Norman Rockwell

Norman Percevel Rockwell (New York, 1894 - 1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works are very popular in the United States, because he created the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios in The Saturday Evening Post over more than four decades.

He started painting at the age of fourteen and was very prolific. He produced over 4,000 original works. Rockwell also illustrated over 40 books including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Rockwell’s work recieved serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works were considered “sweet”, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which showed idealistic or sentimentalized portraits of American life. There is a deprecatory adjective in english: “Rockwellesque”. Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a “serious painter” by some contemporary artists.

In his later years, Rockwell began receiving more attention as a painter when he chose more serious subjects such as the series on racism for Look Magazine. Two examples of this more serious work is The Problem We All Live With, about school racial integration. The painting depicts a young African American girl, Ruby Bridges, flanked by white policeman, walking to school passing a wall with a racist graffiti. And New Kids in the Neighborhood, which shows two black kids arriving in a white neigbourhood, and their new neighbours looking astonished at them (even the dog).

I like his work a lot because his paintings are very realistic and happy. Many of them are funny, and I think he is a great painter.

Enjoy!

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968), Pastor in the Baptist Church, lived in Montgomery, a city in the south of the United States, with his wife, Coretta Scott, and his four children. There, white people considered black people inferior and they lived segregated. This meaned they had different shops, hospitals or schools. One day (december 1st, 1955), in a bus, Rosa Park, a black women, refusing to give up her seat to a white man, and she was arrested for one day. Because of this, Martin Luther King decided to use a non-violent protest: a bus boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days, and was the first great black nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States. In 1956 black people got the same rights as the white people in buses. During these days of boycott, King was arrested and his home was bombed. In may 1963 Martin Luther King organized the “Children’s Crusade”, a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham. The children were sprayed with water from high-power. They were also attacked by dogs. By the end of the day, the police had arrested 959 boys and girls. Images of the attacks were shown on national television and in newspapers. Many Americans became disgusted by what they saw. In june 1963 the president, John Kennedy gives the black people the right of entering to public places. In 1964, at the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, he was assassinated.

Tim Burton

Hi!
I wanted to tell you about Tim Burton. I'm sure you all have seen films directed and produced by him, such as Alice in Wonderland, or some less famous, for example Mars Attack orBeetlejuice. And also animation movies, for instance, The Corpse Bride. But he also writes poems. Many funny and short poems with really cool drawings. And so, I wanted to give you a page link to this book: The melancolyc Death of Oyster Boy.

There is also a video that I love about Vincent Price, a famous horror movies actor that acted in many films based on books by Edgar Allan Poe, a very important American writer of the XIX century. The narrator's voice is Vincent Price's.

Enjoy!

Durand

Yesterday I went to Fundación Juan March, in Madrid, and I saw a great exibittion about Asher B. Durand, one of the most important American artists of the nineteenth century. I liked it a lot, and I wated to tell you about it.

Durand was born in 1796 in a farm in Maplewood (New Jersey) and when he was twenty settled in New York. He started his artistic career as engraver and later as portrait painter. Finally, in 1830 he started painting landscapes, that was what he really wanted to do. Today, his contributions are recognized as central to the development of American landscape painting.

In 1869 he retired to his family house in Maplewood and continued painting until the late 1870s. He died there in September 1886.

I liked the exibittion because I think Durand is a very talented artist, and there you can find many beautiful drawings and paintings by him.

Durand is not very famous in Europe and here it is hard to see paintings by him. The entrance is free so, why don’t you go there one day? If you go, tell me if you’ve liked it. In the walls of the exibittion there was this poem:

“Upon his canvas nature starts to life […]

yes, this is nature: living, breathing, warm”.

If you go, tell me if you’ve liked it.

Bye!