Four or five times a week, I escape the solitude of the house where I live and head into Front Royal, Virginia, to the Happy Creek Coffee Shop to write for a while and surround myself with other people. Originally built as a stable and livery in the 1880s, Happy Creek today serves not only as a coffee shop and café but also as a gallery. and drawings from the old brick walls for about a month, and then a new display goes up.
Is That Art?
Now whisk us back to the United States and drop us down in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of the Norman Rockwell Museum. Place us in front of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms.” Here the critic turns up his nose a bit, sniffing that Rockwell was a technician and an illustrator rather than a true painter.
Meanwhile, we others listen to him absentmindedly, but we identify with Rockwell’s themes of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The paintings speak to our experience. The auto mechanic explains that he knocks himself out daily to put food on his family’s table; the policeman tells us that a big part of his job is to give others the freedom from fear; I highly value the freedom to write and speak as I choose; and all of us practice a religious faith.
