Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Hollis Sigler
American; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: Midway International Airport
45%
Goin’ to the River for the Promised Land. 1984. Oil on canvas
You can tell that this is "in the manner of" folk or outsider art, rather than the real thing. (Sigler had an MFA from the School of the Art Institute.) Outsider artists (however minimally coherent that category is) seldom treat their textual elements as reverently or as cleanly squared-away from the diegesis of the image as Sigler has here, for one, and for two there's a way too studied aspect to the picture's play between balance and imbalance (check how the smallness of the landmass at left compared to the one at right is counterbalanced by the reversed big/small dynamic of the two trees in the foreground). While the dot-painted frame is a nice, if slightly academic, touch, it corresponds either too much or too little with the pink and blue tones — that tryhard pink hugging the hills! — in the main part of the painting. There is little that seems deeply, unavoidably felt about the symbolism. (2024)