporary or 20th century painting process where you might paint directly, although he did sometimes paint from life that as he had been trained paint from life. And he used to go to he and I used to go to it in the late 50s, a sketch class in here in Stockbridge and which you drew or painted from life. But his real way of working out a painting, because in the process of working out that painting was when he worked out all the details and getting all the details right. And he really had a tremendous sense of being able to. Find what were unnecessary details and exclude them and have only the important details that worked with the mood of the painting.
Speaker And they really functioned as almost as a movie director would write in terms of casting.
Speaker Well, at one point, in fact, I believe that Kodak hired him to direct the photographs that they used to have in Grand Central Station. You know, all those great big one. And they actually had him direct a couple of those because he yes, he did work. And and he was an actor. I mean, he would you know, if he wanted you to laugh, he would start laughing and this whole thing. I mean, he would sort of act to get your acting out, to get you you write in in the picture, which was, of course, something that he found. And I think, as I think about it, that there was a kind of an element of clowning in it which taking totally Ammit amateurs who were not actors was a way of getting rid of their self-consciousness so that they could act for him at the moment of taking the picture.
Speaker And he usually had I mean, he had a photographer working with them and he usually worked with a very I mean, that was Bill Scovel here in Stockbridge and there was Jean Palam and in Arlington. And they, of course, had to know to some extent how to work with him to get the pictures while he was while he was doing the acting and getting people going in and acting, but looking at his work, him in some ways.
Speaker And of course, it was just when television was starting and sort of the moving image was had movies, of course.
Speaker But I mean, do you think I mean, are there other analogies and the way he worked on the product too, to television, television or movies like in terms of creating a image?
Speaker I never thought about that, but I think it probably was in the sense that if you talk about that double image that I was talking about and the sense in which he would think of of of things that were UNMOVIC turning, things that you expect to be unmoving into moving things like the paintings being more alive than the person, but.
Speaker I don’t know how.
Speaker I mean, he was somewhat interested in the movie process when we were out there in 1949 for nine months. They were trying to get people were trying to get him to do movie posters. And so he would be invited out to the studios and he would I was the only kid at home at that point. He would come and take me out of school and take me out to the studio to watch it, which I have a photograph of fat, little ugly, me and John Wayne and Oliver Hardy and, you know, things like that. Although the great moment for me was one in which I doubt if they wanted to make a poster, which he must have realized that I really wanted it because he got he took me out to see an Abbott and Costello making a film and that they were, to me, the great in 1949, the great movie People. But I don’t I don’t think he felt an awful lot of relationship with the movie. I think he I think he felt himself so strongly their relationship with.
Speaker We’ve already felt some relationship to photography, and he was very, very much impressed with, for instance, with of bristles photography. I think there’s probably several books where he used to have several books subtractive Rosol.
Speaker But of course, Kathy Ebersole is is a humanist photographer, the way my father was a humanist painter.
Speaker And. But I. I can’t think of anything that I know of from him. That was a close relationship, the movie or TV Skouras.
Speaker Let’s turn to his story, run through some of the headlines.
Speaker If you don’t mind me, starting from when he was born. Well, tell me about you. Certainly under a pseudonym.
Speaker I mean, cause somewhat surprising to people, the fact that he was, you know, not born in the country.
Speaker I mean, I one. I think one hundred and twenty Fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. That’s what we always said. But it may.
Speaker But it was somewhere up there. He was a he was a New York City boy because he used to say he said that when he was six years old, he used to go and sit on the top of the roof of the boardinghouse they lived in and watch the Irish and the German gangs fight it out with bicycle chains, which sounds like a pretty vicious way of fighting it out. He now he was real New York say they have.
Speaker Then they moved out to Mamaroneck and then later on after. Right. I guess before he was married, but maybe after his first marriage, he moved to New Rochelle.
Speaker But the moving out to the country was not until he was over 40 and he was very much New York, but also for the kind of painting that he was doing, where he was using live models, you had to be near a source of live models. And that meant really New York. But New York was was his city. They did go out to the country in the summers for vacations. And I think he probably developed some. I dislike feeling about that. Maybe I don’t know. He I remember him talking about as a child taking the horse carts out to the country in the Bronx, which is a little hard to think of as a country these days. But he was born in 1894.
Speaker It’s an interesting thought where his sense of of country and America as being. Well, it’s not that it’s non urban, but that the urban rush isn’t really part of what you feel in his paintings. And yet he was born up. So. So. Born in New York City. So maybe it’s a little bit that the that it was a seeing another way or something.
Speaker When he went to art school in New York, he went to the Art Students League.
Speaker And I think he also went to the National Academy of Design. But I’m not sure about that one.
Speaker And he.
Speaker Went to art school, he he started out going to art school part time when he was in the ninth grade and evidently at the end of the ninth grade, his principal called him in and out of Mamaroneck High School.
Speaker I even know some Mamaroneck High School cheers because even though he only went to ninth grade, he remembered them. We have people outside.
Speaker Being reflected in the pictures above. Peter’s had seen that painting. Yeah. Magette.
Speaker OK. Rolling, rolling.
Speaker So tell me about your perception of his feelings about the city as opposed to the country?
Speaker Well, I think my perception about his feelings of the city was that he enjoyed the city because my perception he was a wonderful storyteller. I mean, I grew up feeling I’ll never do anything interesting because he has so many interesting stories to tell about. He traveled to Europe a lot in the 20s and 30s.
Speaker But about the city. And then my other perception was that during from about it, I think from maybe 1944 to 47 or 48 hour one sort of family trip that wasn’t a work trip was three days to New York. Now, I don’t know what anybody else’s purpose of the trip was because I never asked. But I know that I felt that the purpose of the trip was to see Ringling Brothers Circus. So I was always around Easter time. But then he would do things like take us down through the Bowery at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning talking about the Bowery and how much he enjoyed and how interesting it was, the bombs there and everything, and visually interesting. And then he’d take us to Rockefeller Center so that we could run up the down escalators before they started. And I developed a sort of a fascination with New York based on the way he was taking us around New York. And so I don’t see how. I mean, I can’t see him as seeing the city as a dark place. But, sir, why do you think he never painted? But he did paintings there. Lots of post covers of me. They’re often sentimental. There’s the there’s the late post cover of the people looking out of I think it’s the Harvard Club or one of the other clubs at the couple at the sailor and his girlfriend.
Speaker There’s the couple walking along in front of a brick building, the family going to church in front of a brick building.
Speaker He there is the one of my favorite pictures, the homecoming to the tenement. You mean that tenement could be New York as well as try New York? It’s a it’s a tenement. You know, it’s the back of a length of a mid 40s tenement. He painted a lot of city stuff, the the window cleaner with the secretary looking at the window cleaner. Who’s behind the boss winking. That was a 50s cover. So I think we’re in danger maybe of it’s so easy with somebody like Norman Rockwell to develop your own image and then remember the things that fit with that image and forget the things that don’t fit with that image.
Speaker And I may do I probably doing the same thing.
Speaker That’s interesting, so he goes to the New York School of Illustrator’s, then what happens?
Speaker Wasn’t the New York school of Illustrate?
Speaker It was because this was an art student, because his training, even though he may have taken illustration, he was training in an art school in which they didn’t really necessarily differentiate illustration from regular painting that strongly the way they would now.
Speaker He learned how to be a painter, but also in terms of illustration. And I guess I never got face that his ninth grade principal called him in the new year. Say, Rockwell, you’ve got to get serious. This thing of art school, you got to make up your mind.
Speaker Art school or high school, knowing that he would decide high school. My father said, fine, I’ll go to art school. And so he not that’s he never went beyond the ninth grade in in formal education.
Speaker He went to art school. And then by the time he was 16, he started professionally illustrating, working with things like boy’s life or things like this in the context of illustration, and worked his way up through to the point that when he was 22, he took some things that Saturday Evening Post, which to him in which the most other people was the peak of illustration. And he did his first post cover at 22. So he was known as the Boy Wonder of American illustration. I am told I was not a rat at the time, but I am told that that was what he. That he reached the peak of his profession at the age of 22. And the kind of amazing thing is that he succeeded in flexing and changing his work enough so that he stayed there in the sense that he stayed at the peak of illustration and illustration isn’t kind of like being a portrait painter in the sense that the illustration required flexing and changing on his part to meet the changing needs of advertisers. Because a lot of what he did was, was advertising work and even the changing sense of the Saturday Evening Post and other other magazines.
Speaker Anyway, got me off in New York.
Speaker What was their artistic background on the family? Word did this.
Speaker I don’t think there was. I my my grandmother’s father was both a painter and an opera singer who the story was was brought to. He was English and he was brought to America to sing in the opera Philadelphia. He was also a painter and I have seen a couple of his paintings. He was more a landscape painter, but that was the only artistic thing in the family.
Speaker My father’s viewpoint was that the Rockwell family had a singular inability to do anything interesting. And this may not be. Well, he used to tell the story of his great aunt, who was a delivery, who delivered things to illustrators for magazines in New York and was chased down the stairs by Charles Dana Gibson. And his comment was typical of the Rockwell family. She ran too fast.
Speaker He did not feel that he came out of a very interesting family. His father was worked for, I think, as office manager for a shipping line, and his family came from Yonkers and from Providence, Rhode Island and places like that, although there is now a sort of a Rockwell family. I mean, the Rockwells of America thing. And they would know more than I do about what the rock was did and would probably deeply resent what I’ve just said about his feeling that the rock was for Chatterley, rather dull. That may have just been his thing of wanting to seem more famous.
Speaker Was he particularly close to your grandparents or not?
Speaker No, not very much. My my grandfather died not long after my oldest brother was born, my grandmother. Lived in old people’s home in North Bennington, and I always I have these memories of we can’t open Christmas presents until Pop has gone and got. Grandmother and brought her here.
Speaker She was a woman who. Rather enjoyed, I think, complaining, and I don’t think he felt terribly close to, but he took good care of her.
Speaker Tell me about how we met your mother and what their relationship was like.
Speaker Well, my mother was his second wife.
Speaker His first wife was a schoolteacher who he claimed whether this is true or not, that in the end the enthusiasm of having been picked by the post in 1922. He went back and invited this pretty schoolteacher who was living in the same boarding house as he lived in in New Rochelle, asked her to marry him. He later used described it as not necessarily a terribly close marriage and that both of them lived a fairly twenty’s free and easy lifestyle and neur in the suburbia of Nouri Shell and having affairs with other people. And finally, at one point he said this again, I’m just giving you the stories that came through to me.
Speaker I don’t know how true they are that several times she fell in love with other peoples and said, I want a divorce. And he said, Oh, no, it won’t last. And one time she didn’t. He said, fine, let’s just get a divorce. And he got a divorce. And he thought, oh, I’m gonna go live in New York. I’m gonna have a beautiful studio and I’m going to live the life of The Bachelor and have a wonderful time. So he fixed up a beautiful studio, went and lived in New York, and after about three months, got deeply depressed by living alone. But then one night at a cocktail party or at a party had too much to drink and promised to do a job for somebody who then he woke up the next morning and said, no way do I want to do that job.
Speaker But the man threatened to sue him. So his friend, the cartoonist Clyde Foresi, who he had shared a studio with, said, come on out to California and they won’t chase you there and come out to California and and visit me. And he went out to California.
Speaker And sometime soon after he got there, I met this cute. Mary Barstow, who was just a year out of college, 14 years younger than him and I think a week later got engaged, but due to the fact that her father didn’t quite approve, waited three months to get married. And I do remember that my father was always mildly chagrined that his hometown newspaper, The New York Times, put when they got married. Mary Barstow, California socialite marries artist and. And my mother was a extremely warm person. She was she took on herself the extremely difficult job of one year out of college. And she marries somebody who has for 14 years been a well-known artist and takes on the job of doing all the work for him, bringing up the kids, doing the taxes, taking care of the house, everything. Which I think she did quite well for several for a few years. I remember her as a wonderfully warm and emotional person who one could argue with one’s heart content. Now, one of the characteristics that I remember my wife. Cynthia noting, because we met when we were in the 11th grade and she would I was in boarding school and she was in pointings with the same boarding school coming home to visit.
Speaker Was that our family dinner consisted in often and loud arguments in which one person or another might stand up and shake their fist at somebody. To emphasize a point of view, and which my mother and my two brothers and I loudly argued and my father tried to keep quiet and didn’t loudly argue, but sort of slip things in.
Speaker And my wife has always said how amazed she was that a family where she was brought up with two sisters and everybody sat there quietly. Did you know?
Speaker And my mother was very much the spirit of that.
Speaker The problem was that that that eventually she cracked under the pressure of all this and became an alcoholic and then had nervous breakdowns and I think tried to commit suicide and had to be off and on committed to mental institutions. And in fact, the reason we moved to Stockbridge was because there was a very good Rex Foundation, which is a psychiatric mental institution, and she just needed to be near near it.
Speaker Although she never lacked that, never lost this level of warmth and this animal loyalty to her daughter in laws who could do nothing wrong.
Speaker And it.
Speaker But like I say, I think. You know, it’s just not the recipe for things to work. If you’re just out of college to marry somebody who is a combination of very successful and on a certain level very childish because he hasn’t had to worry about these things. But who doesn’t have enough sense to hire other people to do his taxes? I mean, my father was earning by the mid 40s, early 50s, a lot of money, but my mother was still expected to do the taxes and it took her having a nervous breakdown for him to realize you could hire a tax accountant.
Speaker And so I think.
Speaker It was. When I put it, it was.
Speaker It created tensions in the family. Create a lot of tensions over the fact that I think my father felt that the public image ought to be something like his painting. And it wasn’t.
Speaker But.
Speaker On the other hand, he was amazingly good. That when. When she did crack up, he took over. And stuck with it until she die.
Speaker How did he deal with that by taking care of himself? My brother Tom helped. I wasn’t much help then. My my father’s first grandchild is my oldest son was born two months after my mother died. And my father wasn’t used to the idea of having a baby in the house when we came up in the summer. So I’m afraid that the summer after my mother died, we may have made life off.
Speaker But one of the things he did do is about a year after my mother died, out of some sense of either boredom or whatever, started taking a a poetry course, adult education poetry course with this cute pundits know at 65 had just retired from being English teacher for 35 years at Milton Academy. And I remember spending the latter part of the summer with Cindy, my wife, saying, look, dad, come on, ask her to marry. For goodness sake, don’t be frightened. You’re in love with her. She’s obviously interested in you. And so then he married his third wife that fall.
Speaker And I thought they get along wonderfully and she.
Speaker I think she felt that it was something she wanted to.
Speaker Take care of him in certain ways. But he didn’t need it in other ways anymore. He knew enough to have a tax accountant, for instance, and this sort of thing. So I think they did very well together. Did she change him? Yes, she did. In one. I’m sorry. Yes, she did. She did change him because he would never do paintings of social issues, which might make anybody annoyed. Before that, he said, I will not disturb my audience. And she had a very strong social conscience. And the painting, the problem we all live with was probably done because Molly made it clear to him that she felt that this was a that he should be doing this sort of thing now. On the other side, he had this incredible sense of what people would take. And I think he realized that in the beginning of the 60s that people will now take dealing with social problems that they wouldn’t take before.
Speaker But very much, I think Molly had very strong feelings about that. And I know that she got. Very strong about when the Marines came to him for a recruitment poster during the Vietnam War, I believe Molly may have said that she would leave it. And if he did that. A New England lady who has never before been married and is 65 and has taught at a good private school for 35 years, has a well-developed sense of discipline and how to say strongly what she feels. And she did.
Speaker I had to order, frankly.
Speaker You had tried to get him at one point to put a black person on some painting. I read that somewhere. I don’t I don’t seem to remember that. And he did. I tried to get him. Well, I was the family radical, you see.
Speaker So I would try to get him to do things like when they started. I don’t know if you’ve know, but they started something called Eggheads for Eisenhower in 1952. And I tried to get him to write letters saying I am not for Eisenhower. He said, oh, I don’t want to get involved for that. He didn’t like it. He was for Stevenson, but he didn’t want to get involved in that. And I would try to.
Speaker And also, there was a whole thing of people who would write saying about Picasso or about Jackson Pollock or about de Kooning saying, oh, what how Norman Rockwell must find this painting horrifying. And I would say, Pop, you like Picasso, you admire de Kooning and or you’re confused by them, but you would sort of admire what they doing. Why don’t you write and say, get off my back, stop. And he would say, no, no, no, I don’t I don’t do that sort of thing.
Speaker I don’t remember particularly trying to push him on social issues because he was not somebody that I was more interested in getting him off my back than I wasn’t getting on his back because he didn’t want me to be a sculptor and because I was the first of his sons, it went straight through college. And he want me to be something sensible, like an English professor, which many people might feel laughable at the moment with the problems in English. But I went through college most of the way through college studying English and accidentally took a sculpture course near the end of my junior year and fell in love with sculpture. And so halfway through the scene here, I went home and I said, I’m going to go to art school. I want to be a sculptor. And he said, You’re nuts. Absolutely. Stark raving nuts.
Speaker And he wouldn’t put up violent fights. He would just carry on. Every time I went home saying, you’re not you can’t. You have to have decided that you want to be an artist when you’re twelve or thirteen, because if you don’t if you decide at 22, that’s ridiculous. It’s too late.
Speaker And this would go on and on and on. So I was much more interested in getting him off my back than I was in getting on his back about anything. Would you like to out and get him off my back? Yes. His psychiatrist at the time was Erick Erickson, a famous.
Speaker And I knew that if I could convince Eric that this was all right, that he would get my father off my back. So I said, all right, that I will go to Eric, can talk to him about it.
Speaker And I also know that Eric, in no way would Eric say somebody shouldn’t do something they went to. But I went and Eric said, oh, he said, I think it’s a great idea.
Speaker He said I was an artist for five years and spent five years living on almost nothing in Italy before I accidentally went to work as an art teacher, Anna Freud School. And Sigmund told me I ought to be an analyst, which may not be the true story as I wrote it, but it was certainly true that Erickson, I think, is a great idea for you. Be nice. Besides, you can change your mind later if you want to.
Speaker And that got my father off my back. And so.
Speaker All this is from the fact that I don’t think actually I would have ever tried to get him to do anything in his painting because he was so clearly where he was, that it just wasn’t something that you thought you might about a detail, say something. But you also knew that although he always asked everybody what their opinion of what his painting was or he asked, do you think I should do this or that?
Speaker Me. And if you read the chapter about the Tree of Life painting, about all of his aware, which is really that is the chapter in the autobiography where they did tapes and he did tapes each night about the painting and he talks, should I have done this? Should I do that? And it was always his downfall. On the other hand, I always remember noticing as a child that whatever anybody else said, he always ended up doing what he wanted to do on the painting. He would ask everybody’s advice, but he seldom took it.
Speaker Yeah. I don’t know if you know that argument.
Speaker I would say that he he must be reading off the paintings without any knowledge of my father because this whole fight in the late 40s that went on.
Speaker Which I remember quite well between the Saturday evening people at the Saturday Evening Post. And my father was over the issue of whether he did, at least, as I remember, over the issue of whether he did his ideas. And the fight finally came to fruition, you might say, over a split painting of a sort of cowboy and his girlfriend getting ready for a date in which somebody at the post had part of it repainted without asking my father and my mother. And I remember this sort of thing because my mum, my father would all would always get he’d be upset, but he didn’t want to anger anybody. And so my mother, my mother would have this sort of Norman, dammit. All you have to fight over this. You feel strongly. So you ought to fight. And he finally called them up and said, I’m not going to paint for you anymore. The next day, the editor, the associate editor and somebody else arrived. And I remember it because I was care. I remember being carried around on people’s shoulders. And there was all this sort of lets and it ended up with them saying, all right, Norman, you do it your way. And his way was his own. At least for Saturday Evening Post covers his his own ideas. He he, I believe, said that the only cover he did, which wasn’t his own idea, was the saying grace cover, which was an idea somebody. But people used that. He got a lot of fan mail. I mean I mean, I’ve seen stuff from the 30s and late and people would send ideas, but he at least consciously did not use them. Now, advertising was another issue. He was when he did advertising, he did what the art director said, basically, because I also remember that, look, ma, no cavities in others, as in which the trial piece to be sent out to Procter and Gamble of the kids smiling and look, ma, no cavities.
Speaker The art director said it’s got to have a pink background. And my father kept saying, listen, I think a pink background is not going to work on this. So no, no, I want a pink background. So my father pay the pink background. And the reason I remember it is it came back from PMG saying great painting, but the pink background has to go.
Speaker But he would do in advertising, basically, he would do what they wanted. Once maybe there were nothing was Rock of Ages Tombstone’s. Why that was so the first one. They wanted him to do a little girl leaning against that. I mean, just horrible little girl leaning against a tombstone. Can you fix. And he did it, but then he said, I won’t do another thing the next time. And he came back, he said, I’ll do something for you. If you want me to come up to your workshop and find a scene that I like and I can paint. And I remember because I ended up driving him up and I said, I’m a stone carver. I was fascinated to go up to this workshop. So I drove him up to Barrie, Vermont, to the workshop. And and it was very funny because they were incredibly proud of how they had industrialize the whole process and mechanise whole process. And all he was hunting for was a sort of a old-world craftsman working on it. So there was a certain clash going on there, which he won out, but he never did another rock of ages. And he had this funny kind of relationship going on where he could be. The other thing he would do is simply avoid doing something he would always say yes.
Speaker But I mean, I remember with my brother finding a bunch of letters, I think, from the Ladies Home Journal in which, you know, he agreed to do something in 1951 and 1952. There’s a letter saying, Norman, could you give us some idea when you’re gonna do that piece for us in 1953? There’s a letter, Norman. You know, we’d really like to have that piece from yoe. And 1954, a sort of Norman, couldn’t you kind of find time to do this? And he hated to say no. And my poor mother would end up, if he really did have to be now, that she would have to call up, say, Mr. Rockwells decided he can’t do this picture because he couldn’t bear saying no. But he would. And.
Speaker So, yes, in advertising, he worked from other people’s ideas. But there was always a balance going on.
Speaker Panamerican in the late 50s sent him around the world to do drawings which would advertise Panamerican and which he he ran through three vice presidents on the trip because they were supposed to be a vice president, were going with him and they just couldn’t take one of them out. I think had to fly back from Egypt. Another had to fly back from Japan. They keep sending him out. He was just going on. He loved travelling and drawing. But then they came down to doing it and they did sort of one thing of drawings. And then Panamerican said to the advertising agency, but, you know, everybody else flies here, too. This doesn’t advertise Pan American. We’ve got to have our planes in. And my father said, no way. I’m not interested in. I mean, he did one drawing and but he said, this is not me. This is not my stuff. You hired me to do this. I did it. I’ll do more. I’ll do a lot. I got a whole sketchbook. I’ll do lots of drawings, but I don’t see how we can put a plane into it.
Speaker And one way or another, he was a man who was wonderfully good at getting his own way when he wanted it badly enough without seeming to be too pushy.
Speaker He could be quite insidious about getting his own way. I used to get really annoyed as a child because something would happen that would make me infuriated with him and he could succeed and make me start laughing while I was still furious with it over the breakfast.
Speaker I mean, I still remember this laughing at something he was doing and being furious with him at the same time. I mean, he had this sort of capacity to talk you around to things. And and he had a very imaginative sort of funny side to him.
Speaker He’d loved water fights once, brought the garden hose into the upstairs the house, cause my brothers and I were beating him in a water fight. I mean, he he had a whole childish side to him, which was which would come up from time to time. And so.
Speaker And speaking of his own, sure, he sort of had dreams of painting the big painting. I’m thinking of the Four Freedoms. And that was certainly his own idea. Tell me about that. Well, of course I do.
Speaker Four freedoms, I was sort of young. And and the four freedoms, to my mind, is the one example of successfully painting a big painting. Even though I don’t find the four freedoms as thrilling as most of the post covers, frankly.
Speaker But he did have this sort of thing of the big painting. He wanted to do something for the war. The. It was Roosevelt’s speech about the four freedoms he went down. There was. He went down to Washington and couldn’t sell anybody on it. So it came up in the Post, said, we’ll do it.
Speaker It was also part and parcel of his getting interested as he was as an artist, often hunting for new ways of doing things of his. Getting interested in storytelling off the cover, because those things he did in the war, like the visit to the racial board, the visit to the election office, the visit to the country editor, to the country editors, which are really kind of stories without a story. That is to say, it’s a story made up of a painting with a series of illustrations and with minimal writing. It was a way of extending his storytelling into the inside of the painting and not being limited by the kind of story was on the outside. And I think the Four Freedoms works because it is has an element of story going going on through it. It also works because he saw it in very everyday terms. It’s like the Willy Gillis again. He didn’t see it in heroic terms. The reason I think that some of the later ones don’t work as he started seeing them in heroic terms, the sort of the U.N. that these things. And it’s a funny thing, you know, the great English painter Hogarth had the same problem. He was always wanting to paint a great painting, a great history painting. And the few that he did really weren’t worth much. But his sort of illustration, paintings, work were wonderful.
Speaker And it’s it’s a problem for somebody who is feels they’re part of painting but aren’t their thing. Isn’t that the serious painting? And maybe it’s the problem of somebody who is partly a comedian, too, and.
Speaker Was he said now? That’s right. Was he satisfied in the end with who he was as a painter, or do you think he.
Speaker I think he was satisfied with who he was.
Speaker No. He wasn’t always. I do distinctly remember him once. Say he decided. You see, I was very lucky because being three and a half years younger than my next brother up. My parents tried out all these things on my brothers and they didn’t work. And so they left me alone. By and large. And he decided that my brothers should learn to be artists.
Speaker And there’s a photograph in one of the I think that Watson Guptill book of my brother Tom sitting and he’s learning to paint the living room. I remember my father distinctly saying at one point, I want you guys to be serious artists, not a commercial artist like me. I want you to be the real thing.
Speaker So he was very obviously had a level of being dissatisfied. But the funny thing is it didn’t let that most of the time affect his own self knowledge of where he was. He didn’t really try too many of those serious paintings.
Speaker He kept coming back to the things that he really knew how to do.
Speaker And the themes where he really could use his compositional ability because he was a wonderful composer of a painting. I think to me, one of the paintings that amazes me is his look portrait of Nixon with Nixon, with his arm up like this, because Nixon was one of the most impossible people to paint in the world.
Speaker Even even if you liked him, he was impossible to paint because his his face tended to just look worse as you painted it, rather than better.
Speaker And I remember him doing the Kennedy and the Nixon portraits of 1960. And the problem was that you couldn’t make Kennedy look too good or Nixon looked too bad. But if you started to improve Nixon too much, he didn’t look like Nixon anymore. And I mean, he one of the signs of his talent was he perceived in getting something there.
Speaker But I believe it was around 1970 that Look magazine was being cut off by the Nixon White House because they had done some reporting that Nixon didn’t like. And so they said to my father, we want you to paint a portrait of Nixon, which will get us back in with the Nixon administration.
Speaker And he did this painting in which by putting Nixon sort of thinking and with his arm out like this into the side, the cop immediately. The composition is so fascinating that you don’t have to face him on the face of Nixon. And the pose and the way the pose is conveys such a mood that it makes him simpatico, if I may use the attack. And whereas if you were just fastened on the face, it would be very hard to do that.
Speaker And to me, it’s a brilliant piece of composition and kind of portrait, you know, quibbling over that part of the pose a little wider. I can see your own.
Speaker Yes, well, because the pose is kind of you know, he’s got Nixon, he’s got his arm out here and he’s got sort of I don’t remember it exactly, but it’s like this. But his whole head is placed on one side of the canvas.
Speaker But what you see is a person and the story is being told by the pose of the person rather than the face. So you can get away with that. Whatever he was like a very unsympathetic. I’ll face that he had.
Speaker All right. Let’s talk about triple self portrait and what that tells us about your father as a man and a painter.
Speaker Well, I think that’s the one painting where he came out on us. I forget to start. I was naming the painting. I’m sorry, a triple self-portrait. The triple portrait, which was I tell you what I mean, I think like a good art historian, we should put it in context. The context is that that was the portrait for the first of the series, serialization of this of the of the autobiography in Post magazine. So for the magazine that he has worked for all not all of his working life, but much of it are putting him on the cover as a self-portrait.
Speaker So what he does is one of the most interesting deconstructions to me of the art of portraiture in American painting. He because what he does is he has his back in this room. He has his back to us. So we see a self portrait of the person was with his back to us. We see his face in the mirror. We see a series of sketches of possibilities. And then we see his face, as he does in the face. In the mirror is an intense, serious face of somebody with a pipe going down the face up. Here is the smiley Norman Rockwell.
Speaker The pipe going up the pipe, remember, was very much part of his self image. I mean, I can remember in some time in the 50s, going to a play in New York on Broadway had either during intermission or afterwards. We were standing out there and I became conscious as he did, that there were sort of a few people over there who suddenly recognized him and he suddenly pulled out his pipe and put it in his mouth to make it clear who he was.
Speaker I mean, he was self. He’d like to self image and he liked being famous. And then so the pipe is important in the portrait in that way. But the pipe down like this in the mirror image up like this with a happy guy in that. So what he’s doing there at least is saying at one level is saying the portrait that you see on the camp canvas is an artificial creation, although that’s fine. But you have to remember that we see portraiture, especially since really the Renaissance as this sort of intimate one on one relationship. We are looking straight at the person as he really sees himself, the sort of Rembrandt based sense of self portrait. So what does he do? He puts up over here on the canvas a Rembrandt, a door or a Picasso, which is not really a self-portrait. It’s a Picasso painting of a woman with an outline for self self-portrait of Picasso behind it and a Van Gogh. They’re all these are all the great people of painting. He is putting himself in relationship to them for once in his life. He’s saying, these are the people I compare myself with. But they are also the kind of intimate self portrait. I mean, especially the Vango, we all I mean, if we have any background in art, we think of Van Gogh and the cutting the ear off and all that. But even the Rembrandt.
Speaker But he’s put over here, he said, look, this portrait you’re seeing of me is a false image. It’s an artificial creation. It’s not a false image. It’s an artificial creation. And then he’s sitting over here, these guys. And so is he suggesting that these guys are just as artificial a creation as his? What is he saying?
Speaker He’s he’s leaving it up to you to think about it and make and have some feelings about it or to say maybe those are artificial creations, maybe they’re not. Then you saw the Rembrandt is emotional. The Durer is detail realism. The Van Gogh is insanity. And the Picasso is our present day wild man, you might say. Who is? I mean, it’s an interesting set of personalities and he certainly know enough about art so that he could put he could put other people up there. Of course, the Rembrandt is the one that he always said. That’s my favorite painter.
Speaker In fact, if you look at what he did and if at least in my sense of being grown up and the prints that are somewhere around here in the studio, still, it was it was Breugel that he really related to, but he himself felt Rembrandt. He once told me when he came to Rome that he had just been in in Amsterdam.
Speaker And he said, I got the curator of the Rembrandt Museum, let me go into Rembrandt studio at sunset. And I went in and I said, Rembrandt. I’m Norman Rockwell. And what do you say give me.
Speaker You stop it. I didn’t get an answer.
Speaker He was sort of half sad and half funny and then so, you know, he had himself up there in his mind that that that I’m as I think I think artists should I mean, remember it. Maybe the greatest art painter or Michelangelo may be the greatest sculptor. But I’m a marble carver and Michelangelo is a marble carver. And I have a right to say we’re in the same profession. And so he was doing the same thing. Then the self-portrait. Then he’s got matches all over the floor and he’s got a little whiff of smoke coming out of the can down here. Now. He was so careful about never causing a fire after his studio burned down in 1943 that he always took the trash out every day and burned it. He never left it in overnight. It was, I think in some ways one of the really.
Speaker I don’t know how to put it, but emotional shocks of his life. I mean, he finished the Four Freedoms and then soon after succeeded in burning up his own studio by knocking out a pipe onto the cushion.
Speaker Well, you can see behind me the cushion that’s on the on the thing. Then he knocked out his pipe under the question painting late at night, and that started the fire.
Speaker Maybe it was a recognition of the self-destruction that is in any artist that especially comes up after you’ve done something particularly hard. And particularly along that it’s I mean, after you’ve been really intensely creative, there’s all this sort of destructiveness that comes out that you go kick your children or you go throw food at some. I don’t know what you and what you do. I go.
Speaker Michael shout in my studio full of time. But but.
Speaker That smoke represents to me the studio fire. It’s a statement. Then there is the helmet on top there. And I was just in the museum and somebody was talking about the helmet as being.
Speaker It’s a Paris fireman’s helmet. But he thought it was an antique when he bought it. I’m not sure that that story is really true, but there’s a helmet up there. One of the things to remember is there’s a great Rembrandt with a man and a helmet and there’s a little. To my mind. There’s a reference going on there. But there’s also that element of.
Speaker Of the way, a self-portrait is a kind of expanding of yourself. Nobody much does truly depressed self portraits. Most people, their self portraits are a kind of a slight self-glorification. I mean, if you can feel important enough about yourself or that you are important enough to do a self portrait, which you then going to show to people is a little bit of expansion. I think that’s related in that thing. Then the fact that he gives it no background at all, he’s just there. I mean, they own. He creates space rather rather fascinatingly. By the way, there are things like brushes and matches lying on the ground and they are creating a sense of three dimensional space. But there is no background. There’s just him, the easel, the painting board and the things tacked up. And I just think thoroughly what he’s done is he’s created a level of things. There’s a personal level, which is the fire. And then there is the level of portraiture as a form of fakery. And there’s a level of look at art history and ask questions about it.
Speaker I like to think of my father as a closet intellectual, that he did a lot of thinking about painting.
Speaker But he did it visually and that he brought it out more upfront in that painting than in other paintings. But you keep finding it and other paintings. And it’s also that’s a painting where he’s, I think, very much influenced by Velasquez, the last Meninas and Velasquez, the way of putting images, very references, all sorts of references into the painting.
Speaker But that’s the kind of you know, that’s that’s what it should be, because there is his his autobiography is in his magazine. And so this is his one chance to really say this is what it’s about. Everybody it’s not just apro fall covers or it’s not just this. What it’s about is the artist is taking reality and twisting it around to do what he wants to do with it. And that’s what everybody else did, too. But there’s also another unconscious level going on as well, which is the burning level of the smoke of the father.
Speaker And he’s saying a way.
Speaker I’m not just what you think I am. I’m more than you. Can you. He’s saying I’m different from what you think I am. I mean, if you look at that image in the intensity of the image in the mirror, I think there you see maybe the one case where the workaholic. Is right there. And one of the interesting things, too, about the wholesale portrait is you never see his eyes. That is, he’s got his back to you in that image. The glasses are ah, I have the lighting. So you don’t see his eyes.
Speaker So the only safe place you see his eyes is where he has been has drawn them in for you, which is kind of an interesting thing for a painter that he won’t show you his own real eyes.
Speaker Isn’t that a little strange? No. You know. And what could that mean?
Speaker I don’t know if you had to sum up your father’s place in American art. I mean, what what do you think it is really? I have no idea.
Speaker I mean, I know that’s not totally true. I think.
Speaker I was somewhat in a little bit involved around the periphery of a fairly good sized show of his work in Rome in 1992 in the way which, interestingly enough, the show was originally put together to go in Cortina d’Ampezzo, which is a very a holiday resort for the wealthy in the Dolomites. And the then prime minister, Julien Droughty, saw it there and said, I want this show in Rome and Italian politics being the way it is. When he said to the head of cultural authorities for the city of Rome, I want this show in Rome. It moved to Rome.
Speaker What was interesting about it is that where as American critics, it seems to me you still have a lot of trouble trying to.
Speaker See, Norman Rockwell as part of the history of American painting, because the history of American painting is very much involved with the movement through abstraction, into abstract expressionism. And after all, American painting really only hit. You might say the international became stars in the in the international world of painting with the abstract expressionist who were so completely different from Norman Rockwell’s way of working that this sort of division still keeps on.
Speaker It was very interesting because for the Roman critics, this was not a problem at all. Roman newspapers. Basically, the critics, serious critics of painting said, look, this is one element of American painting. You shouldn’t miss it because you won’t get it in other places.
Speaker I was in a press conference because I had written an article for thing, and I said, well, I said. In the time I said my father’s work is somewhat sentimental on occasion, and a professor of art and sociology at the University of Bologna said, you’re wrong.
Speaker He is not sentimental. It is eat only here and eat only. It is not ironic. It’s.
Speaker It’s sort of how would I say it’s it’s being humorous and slightly critical and observant all at the same time.
Speaker And he had it. I found it personally difficult to pull off saying.
Speaker He’s sentimental, but I suddenly looking at his eyes. It isn’t the sentimental sentimentality that they see.
Speaker They see an element of taking off slightly on American culture in it.
Speaker And it was just it was fascinating because they didn’t have any trouble seeing him as part of American painting. Along with all sorts of other people who are working very differently.
Speaker I don’t think anybody’s gonna have any really clear idea of where my father is an American painting, until American critical discourse can somehow or other resolve the the at least outward contrast that started up sometime in this century between commercial art realism and abstract art, non-commercial. And it’s sort of a this worked in the 50s. It’s a little hard to call abstract art non-commercial at this point, given the prices that go for thing. And given the way art students look towards a future life, you might say, well.
Speaker But I think until this sort of sense of distinction resolves itself, we’ll never be able to see where where he fits in, where the good work fits in. He produced an awful lot of work.
Speaker An awful lot of the advertising is not, to me terribly good work. But there are some really wonderful paintings in there as well.
Speaker And I don’t know where it fit.
Speaker But beyond the art historical point of view, I mean, he certainly did define the American dream or the American myth or something like that.
Speaker Well, he was a myth maker. I mean, that’s one of the things I suppose I should’ve said in the beginning. I mean, he really was a myth maker.
Speaker And I suppose his position in terms of American culture as a definer of a myth is fairly secure where they go to the art world.
Speaker I don’t quite know. We have some water. I got some water. Sorry.
Speaker Almost. We’ll just start that again. I’m sorry. Hold up. When we get a camera back here. OK. Thanks for having us. Let’s system when we have no what else? I don’t know. I think my voice should hold out now. He was a mess maker again. We were just.
Speaker He was a myth maker, and he he made myths that people who were not concerned with art as such could believe in. So this intense realism was was very important to it. And it’s a myth which combines a certain amount of sentiment about seeing America as a good place with a high amount of very precise realism and detail. And as a myth maker, he’s certainly there. I don’t think there are too many people around who equal him as a myth maker, perhaps because I’m an artist. I’m equally concerned with his place as an artist and perhaps because I may have been influenced by his growing up feeling, by growing up while he was feeling that he was a better artist than he got the credit for that. Maybe I’m finding myself trying to get people to pay him more do on that. So but as a myth maker, I don’t think anybody argues that there’s that wonderful bit where. Oh, the writer. Oh, I can’t remember his name now, but an American writer of the 50s wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly basically saying that my father had sort of damaged the American capacity to look at art because he got people so used to looking at realism that they couldn’t look at anything else. I don’t think that’s quite a fair statement, but it it suggests something about the power of his way, because it wasn’t just the realism. It was the myth and the realism together and the realism backing up the myth, because that’s almost kind of the.
Speaker Where the April Fools cover covers come in, because the fact is he can take the realism and make it all unrealistic and all sorts of ways. And yet.
Speaker It looks right. So it’s the quality of a of a mythmakers, it seems to me, to to create a world which we accept immediately without thinking we don’t even have to have a kind of a suspension of disbelief. We just walk. We just drop right into it, believing it. And then for many people, disliking it because it’s not their myth.
Speaker And I think that maybe some of the problem of dealing with him I once had when I was going to Harvard Summer School in the 50s, had a left wing guy say that he hated my father’s work because my father convinced the American working class that they were happy even though they weren’t happy. And I mean, that’s that’s saying he’s a myth, man. He’s a tremendously successful myth maker.
Speaker But to me, it’s also important that he’s a tremendously good painter who loved the art of painting and who loved the past of painting and who saw himself part of that. And I think on some levels that can become more important with time when when it is less important to believe in the myth. I mean, you look at the sculpture of Phidias. You don’t look at it for his quality of making you believe in the myth. You look at it for its quality of art. Seems to me as whether the myth is so that as the myths of America change, the quality of him as a painter may become more important element in it. Although as a myth maker, that will always be. But you know, they’re not just American myths. Again, as I was saying, I mean, there I go.
Speaker I go into north central Pakistan and meet these people who turn out to be fans of my father. Give me this feeling and where I go in the world. I can’t get away from it.
Speaker But who look at something. They’ve never I mean, the details of America they’ve never experienced, that is a soldier coming home from the war. And they know exactly what’s going on in that painting. And they appreciate it, because even though we look at it as American, the kid coming home from war is so obvious that it doesn’t that that it doesn’t matter what detail it’s in.
Speaker A woman, you know, a fundamentalist Pakistani Moslem woman, can see that and understand that although the although the things the uniforms are completely different. And so that makes it more than just an American myth, it means that he is somehow or other able to tap down to a level where it’s not just American.
Speaker But I think in some ways that can be something that we miss in America because we see it so much as the American myth that we may miss that what he what he may have really been doing is taking the sort of.
Speaker Emotional myths that underlie a lot of cultures and making them American without losing their quality as sort of myths of motherhood, myths of fatherhood. I’ll bet if you show that cover of the kid going off to college with the old father sitting there on the running board of the car and the kid looking off and a dog with his head on his thing, I’ll bet you show that to somebody in the middle of Russia and they’ll understand exactly what’s going on.
Speaker Yeah. Took Universal. Yeah.
Speaker Translated it on American idiom. Yeah. And that’s maybe what the nature of myth maker is. If you see what I mean. I mean that you can translate it into a universalities.
Speaker His imagery is all around us today. Even right, Lou?
Speaker I suppose it is, but, you know, do you think it’s around? I mean, when I was working carving my monster piece here in 1994, which I spent four months carving, I mean, there were bus loads of English coming.
Speaker And I’ve had someone would come up to me and it was very interesting because I was carving something that’s completely different from his kind of work. But then people were saying, that’s Norman Rockwell, son. And so people come up and they would be older English people saying this painting really meant a lot to us in World War Two. Yet they can’t have been wanting to be America. It meant something to them in World War Two because it meant something to them in their culture. Daddy once told me, however, he said they they would. There were also they dropped the Saturday Evening Post as as part of American propaganda. And and he said, I loved the covers and I learned about the covers from that. He said the other thing was the inside. The Saturday Evening Post made some of the best toilet paper we got.
Speaker How about your own work? Is that a tribute to your father in some way anyway?
Speaker No, I mean, I think if there’s anything that’s a tribute to my father, it’s the fact that I work nothing like it. And just as the same sense, my brother Jarvis. Doesn’t work anything like it. My daughter Mary doesn’t work anything like me. My son Tom doesn’t work a thing like me. I think it’s a tribute to.
Speaker My father’s love of art rather than love of his own style, that no, none of us feel impelled to work like him.
Speaker I do notice that there that there there’s an element of love, of nonsense that comes out in me, and I think it comes out somewhat. And my brother Tom’s children’s books and a little has comes out a little bit. And what Jarvis does. And which. Maybe only comes out and things like the April Fools covers, and I wonder if maybe that maybe sometime. But I don’t know.
Speaker I have, I suppose. Well, the major influence of him, you might say, is that. For most kids growing up in the 50s, in the 40s and 50s in America, the idea of being an artist was a little strange. For me, it was perfectly normal. I mean, I, I tried to revolt against it for a while and failed and but.
Speaker You know, I mean, this sort of thing, which isn’t true anymore. But at one time, Mr.. I don’t want my child to be an artist, which my father had to, but I wouldn’t. I mean, he was just normal for me to be an artist. I am very much influenced by my father, however. In one sense, which is I’m also an art historian. I mean, I write on the history of the techniques of marble carving and stone carving. And I have written a book on the subject and things.
Speaker And that really comes out of my father. I feel my father’s passion for art history, which I absorbed just in his studio, looking at things, looking at all the prints that he had of paintings and everything and his way of talking about it.
Speaker And I really feel much more influenced by him in the sense that I learned to love the history of what I do enough to want to talk to other people about it from us, that sense that was in him.
Speaker I am not a realist.
Speaker I do not do this methodical working up. I tend to be much more crashing into a piece of stone and starting carving. And then I can’t I’m just not methodical that way.
Speaker But I have a real passion for the history of the mediums that I work in. And I think he had that too.
Speaker And that that came through me and even Troy being his storyteller, if you will. It’s not a job you.
Speaker Well, I enjoy. I don’t like it. I mean, sometimes I think one of the nature of being the son of a famous person is you can never quite get yourself free of them.
Speaker And so you either try to get yourself free of them by writing shocking things about them or you may try to get yourself free of them by just denying them. I’ve sort of come around to the notion that there’s no way I can get free of them. And as I rather like the idea of being the center of attention, just like he did, I have to admit it’s a way of being the center of attention. I mean, my father’s more famous than I’ll ever be. And I would suspect, well, he was never a good sculptor. But I mean, certainly more famous artist and I will ever be. So it’s one way of getting to be the center of attention, isn’t it? It’s I mean, it’s a little maybe a little more creative than being nasty about it.
