Ben Norris was an American painter. He was born in Redlands, California in 1910. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona College in 1930, he won a fellowship at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University where he spent a year and then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for 11 months. He traveled extensively throughout Europe before returning to California to pursue a career as a landscape painter. As an active participant in the California Watercolor School, he had the opportunity to work closely with landscape artist Thomas Craig (1906-1969). They became friends and in 1936, at Craig’s suggestion, Norris accepted the position of first art teacher at the Kamehameha School for Boys in Honolulu. After a year, he joined the art department at the University of Hawaii as an associate professor, and also took printmaking courses from a colleague. He served as department chairman from 1945 to 1955. In 1955, he was awarded a Fulbright professorship to Japan where he was exposed to Asian techniques, motifs and forms. After his retirement in 1975, Ben moved to New York, and then, in 1993, to Stapeley in Germantown, a Quaker sponsored continuing care retirement community in Philadelphia. He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2006. Ben's brother, Henry Norris, passed away the same year. Ben said of art, "To love something is to perceive it and one can be helped to see it, really see it...through art. We cannot love what we do not know— know in itself, for itself. Art stops, freezes, frames bits of reality and by so doing, helps us to pay attention..." The Hawaii State Art Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri) and the Oregon State University Memorial Union (Corvallis, Oregon) are among the public collections holding works by Ben Norris.
References
- Forbes, David W., "Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and its People, 1778-1941", Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1992, 214-261.
- Haar, Francis and Neogy, Prithwish, "Artists of Hawaii: Nineteen Painters and Sculptors", University of Hawaii Press, 1974, 88-95.
- Yoshihara, Lisa A., Collective Visions, 1967-1997, [Hawaii] State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1997, 48.
- http://www.quaker.org/fqa/types/t06-norris.html
