No takers on that last game board? Okay, lets try this one out. I would love to give away a nice picture prize, but I need some players. No gold stars today.

Let’s see if anyone can get these 5 artists and images by leaving a comment with their guesses.

How well do you know your Art? Above are images of paintings from overstockArt.com currently available in our online gallery.  If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We will provide the correct answers  in two weeks (on Friday, Sept. 24th), along with our next ReproduceTHIS: Know your Art challenge.

Bonus:  Winner will be visually rewarded with a mystery prize image!

I didn’t think anyone would get #5 Van Gogh’s Noon: Rest from Work  :-)  and they didn’t he he… I love that little cart in the background.

Gold Star goes to Amitai for getting 3 of the 5 answers.

This week we focus on the animal kingdom. Happy hunting!

How well do you know your Art? Below are images of paintings from overstockArt.com currently available in our online gallery.  If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We will provide the correct answers  in one week (on Friday, Sept. 10th), along with our next ReproduceTHIS: Know your Art challenge.

How well do you know your Art? Below are images of paintings from overstockArt.com currently available in our online gallery.  If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We will provide the correct answers  in one week (on Friday, Sept. 3rd), along with our next ReproduceTHIS: Know your Art challenge.

Congrats to… <drum role>  No one?
Gold star goes to Amitai. The only person brave enough to make a guess.

Did I stump everyone with that first game?
Lets see if we can get a few more players to take a crack at this new game board.
Good Luck!

Many artists, particularly painters, have made a name for themselves for their artistic ingenuity. They’ve painted and brought new meaning to an object or a scene or an event. However there are seldom artists who make use of their craft in addressing day to day issues, such as poverty, love, freedom, communication, bravery, work and everyday mundane activity of human life. Norman Rockwell is one of those few.

Norman Rockwell has made a great impact not only in terms of his art, but also in terms of his social contribution.

To give you a glimpse of who Norman Rockwell was and what he’s done that has made an indelible mark in history is to bring you back to the city of New York where he was born on February 1894. This is where he cultivated his gift under the tutelage of instructors from Chase Art School, the Academy of Design and finally the Art Students League. His artistic style was influenced by his instructors Thomas Fogarty, George Bridgman, and Frank Vincent Dumond.

Norman’s first major breakthrough came in 1912 at age eighteen with his first book illustration for Carl H. Claudy’s Tell Me Why: Stories about Mother Nature. This catapulted him to become the art editor of Boys’ Life published by the Boy Scouts of America. Unfortunately, his streak was cut abruptly with an imminent war.

Rockwell’s family moved to New Rochelle, New York (The same suburban town from the movie “Catch me if you Can” starring Leonardo De’Caprio) when Norman was 21 years old and shared a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who worked for The Saturday Evening Post. With Forsythe’s help, he submitted his first successful cover painting to the Post in 1916. Norman Rockwell published a total of 322 original covers for The Saturday Evening Post for over 47 years. Rockwell’s success on the cover of the Post led to covers for other magazines of the day, most notably LIFE Magazine.

In 1943, during the Second World War, Mr. Rockwell continued on to produce his most famous four part series of paintings of the most powerful war caricatures inspired by the famous Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech – Four Freedoms. These masterpieces as described were the four principles for universal rights: Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, and Freedom from Fear.

During his long career, he was commissioned to paint the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. One of his last works was a portrait of Judy Garland in 1969.

For “vivid and affectionate portraits of our country,” Rockwell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America’s highest civilian honor, in 1977.

Rockwell died November 8, 1978 of emphysema at age 84 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. First Lady Rosalynn Carter attended his funeral.

To see more of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, you can visit the Norman Rockwell Museum. The Museum’s collection is the world’s largest, including more than 700 original Rockwell paintings, drawings, and studies.

The month of March is Youth Art Month – an annual observance to emphasize the value of art education for all children and to encourage support for quality school art programs. one might ask, what is so important about art that we need an annual event to observe it?

If we sit and observe whenever little kids draw, finger paint or play, it’s intriguing how they seem without self-doubt, judgment or fear of doing it wrong. A preconceived expectation of the end product doesn’t seem to play a role in what they are engaged in and in that moment they simply get lost in the doing of it. It’s as if they approach their art, free of inhibitions and with an openness to take risks, experiment and most importantly have fun. It’s as if being fully present in the moment and entering that space of spontaneity, comes so easily.

I recently spoke to someone who runs a local community art school. She shared with me that they had noticed a decreased attendance in their children’s art classes. When I asked why, she speculated that it was the result of kids being less and less encouraged to do art for the sake of the experience and for play. Instead, in order for parents to feel they were getting their money’s worth they were expecting their kids to produce a nice finished product at the end of each class. If the art piece resembled something out of preschool, their child must not be learning something valuable.

Is it possible that in this day and age of video games and computers, where shapes are colored within the clean lines of digital images, we’ve suppressed the urge to color outside of the margins? Are our children losing touch of their innate nature to create something in the mud, draw in the sand and venture down the road of their own imaginations? Is the art of trial and error no longer valued?

As we “grow up” the courage to create slowly moves into the background of our lives and we measure what we produce with labels of “Success” or “Fail” with nothing in between. We develop an apprehensiveness towards taking risks and the fear of doing it wrong keeps us from looking foolish in the process. Is learning to suppress free expression, suppressing our own imaginative instincts that we were naturally born with when we first entered this world?

“All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso

I once heard a grade school teacher encourage parents to, “Praise the effort rather then the outcome.” We often have the bad habit of discounting the process in it self. Undermining the steps in the middle that hold moments of exploration while focusing too much on the end product. If we approach our careers or our art giving value to the effort perhaps we will resurrect the courage to create; remembering what it was like to drenched our fingers in paint and draw out of the lines.

Sir Ken Robinson said it best, the ecology of our education will need to change and adapt. Art and creativity will need to take an active and central role for this world to develop and the only way we can do it is by seeing our children for the hope that they are.