Excuse Me! 1917

Norman Rockwell made this piece, ‘Excuse Me!’, sometime in the early 20th century, working in oil on canvas. He used a lot of thin washes to build up form and imbue the characters with great emotional and comedic expression. I imagine it was made in his studio, with lots of adjustments along the way, shifting the positions and expressions of the figures until they said exactly what he wanted them to say! I am always thinking, what was it like to paint this? I bet Rockwell was smiling when he painted the blushing face of the woman in the pink dress. He’s captured a classic situation here; she is caught between two worlds, the educated middle class, represented by the bespectacled man on the left, and the masculine world of the soldier on the right. Look at the gesture of the woman’s hand on the soldier’s arm and her expression, which seems to be saying, ‘Oh, dear.’ Rockwell's work sits within the wider trajectory of American painting, alongside artists like Edward Hopper, but is very much his own. All these painters inspire each other across time and are involved in an ongoing conversation. The beauty of painting is that it embraces ambiguity, allowing for so many different interpretations.