I remember that when I was growing up our Thanksgiving dinners were a warm and loving scene similar to Norman Rockwell’s famous painting:  Freedom from Want.  This was one of the four freedoms that he depicted.  His paintings were as American as apple pie.  Which brings up another subject…apple pie.  My mother always made her fabulous apple pies at Thanksgiving.

Okay, let’s get off of food and back to art.  It’s always around the holidays that I think of Norman Rockwell and the influence he had on me.  I couldn’t wait for my mother to get the latest issue of The Saturday Evening Post so I could attempt to draw the cover of the magazine depicting his newest painting.  I was around twelve years old when I started doing this.

At that time, the feeling among many art critics was that Rockwell was a great illustrator but really not an artist.  I thought this was nonsense.  Try telling this to all the museums where his artwork is displayed with pride.  I don’t feel they, or the hundreds of thousand of visitors that come to view his massive amount of paintings each year, feel this way.  Remember, art is in the eye of the beholder.