Waiter, There’s a Pig In My Soup
Sometimes I get the feeling that someone, somewhere, has decided it’s just not art if it can’t be given a label or title. So imagine the difficulty posed by the works of Michael Sowa.
Sure, you can peg him as a Surrealist (the most common label slapped on his work), but it’s not the kind of Surrealism that you find in artists like DeChirico, Dali, or Ernst. Indeed, the closest affinity in a lot of Sowa’s art would seem to be with Edward Hopper, if you could picture Hopper’s world populated with Autobahn pigs, driving pickles, and bunnies on trains. In the wrong hands this could be a recipe for disaster, as though Thomas Kincaid tried his hand at The Far Side. It’s the attention to technique that keeps Sowa’s art from veering either into sentimental kitsch at one extreme, or cheap sight gags on the other.
Robert Hughes once wrote of Hopper that there was a certain ambiguity about the painter’s works; you could never be quite sure if they were about solitude or loneliness. Similarly, Sowa’s art defies easy categorization. The scenes have a nearly voyeuristic quality about them, as if we’ve wandered into someone else’s daydream, or another reality that hovers just at the edge of perception. It’s appropriate, in a way, that Sowa’s visuals played a part in the film Amelie. As with the film, Sowa’s art displays a sweetly off-kilter sense of humor that’s tinged with a sepia-toned melancholy.
Postscript: These images, and others, are available in Sowa’s Ark, a collection of the artist’s work that’s finally back in print.
Tags: art, Edward Hopper, illustration, Michael Sowa