LIGHT THROUGH PLASTIC RAINCOATS

The great French impressionists did not have plastic raincoats, so when Monet or Renoir wanted to study the reflections of light on translucent surfaces, they had to visit La Grenouillere, a local riverside spot, and paint the surface of the water.

By the 1950s, plastic had been invented and clear plastic raincoats became a fashion trend. Many illustrators were drawn to the challenge of capturing light reflecting on this new, translucent material:

Austin Briggs


Al Parker


Robert Fawcett

Monet brilliantly captured the essence of light on water by using bold daubs of fresh paint, rather than painstakingly blending and smoothing the colors.

Briggs brilliantly captured the essence of light on plastic using the same bold approach.

Briggs and Monet each realized that carefully blending with smooth brush strokes would have stripped the painting of its vitality without improving its accuracy. You have to be very, very good to get away with painting this loosely.

One other point about the illustrators who chose to paint translucent raincoats when it would have been far easier to paint a nice wool overcoat: Artists who produce art in exchange for food and shelter always develop tricks to be more efficient, save time, and (most of all) conceal any gaps or shortcomings in their skills. For example, artists who are not good at drawing hands tend to draw people holding their hands behind their backs. Artists who have trouble with perspective tend to draw pictures with a narrow depth of field. And of course, heavy shadows have long been a favorite technique for concealing a multitude of artistic weaknesses.

So I have special admiration for artists who, while working under a deadline, look for tough and interesting new artistic challenges. The centerpiece of the Al Parker illustration above is clearly the plastic raincoat. The same with the Austin Briggs illustration. These were not commercial choices, they were aesthetic decisions motivated by the same artistic ambition, pride and curiosity about the world that motivated Monet.

NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTS THREE KINDS OF GOLD

This painting is on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts:

Look at how lovingly Rockwell paints three different kinds of gold surfaces.  The gilded wooden torch:

The letters on the boy's banner:

The metal wreath on the boy's head:

Rockwell didn't just dip his brush in gold paint three times.  He went back to the beginning and re-learned the nature of gold three times.

Rockwell was one of history's great materialists.  He examined and described material objects, their surfaces, their volumes, their textures and qualities with fanatical devotion.  

Growing up, Norman Rockwell had an uneasy relationship with the physical world.  Scrawny, pale, nearsighted and pigeon toed, Rockwell was embarrassed by his frail physique.  When he was ten, he tried exercising but gave up after a month.  His insecurities continued to haunt his early work.

But like an unrequited lover, he worshiped the physical world from afar.  It's hard to name another 20th century artist with a greater appreciation for physical matter.  

It's not always easy to tell from the way Rockwell's work has been reproduced in cheap magazines.  But compare this printed cover for the Saturday Evening Post:

with the big, glowing original painting hanging on the wall at the Rockwell museum: 

His description of the girl's plastic raincoat is a tour de force:

Notice the attention he paid to the rim on the lid of the paint can, or the bottle of medium, or the scuffed shoe:

Similarly, there is nothing formulaic about Rockwell's treatment of the wooden box.  Those lines are not straight because Rockwell understood and cared about how the box had been treated on its voyage through the material world. Here is intense, honest observation: 

For another example, in the corner of Rockwell's painting of a pharmacist...

... you can see that he didn't neglect the bottles, the test tube, the spoon.  Importantly, these obsessive details are not described with photographic realism, as Rockwell's thousands of clueless imitators would surely have painted them.  They are expressed through the loving eyes of someone with rapturous appreciation for their physical qualities... 

... right down to the nuances of the cork and the character of the string around the bottle.

There have been other great materialists in art before Rockwell.  Vermeer and the golden age Dutch painters delighted in the properties of fine material objects: the textures and patterns of lovely fabrics and tapestries, the sheen of  metals, the soft feel of furs.  

Note Gabriel Metsu's attention to the gold frame and oriental rug

Renaissance art was also a period of great materialists.  Freed from the medieval focus on the supernatural (and spurred on by the invention of soap) Renaissance painters obsessed over the surfaces of the secular world-- the nuances of human flesh and the reflections of armor.

Norman Rockwell was a true materialist in that tradition and, in my view, can walk proudly in that company.