JKR

Those of you in London might be interested to know about an exhibition of paintings by Norman Rockwell at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. One of the things that is likely to come up in all the reviews is how Rockwell’s paintings for The Saturday Evening Post helped create the iconography of an idealised America which feels as familiar as mom’s apple pie to us today. He had the amazing ability to tell rich and poignant stories in a single image, while keeping the compositions simple and graphic. There was some guff written about the show that he was just an illustrator, not an artist. Well, some illustrator!

For those of us in the business of telling stories visually, and striving to create iconography for brands, there is much to study in his work. At the heart of his approach was a gentle wit, one which repaid close inspection – the point or gag was not always signalled at loud volume. Check out the little boy at the back of the image above. In packaging, we tend to assume our work must telegraph our point in the blink of an eye. But I think Rockwell shows that visual storytelling can work on two levels – as a composition that can be enjoyed at a glance (as magazines covers have to) and as a richer text that can be studied in closer detail. Wouldn’t it be great to see the depth he bought to simple subjects applied to, say, the characters which feature on cereal boxes or the corner of a whisky label?