The Book of Norman: Norman Sunshine / A Life in Art, brings together more than seven decades of the American artist Norman Sunshine’s painting, sculpture, pencil, charcoal, and digital work, all deftly interwoven into his remarkable life story. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Sunshine began as an illustrator for the entertainment industry and the New York Times, eventually moving into advertising, where he authored some of the most recognizable campaigns of the 1970s. He quickly drew acclaim as a painter of southern California’s soft geometry and quiet loneliness. After moving back to the East Coast, his practice expanded: sometimes through distinctively experimental, Cezanne-like still-lifes, sometimes capturing the austerity of the New England winter, but always developing a visual language equally attuned to the psychological and physical spaces he inhabited.
The Book of Norman is both a memoir of the social and artistic worlds of post-war America and a deep reflection on a life devoted to making art. The art critic Donald Kuspit said of Sunshine’s work that it is, “a classical example of dynamic equilibrium.” That statement is also true of the artist himself.
