First, go pick up Daisy Rockwell‘s Little Book of Terror. Here. Or at least spend an inordinate amount of time getting lost in her Flickr photos.

Daisy is the granddaughter of Norman Rockwell, and although that’s largely an irrelevant fact, I find something satisfying in the inter-generational dialectic occurring here: my Mormon, Midwestern family adored Norman Rockwell, and had hosts of folksy, wholesome prints of his work adorning the walls of their homes. I should note that there are now fewer of these; the wholesome, familial, American kitsch has devolved into obsessive collections of those horrific “Precious Moments” ceramics (“precious,” here, is to be pronounced a la Andy Serkis’ Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy).

Not that Norman Rockwell’s work is bad; in fact, I don’t have any well-formed opinion on the stuff. But in my life it has represented a strange fantasy of pre-1960s American folk, “simpler times,” the kind of “real America” Republicans are always going on about, America before The Fall.

So I find great pleasure in thinking that my generation has a Rockwell too, but ours is ironic and twisted, exhibiting simultaneously a kind of melancholy wisdom and carefree cartoon wonder.

“This!” I envision myself shouting at my grandmother, “This is real sentimentality!”

A common theme in articles about Daisy is that she is the opposite of Norman:

Now that she’s painting again, Rockwell realizes she is connected to her grandfather in ways she never imagined. People think Norman Rockwell captured the “authentic reality of this country” with snapshots of real life. Few realize that all of his paintings were meticulously created in his studio with the help of a photographer. Her paintings come from photographs, too—except she finds them on the Internet and in newspaper stories.

Still, the differences between them are more striking than the similarities. “My grandfather was in a way the opposite of me,” she says. “He made ordinary situations iconic.” Daisy Rockwell makes icons into ordinary people—with the help of cats, dogs, and a healthy dose of irony.

Emphasis added. That last line, articulated in other words as well, initially confused me. How do her paintings make these people more ordinary, in any way? Rather than making Saddam Hussein appear any more ordinary, he appears far stranger:

But they’re almost right. Daisy’s stylistic choices do resolve some tension between icons and reality, but rather than iconoclastically demolishing  appearances to reveal some hidden sentimental truth, she twists the whole world around them so that they fit in. It’s not that we can empathize with Putin because now he’s nuzzling a poodle, it’s that the perspective from which we see him is now commensurately strange. In her “Libya” set, Qaddafi and his all-female, Amazonian revolutionary guard finally seem to inhabit a world where their cartoonish personalities make sense.

Only the expert will realize that your exaggerations are really true.

Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw.