Andrea Kowch

A Michigan native, Andrea Kowch cites the Midwestern landscape as the prime inspiration for her work. Kowch's charming, haunting scenes have been compared to the work of Andrew Wyeth and Alfred Hitchcock. Like Wyeth, Kowch paints in a realist style, using rural settings as metaphors for her female subjects' internal states. And as in Hitchcock's films, the scenes Kowch depicts are not what they seem; mysterious plots and backstories seem to lurk below the surface. Kowch's fictive world is both domestic and wild: rabbits nest in women's laps, quails sit in their hands, moths land on their blouses. Even when her characters are inside, the natural world intrudes. In The Feast, three women gather around a table; wind blows through the wide-open windows, while a rooster sits beside their plates, its beak reaching for their loaf of bread.