Reveling in the lovely sun pouring through our bedroom window, we spent Friday morning sleeping in.  When we got ourselves moving, we trekked into Pittsfield, MA to find the home of Herman Melville and the spot where he wrote Moby Dick.  All we could do was admire the huge house that he built for his family and the lovely surrounding farm as the house was being restored and was not open to visitors.

So, we drove back down to Stockbridge and found the Museum dedicated to one of Stockbridge’s most famous residents – Norman Rockwell.  If asked, it would not be a hard push to say that Norman Rockwell is my favorite artist.  While he didn’t think of himself as an artist, but an illustrator, it is clear that he gave the American people a huge gift through his enormous talent and prolific art.

We spent several hours in the museum viewing his art and learning how he set up his studio and how he made several versions of the same scene, using models and people he knew as subjects, until he was happy with the results.  In a film about him and his work, he himself said that he just painted pictures of everyday things and “captured the things most people missed.”  It sounded a lot like finding grace to me and I immediately liked him and his work even more.

We walked the grounds of the beautiful Berkshire Mountains that Rockwell also walked and we were so grateful to have experienced such grace.