#norman-rockwell

#norman-rockwell

I was childless into my early forties. By then, my partner and I noticed that a lot of our peers were at a similar crossroads: dog, cat, or kid?

The Dugout is the largest and most elaborate study in oil that Rockwell made for one of his most recognisable Saturday Evening Post covers. The image is partly credited with popularising the team's reputation as the 'lovable losers.'

"I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life, a man who had good friends, fine family-and I don't think I could ask for anything more than that, actually."

Maira Kalman painted a vase exploding with flowers, capturing the anticipatory air the season brings. She cited Gustav Mahler's 'Das Lied von der Erde' ('The Song of the Earth') as her inspiration: 'Dark is life. Spring is here. The birds are singing.' What more do we need to know?

To call the oil paintings of Eyvind Earle "landscapes" is accurate but very sorely wanting. For more than seventy years, Earle turned his unique refracting eye on what he called the "stupendous infinity of nature," interpreting what he saw through a long lens shaped by a very particular kind of mythopoeia.

I love love, that's why his drawings often include figures, animals and even flowers hugging and kissing. Doesn't it feel good to be loved? Hot-dang, I know so - so my drawings express my love for love, especially for the ones we love.

In my head, I'm still that guy from the photo. Still strong, still capable, still got it. Then I catch my reflection in a store window and think, who's that old guy? The disconnect is wild. I'll go to lift something heavy and my brain says 'no problem,' but my shoulder reminds me about those thirty years of overhead work.

Last fall, I bought a ton of marble scraps off a sculptor in Woodstock for like, $10 off Facebook. For sandwiches and cakes, crumbling asphalt parking lots are good. When I lived in Sunset Park, they demolished a building a couple blocks from my apartment, and there was a hole in the fence, so I'd go in there and find tons of cool shapes and textures of rubble.

Jason Adam Katzenstein is a cartoonist and a comedy writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker since 2014.

The British artist Andy Goldsworthy moved to Penpont, a village in southwest Scotland, in 1986, when he was thirty. The area's initial appeal was twofold. Property was cheap, which meant that Goldsworthy and his wife at the time, Judith Gregson, could acquire an unrenovated stone building that had likely once stored grain. This structure could serve as a workspace and, for a while, as a rough-and-ready home.

We might be exposed to more ads and commercials today than ever before in human history, but the idea of advertising itself is certainly not a new concept. According to Instapage, the first signs of advertisements actually appeared in ancient Egyptian steel carvings from 2000 BC. Meanwhile, the first printed ad was published in 1472, when William Caxton decided to advertise a book by posting flyers on church doors in England.

If you woke up too early on a Saturday, you'd turn on the TV to find... nothing. Just a test pattern or static. Television stations actually signed off at night and didn't start broadcasting again until morning. Can you imagine explaining this to kids today? That there was literally nothing to watch? No Netflix library, no YouTube, no endless content.

The Long Beach Museum of Art is pleased to present Jux founder Robert Williams: Fearless Depictions, a survey exhibition featuring 57 paintings spanning from 2001 to the present, along with two large-scale sculptures by the iconic Southern California artist. Robert Williams ' epic, cartoon-inspired history paintings draw deeply from American vernacular culture and its visual slang, using concrete, relatable, and often absurd imagery to deliver sharp social commentary.

Over the last two decades, 45-year-old library assistant John Takis has witnessed some of the most important events in modern U.S. history. He lived through the cyber paranoia of Y2K. He saw the violent, fiery destruction of the World Trade Center broadcast on television. He heard the American government loudly declare war on Iraq not once, but twice. None of these dark, confusing experiences of the early 2000s, however, could prepare him for one of the strangest - and maybe most maligned - pop culture artifacts in recent memory: the Dilberito.

As the administration continues its attacks on culture, the president is targeting a building near the National Mall with several remarkable New Deal-era murals about social security, which remain as relevant as the day they were painted. Reporter Aaron Short brings us inside the fight to save this gem of a building, which a new petition describes as a "Sistine Chapel" of artworks centering working-class communities that the government abandoned during the Great Depression (and continues to neglect today).