Seventy-two hours that included pipe bombs, an assassination of two African Americans, and a synagogue massacre.  What country do we live in?

Strangely enough, I find myself thinking about Norman Rockwell–much the way people have been reflecting upon Mr. Rogers–who was from the very Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the Tree of Life Synagogue is located.

On a recent visit to the museum dedicated to Rockwell’s work, I was reminded of how, at twelve or thirteen, I became obsessed with Norman Rockwell.  There had been a retrospective of his work, perhaps at the Whitney, and my mother bought me the catalogue.  It was a slender book, but I would pore over those images, every detail, ever shoe lace and grimace and expression.  At the time I studied painting with an artist from Europe, a neighbor, who gave classes to teenagers and adults in the back of his framing store.  What we studied was utterly different—the Fauves, whose vivid and savage colors I imitated, those images of European seasides and women bathing on the banks of a river, the gesture toward brush stroke and shimmering intensity, not realism.

So what compelled me toward Rockwell? I had no real contact with small town America—I was a city girl, through and through.  I’d barely traveled in America, since my family used vacations to go to Canada, England and Europe.  I did not even know the suburbs very well, since my mother had a near allergy to them, and both my parents had a fear of communities that were unwelcoming or racially homogeneous. Continue reading