Quotes

Quotes by Norman Rockwell

"Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller."

“I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers … only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.”

“I cannot convince myself that a painting is good unless it is popular. If the public dislikes one of my Post covers, I can’t help disliking it myself.”

"Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative."

"Every single object shown in a picture should contribute directly to the central theme."
-- From book: Rockwell on Rockwell: How I make a picture, by Norman Rockwell, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1979

“If a picture wasn't going very well, I'd put a puppy in it.”

"I used to sit in the studio with a copy of the Post laid across my knees," Rockwell once wrote. "Must be two million people look at that cover,' I'd say to myself. All looking at that cover. And then I'd conjure up a picture of myself as a famous illustrator, surrounded by admiring females, and being wined and dined by the editor of the Post, Mr. George Horace Lorimer."

"The view of life I communicate in my pictures," Rockwell wrote, "excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be."

"If there was sadness in this creative world of mine, it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems."

Quotes about Norman Rockwell

"Even the most brittle cynics melt in the presence of all that wholesomeness. They drop the Armani shield, and they rediscover that this is part of our culture."
-- Robert A. M. Stern the architect of the Rockwell Museum.

"Rockwell's art mirrors our world - or at least an ideal, slightly lost version of that world . . . . Mom and apple pie are very good institutions, and so was Rockwell's America - despite the presumed shortcomings of its seeming simplifications. Rockwell was really a very fine artist. He captured in ways no one else has how America was, and how a large part of it wants to be."
-- Robert A. M. Stern, the New York-based international architect.

“People like to think that Rockwell painted Middle America," says Tom Sgouros, an artist, illustrator, and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. "The truth is, Norman Rockwell invented Middle America."

"Rockwell taught me how to remember. I clung to the ordinary eccentricity, the clothes, the good-heartedness, the names of things, the comic incongruities, and the oddities of arrangement and light"
-- Dave Hickey, in a provocative 1995 Art Issues study.