Winter-Spring 2010 To Rockwell With Love: Fan Mail and The Saturday Evening Post, by Jessika Drmacich
Historical records are filled with references to well known people. Not until the 19th century, however, did the concept of celebrity explode in mass media. Unlike many other artists, Norman Rockwell was neither underappreciated nor unknown during his lifetime. As an illustrator for the widely disseminated Saturday Evening Post, he achieved celebrity status early and is still one of the few well-known and broadly loved American artists who worked solely for publication.
The Illustrator and the Camera
Like most creators of art for commerce, Norman Rockwell worked within the realm of both aesthetics and technology. Cameras and projection devices have been in use by artists for centuries, sometimes surreptitiously by those wishing to obscure any technical intervention in their process, and opinion was certainly mixed.Rockwell and the Movies, by Joyce K. Schiller
Storytellers come in all stripes: some merely write the stories; some are tellers of tall tales – raconteurs; and some tell their stories through pictures. Norman Rockwell was a great
storyteller. Norman Rockwell was an illustrator.
Rockwell was always partly focused on the world of the imagination and partly on the visible world around him. What better mix could inspire images of and for the movies?