Football Hero 1955

Norman Rockwell painted ‘Football Hero’ without a specified date, and I’m imagining him in his studio, carefully mixing his paints. Look at the way the football player kneels before his sweetheart, her hands gently attending to his jersey, like a medieval knight! Rockwell has constructed a scene which speaks of courage and tenderness. It’s all gentle realism, isn’t it? You know, it’s interesting to imagine Rockwell thinking about his contemporaries, the abstract expressionists. It's like they were trying to dig into the same material—human emotion—but approaching it from different angles, through representation and abstraction respectively. I wonder if he ever thought about the way thick swathes of paint on canvas could conjure up a similar sense of emotion to the story-telling he was trying to capture. Rockwell, like all artists, was part of a bigger conversation. He was in dialogue with the world around him, using paint to talk about love, heroism, and what it means to be human. And isn’t that what painting is all about?