Merrie Christmas Couple Dancing Under the Mistletoe 1928

Norman Rockwell’s “Merrie Christmas Couple Dancing Under the Mistletoe” captures a lighthearted moment with paint on canvas. Look at the arc of the woman's arm as she points up to the mistletoe – there's such dynamism there! I can almost hear the music they are dancing to. Rockwell is such a craftsman, and I bet he labored over the lightness of the woman’s gown to create the illusion of movement. I wonder if, like many painters, he struggled with the tension between representation and abstraction? He was, after all, working in the heyday of abstract expressionism. There’s a bit of Boucher and Fragonard here, those lighthearted, frivolous rococo paintings, but updated for an American audience. The rosy, orange-yellow palette is classic Rockwell, and it makes me think about how artists borrow ideas from the past, remix them, and bring them into the present. That’s the creative process in a nutshell, isn't it?