Skip to main content

How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons


More than 40 years after Norman Rockwell’s death, the question of whether his paintings are realistic or unrealistic remains open for debate. On one hand, critical opinion has long dismissed his Saturday Evening Post-adorning visions of American life as sheerest fantasy. “A little girl with a black eye, an elderly woman saying grace with her grandson, a boy going to war: Rockwellian scenes represent a certain sentimental America — an ideal America, or at least Rockwell’s ideal,” says a 2009 NPR story on his work.

On the other hand, if Rockwell’s admirers give him a pass on this sentimentality, his detractors often turn a blind eye to his obvious technical mastery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a camera.  Indeed, his process began with an actual camera. According to that NPR piece, he “used photos, taken by a rotating cast of photographers, to make his illustrations — and all of his models were neighbors and friends,” residents of his small town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The cameramen included a German immigrant named Clemens Kalischer: “An artist-photographer himself, Kalischer was at odds with the tracing techniques and saccharine subject matter in Rockwell’s work. After all, Rockwell never painted freehand, and almost all of his paintings were commissioned by magazines and advertising companies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shutter, Rockwell directed every facet of every composition,” as you can see by examining his paintings and reference photos together, featured as they’ve been on sites like Petapixel.

At Google Arts & Culture, you can scroll through a short exhibition of Rockwell’s late work on race relations in America that reveals how he had not just one but many photographs taken as source material for each painting, which he would then combine into a single image. This quasi-cinematic “editing” process brings to mind the “storyboarding” of Edward Hopper, who stands alongside Rockwell as one of the most American painters of the 20th century.

But while Hopper gave artistic form to the country’s alienation, Rockwell — whom history hasn’t remembered as a particularly happy man — created an “American sanctuary others wished to share.” And though neither Hopper nor Rockwell’s America may ever have existed, they were crafted from the pieces of American life the artists found everywhere around them.

via Petapixel/MessyNessy

Related Content:

Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (1936-1940)

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

Norman Rockwell’s Typewritten Recipe for His Favorite Oatmeal Cookies

Edward Hopper’s Creative Process: The Drawing & Careful Preparation Behind Nighthawks & Other Iconic Paintings

Yale Launches an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3a3ICFT
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The History of the Fisheye Photo Album Cover

Like gothic script in heavy metal, the fisheye album cover photo seems like a naturally occurring feature of certain psychedelic strains of music. But it has a history, as does the fisheye photograph itself. The Vox video above begins in 1906 with Johns Hopkins scientist and inventor Robert Wood, a somewhat eccentric professor of optical physics who wanted to duplicate the way fish see the world: “the circular picture,” he wrote, “would contain everything within an angle of 180 degrees in every direction, i.e. a complete hemisphere.” Rather than putting them to underwater use, later scientists employed Wood’s ideas in astronomical observation. Their next stop was the professional photography market: the first mass-produced fisheye lens, made by Nikon, cost $27,000 in 1957. From academic journals to the pages of Life magazine: mass media brought fisheye photography into popular culture. An affordable, consumer-grade lens in 1962 brought it within the reach of the masses. For t...
Post a Comment
Read more