Art of the West digital magazine
Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/32473
hobby he continues today. As an aside, Norton bemoans that fact that children today are too wrapped up in TV and video games to get outside and explore. “We never had a TV until I was about 8, and then we only got two channels, so there wasn’t much interest in it,” he says. “When I became a father, I would disconnect the TV cable in May for the summer and would tell the children it was broken, so they played outside.” When his children got older, however, they discovered that the problem was simply a loose cable and proudly told him so, never realizing what had actually occurred and the reason behind it. But back to Norton himself, along with his sports, hunting, and fishing, he painted wildlife. “In high school,” he says, “I copied Charlie Russell paintings for my mother. I would “You can’t play basketball unless you learn to shoot; you can’t paint, unless you paint from life.” take the figures out and put them in my own landscapes.” Following his high school gradu- ation, Norton enrolled at Western Wyoming College, where he took classes in coaching—“because I was too small to play football or basket- ball”—and planned to minor in art. After just one semester, however, he left and headed to Australia, where he spent two years on a mission for his church. Returning to Wyoming, he met Pam, a local teacher, and the two married in 1975. The couple relocated to Utah, where Norton enrolled at Brigham Young University and studied with Bill Whittaker, who had a major impact on the budding artist. Along with his classroom instruction, Norton was captivated by some of the small paintings by Frank Tenney Johnson at the college and says he once spent eight hours in front of one of those paintings, taking notes and studying the master’s style. After two years at Brigham Young, Norton left college behind. Whittaker had told him that if he wanted to paint, he should go paint. And that’s what he did, although the demands of heading a family also necessitated taking on a job that brought with it a steady income. Packing into the Line Camp, oil, 24˝ by 32˝ “An old timer is packing in salt and supplies to a line camp in the high country and stops to give his horses a cool sip of water.” 36 ART of the WEST • May/June 2011