Emile Norman: By His Own Design

Emile Norman remembers that when he was a child, his parents encouraged him to focus on the future. As you consider a photo of young men in sweats (including a young, buff, smiling Emile), he says, “My mother kept heckling me that I should stop all that nonsense and learn an honest trade.” As it turns out, “that nonsense” became Norman’s trade, one that has left him moderately famous (particularly in the Bay Area) and financially secure. A self-taught painter, sculptor, and muralist, he used his art to shape his life and vice versa, an integrated existence that has granted him singular satisfaction.

This much is clear in Emile Norman: By His Own Design, a cozy documentary directed by Will Parrinello and produced by Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry (who met the artist when they happened to buy land from him in 1991). Airing 23 June on PBS, the film offers frequent appreciative shots of Norman’s art — slow moving pans over mosaics made of wood inlay or broken glass, statues of birds and zebras, an early image of Prometheus made of his dad’s beer bottles (“home brew,” Norman notes). Following Norman as he chats about the different rooms in his home in Big Sur, the film is part Cribs, part personal nostalgia, and part history, all entangled and enchanting. Airing 23 June on PBS, the film offers frequent appreciative shots of Norman’s art — slow moving pans over mosaics made of wood inlay or broken glass, statues of birds and zebras, an early image of Prometheus made of his dad’s beer bottles (“home brew,” Norman notes). Following Norman as he chats about the different rooms in his home in Big Sur, the film is part Cribs, part personal nostalgia, and part history, all entangled and enchanting.

Born Emile Nomann in 1918, Norman grew up among farmers in the San Gabriel Valley during the Depression. His early life only takes up a couple of minutes in the film: when friend and art dealer Angus Whyte says Norman had a “difficult childhood,” because he was “partly crippled,” the film doesn’t delve into such details, only notes them and moves on. Norman remembers what’s important to him, that he carved his first sculpture when he was 11, using his father’s wood chisels to shape a granite rock he found in a river. “There’s a face in there,” he recalls thinking when he first spotted it, and so he just had to bring it home and uncover that face. Though his father was angry over the ruined tools, Norman says, “I still have that little face,” at which point the scene cuts to the rock, now a smiling visage, still in its maker’s possession.

He talks about his art as if it just comes to him. “I’m a nature boy,” he says, “I can go out and in 10 square feet, I can give you 1,000 ideas, and they’re all there.” Though he earned an art scholarship when he was a teenager, Norman gave it up after just two weeks, saying it wasn’t teaching him what he was interested in. In 1936, he took his first train ride to New York City: as archival footage shows typical landmarks — the Grand Central Station, Statue of Liberty, Central Park — Norman tells the story of his introductory cab ride, his excitement by the many sights along the way. Only when he exited the taxi, he says, did he see that the Roosevelt Hotel was across the street from the train station. He laughs at the cabbie’s wiliness: “He really knew a hick when he saw one.”

Some of his friends also mistook him for something of a naif, if an extremely talented and energetic one. Costume designer Willa Kim met Norman at City College, and remembers being enchanted by his “curiosity.” He was, she says, “exuberant, constantly experimenting with ideas, tools, different materials. Knowing Emile was exotic.” She didn’t quite know at the time just how “exotic.” She says, “I had no idea he was gay. He just seemed like this big healthy country boy. I didn’t know there was such a thing as gay, but that’s what the climate was.”

Indeed, much of By His Own Design is focused on Norman’s life as a gay man, or at least the surface of that life. After a few New York gigs as a costume and department store window designer, he moved back to California, changed his name (“He became his own person,” observes Whyte), and made art. It was in Southern California that he met Clement Brooks, the man who would become his life partner in every way. Together they purchased 17 acres in Big Sur and built a house. While Brooks was more inclined to work outdoors, Norman preferred sculpting and working out his own endomosaic process. They both took pride in making the house: he recalls buying a bulldozer, which he drove with delight: “That was the butchest part of my life. I loved running that bulldozer.”

The film, aided by footage and photos the couple took of themselves (plus a brief clip of their neighbor Henry Miller, who doesn’t actually speak directly about them), outlines what appears a remarkable 30-year relationship (they signed their invitations, “Clemile”). Not only did they work out an enduring professional partnership (Brooks told Norman early on, “You get in the studio and do the artwork, and I’ll show the world what you’re doing”), but they also made their home a haven for gay men during the 1940s and ’50s. Writer and mentee C. Kevin Smith says gleefully, “They needed to create their own paradise, their own exile, and America was hostile to gays and so this became this gay place too. I mean, they had wild parties here… We’ll show you, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. We’ll be as homosexual as we want to be and we’ll make the art that we want to make and we’ll sell it at a high price.”

The resistance and the vigor of this attitude are visible in Norman’s art, which makes by for the film’s cursory consideration of his political and cultural environments, especially as these have changed over time. Commissioned by the California Masons to design the edifice of San Francisco’s Masonic Temple in 1955, Norman devised (over three years) a crushed-glass and acrylic mural illustrating the Masons’ role in the state’s development.

The piece led to other commissions, in Italy and the States, as well as a private gallery in L.A., which ensured Norman and Clement could live their lives free of dictation by others. And if the film doesn’t focus on this aspect of their lives, their unusual autonomy at a time when most gay men and women were closeted under threat of physical abuse and death, it does allow Norman’s art and sense of design to exhibit their relative freedom. “Bach was the greatest designer,” says Norman as he plays the organ he and Clement played for years. “Bach could take me way out into space, but he always has a resolution, he always brought me back down.” At 90 years old, Norman remains grounded, generous, and ingenious in his own practical-minded way.