In the early 1990s, Greenfield Family Chiropractic in Danvers had two employees. One of them was Lee, a New Yorker whose mother, Judi Jordan Sowers, had married the artist Robert Sowers late in his life.
In 1992, Lee brought in a contact sheet of her stepfather’s paintings and asked which one I liked. I was immediately drawn to one done in the style of American Gothic.
Not long after, for my birthday, Lee gave me the painting.
The painting has no title.
Who Robert Sowers was
Sowers was a painter, photographer, and stained glass artist, and one of the people most responsible for bringing stained glass back as a serious architectural art in the United States.
His glass commissions span about twenty years, from St. George’s Episcopal Church in Durham, New Hampshire to the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York and the blue cross window for the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. In 1953 he was part of the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He also designed the vast glass facade of the American Airlines terminal at JFK, designed in 1958–59 and demolished in 2008 when the terminal was rebuilt.
He also wrote four books and many magazine articles on glass, art, and architecture, and he was an exceptional photographer. He spent hours walking Manhattan and Brooklyn with a camera, and a posthumous book of his black-and-white photographs came out in 1990.
The paintings
In 1979, Sowers returned to his first love, painting, full time, working from a loft on Degraw Street in Brooklyn where the space and light suited him. The first canvases were black and white, abstract expressionist in feel, with architecture hiding underneath. Then came color, and a photorealist style built from his own 35mm slides of the city: streets, bridges, buildings, junk, people, parks, gardens.
Light connected all of it. It had been his central concern in glass, and it stayed central in the photographs and paintings. The canvases were uniformly 40 by 50 inches, signed on the back with the date and “RWS,” one of the few times he ever used his middle initial.
He showed at the OK South Gallery in Miami in 1988–89. He died in 1990, just as his first painting, Stripes, sold through Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery in New York, and as his fourth book, Rethinking the Forms of Visual Expression, was published. His paintings have since found their way into private collections, mine among them.
More on his life and work: Robert Sowers on Wikipedia.