Weekend in Great Barrington

Enjoying the supposed #1 small town in America with Brian and Denise. April weather not reliable: chilly and windy so far.

After finding Chesterwood closed for the day, we went to the Norman Rockwell Museum, which I liked more than I might have expected. Certainly his gift for storytelling resonates as I think about how I’d like my rapier wit and wise insights to come through here on Tumblr.

Besides the better known Saturday Evening Post covers, there was a whole room dedicated to Rockwell’s Boy Scout art. Looking at a couple of the images caused me to think that the current brouhaha over gay Scouts simply can’t be a new thing. Maybe we didn’t talk about it in the 30s, but Norman saw it for sure.

The interpretive text on many of the paintings talked a lot about the process and the craft Rockwell used to turn an idea into a story and then a painting. Many of his finished works were really mashups of many photos. Near the gift shop on the way out, I got a chance to imagine my own Rockwell scene: the museum manager stares at his computer hoping for inspiration, eating a sandwich, under the heroic gaze of one of his charges. He’s gone a little soft, and hasn’t the hair he used to, and has his back to us (a common Rockwell trick), and can’t possibly live up or the ideals that surround him, but he’s there on a Saturday anyhow, trying.