I’m sure Norman Rockwell was on my mind because of the illustration Kristina judiciously chose to illustrate my blog post, “The Need to Talk.” (9/12/26)

So of course I thought of his covers of The Saturday Evening Post. Illustrations of the time, like the famous one of the little black girl being walked to her new school by the National Guard.

And, since it’s September and Thanksgiving is coming up, the famous family dinner around the table, knife and fork poised ready to carve the turkey.

And, of course, because he did children so well, a boy’s visit to the dentist.

They flashed through my memory like the world before my eyes.

I think there’s a museum where you can see all the Rockwells displayed. I should go there, because it’s a record of that span of my life.

And, if memory serves, my Father had a collection of issues of The Saturday Evening Post which he kept in boxes stored under the house. They were adjacent to boxes and boxes of The National Geographic Magazine. I would crawl under the house and look at the pictures, so they became a part of my childhood and youth.

Which led me to think about illustrators and illustrations in the books I loved to read, even when I was very little.

Howard Pyle was way back when and he did adventures. Book of Pirates, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Men of Iron, The Story of Sir Launcelot, etc., etc., etc.

I grew up at the right time. Children read books. We had a lot of books at home, and the library let us check out more. I’d take an armful, read them up, and bring them back and check out more.

I was a typical boy and liked adventures.

For the next generation after mine, it was science fiction.

I straddled both.

I really liked the pictures in the adventure books. The one on the cover made you want to read the inside. The pictures inside made you want to keep reading.

I learned a lot of history by reading those books. Later I found that much of it was actually even true.

The pictures, which they call illustrations, let you know what people looked like back then and how they lived. They made the books better.

When Illustrated Classic Comics came along, I already knew what things looked like. Those illustrator artists borrowed from each other, because the early ones set the style and the look, and the new ones went from there.

History was exciting, even when it was fiction.

There was N.C. Wyeth. He was another famous illustrator and did a lot of books. He studied with Howard Pyle, learned a lot, then did his own illustrating. He was almost as early, and got so good that people called him iconic. He was accurate the way he painted what history must have looked like. They make historical movies costumed by his drawings.

America has its own tradition of art. Europe’s tradition is longer, but ours is more present. We leap-frogged over past royalty and dynasties, and our art is for people.

I know this, because that’s the same way I am.

Our artists used to go to Europe to learn how, then came back home to do it, and teach it so we could keep doing it, and become our own tradition.

And, speaking of comics, we had our own comics drawers, like the cartoonists in the New Yorker, every bit as good as Europe. They were regular or frequent, and had household names I could look up. I did, and you would probably recognize them, so I don’t have to list their names.

We had regular artists too, like Sargent, who painted for the gallery.

But a lot of our artists painted for me, and I’m grateful. They probably have their own galleries too, and I could go to see them like visiting old friends.

N.C. Wyeth (his real name was Newell Convers Wyeth, so it’s no wonder he wanted to be called N.C.) had a son named Andrew Wyeth with the same last name like a dynasty. Andrew was in the family business and his paintings were so good people said he was iconic, and he himself said he was a realist abstractionist and his paintings prove it. His very most famous painting he is forever identified with is Christina’s World, where the girl spreads out and crawls up the hill toward the house and her future. He’s a regionalist. Everybody sees that as America itself.

He continues the tradition of painting with an idea, not just “art for art’s sake.”

True art is not just craft, technique, skill. It goes beyond and deeper than just representation of the visual. The best illustrators know this. Two dimensions flat on the page are lifted into the world of ideas where we live and breathe.

Then Andrew had a son, Jamie Wyeth, N.C.’s grandson, and, you guessed it, he was an artist too. He did famous portraits like John F. Kennedy and Andy Warhol.

But, getting back to what I started talking about, Norman Rockwell, they say he gave America its face. And some people said illustration isn’t art, which applies to him. I don’t agree.

I mean, I have gone to museums and they hang paintings worth millions, and some show real talent. But if you look close, even when you see the little details that are so perfect they make me dizzy, you can tell which ones were painted for money.

The way to judge art is by how long it makes you look.

You can tell how good it is by the way it makes you feel.

And these days, when they take the books I loved with all those illustrations, they take them off the shelves, out of the libraries and classrooms, and make you read only what they want you to read, and think only what they want you to think and not even know about anything else, then I say NO!

Norman Rockwell is part of my life. He helped make me better than I was. And that’s probably enough to say about it for now.