A painter partial to pigs
Patrick Skene Catling
SOWA'S ARK: AN ENCHANTED BESTIARY by Michael Sowa Thames & Hudson, £12.95, pp. 71 Michael Sowa, a German painter of superlative technical skill and a wonderful- ly pixilated imagination, is that rarity, a popular surrealist. Sowa's art, well repre- sented by the 59 colour plates of Sowa's Ark, is enchanted and enchanting.
He was born in Berlin 51 years ago, just after the unpleasantness, studied art for seven years, endured teaching it for six months, and then became what he calls 'a free painter, in private practice'. He has achieved artistic and commercial success, showing his work in galleries, illus- trating books for children, contributing to Titanic, a German satirical magazine, and designing advertisements for an American manufacturer of computer software and election-campaign posters for Germany's Green Party. His art is proliferating internationally in the form of postcards, of which nearly two million were sold last year, including about 380,000 in Britain. There is talk of tee- shirts. Here is his first book in this country, of interest not only to grown-ups.
His medium is acrylics, applied mostly with the substantial opacity of oils, and sometimes, further diluted, almost as light- ly as water-colours. Most characteristically, the atmosphere is sombrely crepuscular, but there is the occasional relief of glowing translucence.
The subjects are animals and people, usually shown in dreamlike juxtapositions In exquisitely realistic landscapes and interiors. Reality is subverted by relative distortions of scale. A tiny pig splashes about in a plate of soup. In 'Happy Easter', a man and a girl flee terrorised by a mon- strous rabbit. Along the dim street of `Haunted City', a Volkswagen confronts a giant snail.
There is a series of dark paintings of small boats on rough seas under stormy clouds — a sheep on a raft, four Alsatians adrift in a rowing boat without oars, a girl coxswain directing a gorilla at the oars of a boat threatened by waves up to the gun- wales, and a veritable menagerie of animals (not in twos) in the ark that gives the book its title.
It is an ark that offers scant hope. There is a single mast bearing no sails. The look- out is a woodpecker. An elephant at the stern tows a rubber dinghy containing two creatures apparently too disgusting to be taken aboard with the others.
`School of Fish' depicts 13 mermen in coats and ties glaring disapprovingly at a nonconformist merman swimming in the opposite direction. 'Sharks of Suburbia' infest a flooded street outside a pub at night. On a gloomy evening in 'February', a man sits drinking beer and reading a news- paper, while only a cat on the windowsill watches three penguins fly past snow- covered rooftops.
Sowa sympathises with cats (one has a leg in a sling to relieve 'The Broken Paw') — even those queuing for `Naumann's Cru- elty Service for Cats'. Advice on how to torture mice? He feels for rabbits, especial- ly lonely ones, 'on a rainy street', 'on a train'. Poultry are awarded his condolences. He feels sorry for sheep star- ing at their computer screens, and for the black sheep seeing on his screen only a white sheep. He regrets that there are dragons that fart flames, instead of snort- ing them nasally in the decent, traditional way.
But the creatures he obviously cares about most of all are pigs. Is the possible English significance of his surname a clue to understanding this special fondness? He paints pigs joyfully leaping into ponds and a pig pulling a blissful infant in a pram at high speed along an empty road in the light of the full moon on 'Midsummer Night'. There are melancholy pigs, evicted from Dodensted, a 'Reckless Highway Pig' (a road-hog) flying down a road's centre- stripes, and 'Migratory Pigs Gathering' on telegraph wires, before heading, perhaps, for a better place.
In a perceptively eulogistic foreword, Nick Bantock, identified as an author and publisher, justly calls attention to Sowa's stylistic homage to Vermeer. 'Man, Table, Fish' and 'The Last Hours of Pompeii', with their black-and-white chequered tiles in dim rooms with soft side-lighting, remind one of the 17th-century artist's young women at virginals.
Sowa declined his English publisher's invitation to visit London. Remember that he is 'in private practice'. Somebody in Berlin, however, sent some notes on 'The Master of Silent Humour (bad written but better than nothing)':
When Michael Sowa starts painting a picture [this anonymous informant writes], he begins with the sky and slowly one can see him cre- ating landscapes of an atmosphere that sometimes goes deeper than any description of reality...
He glazes his pictures of discreet silky grey shades and there emerges a certain depth out of them, in which one would wish to dive.
As for humour, the art of Michael Sowa in general is as funny as babes lost in the Black Forest on a winter night. But I strongly recommend that you dive in.
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