It’s 1961. I’m less than ten years old. I need a haircut. Something that I am not really looking forward to, but… at the barber´s, in the magazine rack, there is a thick stack of Panorama´s.
For me it can not last long enough until it is my turn. I handpick all editions whose covers are painted by Kurt Art. I can sit for hours examining in amazement. The images look like photographs but if you look closely you see that they are painted; illustrations! I have the idea that I am the only one who get that message, and in a strange way I feel that these covers are painted only for me. I am not even 10 years old…
It would be an exaggeration to say that this experience made me choose to become an illustrator or even an artist, but now, when I think back, I clearly rememberer that moment of sparkling light. A scintilla that would kindle a never-dying fire.
Of course by that time I never had heard of Norman Rockwell nor The Saturday Evening Post. That all came much later.
In 1987, in New York, having lunch with two fellow illustrators at the restaurant of the Society of illustrators, I was seated right under the large painting The Dover Coach of Norman Rockwell. In this restaurant you could not come in, if you were´nt invited by one of its members. I found myself inside that particular world that I began to dream of as a child, at the hairdressers in the early sixties.