Career
Norman began his professional career fashioning window displays for Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles and later Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, and other New York department stores. He later designed plastic headdresses for the chorus girls in the 1946 Fred Astaire film Blue Skies."
In New York, Norman's work was featured in Vogue magazine – and he first displayed an affinity for working in plastic, having discovered the material, especially epoxy resins, during a trip to Europe in the late 1940s. Norman was featured in a November 22, 1944 New York Times article, Plastics Shown in Decorative Role, covering the opening of his exhibit at the Pendleton Gallery.
Norman's lifetime body of work includes sculpture, mosaic, jewelry, and other forms – and most prominently the 40- by-46-foot mosaic window for the Masonic Center in San Francisco along with an assemblage of exterior stone sculptures:
| “ | Fabricated with an endomosaic process, it incorporates thousands of bits of metal, parchment, felt, linen, silk, natural foliage, thinly sliced vegetable matter, shells and sea life, plus 180 colors of stained glass. The lower portion of the frieze is made up of actual gravels and soils of the 58 counties of California and the islands of Hawaii. The window depicts the history of the wayfarers and the seafarers that helped found California Freemasonry. | ” |
Norman often used an innovative technique bringing together his own admixture of epoxy-resin, crushed glass, plastic, or wood – creating an effect not dissimilar to cloisonne or stained glass. The effect is especially unusual when Norman crafted the layered effect over a wax form which, when later melted away, left behind a three-dimensional sculpture.
Read more about this topic: Emile Norman
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