Traditional Art

I think that's because he's in the uncanny valley bordering on kitsch. And doing realism whilst everybody in art was being postmodern and abstract.

I think he's in the same vein of Jan Steen, but he was doing it in the sixties.

And sometimes there are little details that escape notice until seeing one of his paintings several times; I've seen this one before and I liked it, but this time I noticed the mother's little smile, like she's proud that her daughter stood up for herself, or remembering when she once sat on that bench with a black eye, or maybe she's just amused at kids being kids. I like it more now, and I can't imagine why anyone looking at this would say it's not art.

Illustration major here. Art is such an overarching term that it can pretty much be used as an umbrella term for nearly anything and everything. Etymologically speaking, Illustration just means making something clear, to communicate some idea to someone else. The concept was modernized to encompass the use of pictographs, texts, and diagrams as visual aids.

All forms of illustrations technically can be classified as pieces of art, as the definitions of art vary wildly. I've always taken art to be anything that evokes an emotion novel to either the consumer of art or the producer of the art or conveys a novel idea either back at the artist or to the consumer of art, or some mixture of these. The key thing to me is novelty, which evolves and changes based off of sociocultural norms and personal experience. Again, totally my personal opinion, and fine artists in particular would be able to nitpick this idea to death. Conversations I still enjoy when I have the energy.

Rockwell comes from a very classic Americana age of illustration. Iirc he is at the tail end of the second golden age of illustration (though my knowledge on the history is very rusty). I always preferred the work of his predecessor, JD Leyendecker, and his predecessor, Alfonse Much a.

I'm not a fan of the artist who defined the brushstroke style that predominates an entire school of oil painting that still predominates digital painting styles today, pioneered in part by John Singer Sargent and Frans Hals. Which Rockwell and Leyendecker both take some bits of stylistic inspiration from as well.

As per this particular piece, it's a simple narrative piece, obviously well executed technically in the oil. The narrative is classic Rockwell. I think Rockwell has been ruined for me just because his work created a nostalgia for a time that never quite existed in America. Don't get me wrong , I don't think Rockwell was doing anything other than illustrating what he enjoyed and was paid to do.

It's just that his influence over the American Art and Illustration scene resonates with people who aren't looking to art for anything more than familiarity, not novelty. Essentially, it's kitsch. At worst, Rockwell unintentionally created the ideal white American past that boomers currently are nostalgic for. An ideal, not a reality.

And it's worst manifestation ultimately resulted in producing Thomas Kinkade, America's richest, and arguably the world's most evil painter. People like to say second most, but Hitler was always a Nazi first and foremost. Calling Hitler a painter is like calling Ronald Reagan an actor. Like yes, but maybe that's not what he should be remembered for?

Anyways, the conflation between Illustration and other Artistic disciplines, as well as with differentiating between illustration and art, is a topic of discussion I find very intriguing and one rife with controversy, due in no small part to the ambiguity surrounding the definition of art in general.

I have a print of this on wood. My mom got it from her mom. We've had it my whole life. I've moved 22 times. I've lost almost everything I've ever owned at least twice. Very few possessions make it through that many moves. But we've kept this picture the whole time. It always hangs in the kitchen, except for this time around when it hands above my bed in the living room.

The only other things we own that we've had even close to as long are a painting of Snoopy I pulled out of someone's curbside trash, a red table we got off the side of the road, and some antique pottery and glassware of grandparents that hasn't been unboxed since the 90s.

Edit to add, view from my bed:

Ignore the dust/cobwebs. I do not dust like I should.

Art is so subjective that ANYTHING can be art. We've all seen the joke art that is a blank canvas with a spot in the middle or something. Your professor reminds me of someone who argues if a movie is a film or not.

He ended the Saturday Evening Post because he refused to ignore the civil rights era and was stonchly on the side of desegrigation and equal rights, and the post refused to ''be too political'' and stop hiring him for covers, and no one bought them without his covers.

I would argue there is a deeper interpretation. That of the girls always told to smile to look better, yet she is obviously deshoveled and rough. But finds joy in the chaos that has ensued from her keeping to herself. The background being the stereotypical school of the time and she is there to shake up the system.