Norman Rockwell's America

I love looking at Norman Rockwell paintings. There is a sandwich shop down the street that has a Rockwell showing a young boy fishing with his dog. The details say so much - the soles of the boy's feet are dirty, the dog is looking up at him in a conspiratorial way, and a dragonfly is perched on his rod, (demonstrating how inactive a sport fishing really is.)

A critique I read of Rockwell's paintings went so far as to suggest that Rockwell's America is dead today, and may never have really existed. I cannot accept that; any great artist is simply reflecting on what they see, and what they paint is an aspect of reality, if a subjective one.

Rockwell's paintings are a meditation on the complexity of simplicity. The simple interpersonal transactions of small town people - men meeting at Shuffleton's barber shop, or an artist sheepishly painting himself - are moments of rich detail. Rockwell paints with the eyes of a child, seeing every good thing, and wondering about it with even a certain glee.

Here in Canada, we have Leacock's "The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle" as a richly captured small town moment.

People who say that this Canada and that America never existed do not make a convincing case for anything - other than the fact that they have perhaps forgotten their own childhood. :-)