ARTIST FOLLOWS IN FOOTSTEPS OF ROCKWELL

Artist Norman Rockwell and the editors of The Saturday Evening Post saw something familiar in the works of an unknown and untrained painter who had entered their magazine art contest.

"I was 22 years old. I didn't have any art training, but I had been working with some painting," Gene Boyer said. He saw the full-page ad in The Saturday Evening Post calling for new illustrators. "I was just brash enough to enter."

Boyer submitted a painting of his grandmother holding his two-year-old daughter. It earned him second place in the contest and started him on an illustrating career that included many covers of The Saturday Evening Post and other magazine and advertising work.

The artist, who lives in Denver, Colo., was in Cape Girardeau Thursday through Saturday at Gospeland Bookstore in West Park Mall.

Boyer's family-oriented art is reminiscent of Rockwell's famous style.

"I want to say something with my art," Boyer said.

The message he hopes to convey is one about the importance of family and relationships.

While he was successful and sought after as an illustrator, Boyer said he never fit in with the professional art community. "Many of them are, well, sort of odd," he said.

About four years ago he met Jeffrey Cummings, owner of a gift company specializing in Christian items. Cummings and Boyer developed The Family Gallery, a place to showcase art from artists with a spiritual message.

"His solid traditional family values were pretty close to my heart," Boyer said. "I think people are looking for something deeper in their lives, especially in their relationships."

The paintings and prints offer a visual reminder of the importance of relationships.

"The paintings depict solid values in a playful way that will be visually entertaining," Boyer said.

Like Rockwell, Boyer paints real people in realistic settings. He usually works from photographs.

He has done portraits of the famous including Norman Rockwell, Robert Redford and Paul Newman.

But the paintings of "regular folks" generate the biggest response, said Jeffrey Cummings, Boyer's partner in publishing.

For example, in one of his most popular prints, a young suitor awkwardly offers a handful of flowers to his lady love. In another, a little boy clutches his teddy bear, as guardian angels watch overhead. In "Father's Love," a dad lifts his child up to reach the best fruit on the tree.

"From my earliest memories of childhood, I have felt a special and profound kinship with what might be referred to as the common man; his God, family and friends," Boyer said. "There clearly were and are deep spiritual roots and amazing texture in what often passes for `commonplace.'"