Thomas Sciacca’s carnival of illustrated men and women at Todd Weiner Gallery

Last year, some friends of the artist Thomas Sciacca asked him to paint some furniture with circus scenes to sell at their store, Rock Candy Boutique. Though Sciacca had long wanted to illustrate the sideshow world, he was skeptical about its place on home furnishings. But then the pieces he had adorned began flying out of the store. Soon, he started work on his own series, the results of which are now on view in the exhibition Sideshow Serenade, at Todd Weiner Gallery. Sciacca met The Pitch there to walk us through some of the works.

The Pitch: Are these figures based on actual characters, or are they from ads and other imagery you’ve researched or straight from your imagination?

Sciacca: I would say all three, but the bulk of the content of the show is based on real characters, real performers, real banners. Actually, the banners had ridiculous liberties taken. People would see a banner and expect Penguin Boy was going to be some mythical creature, and the person would go inside and see some short little guy with stubby arms smoking a cigarette. And they were quite disenchanted.

Which is your favorite?

This guy. [Points behind him to “Hindu Fakir.”]

What’s his deal?

His deal is that he comes from a little tiny drawing in an old magic book from the 1920s. When I was 11, I was already in love with magic. Because it was drawn in the ’20s, it had these scenes of magicians dressed in a tuxedo at some Gatsby–like Long Island dinner party. The women were all elegant. And I thought, “Man, I want to be in that world!” But there was one page in the book that showed this Hindu fakir, a street musician, putting a dagger through his cheek. And all these years later, when I was researching and going through material for the show, I saw him again and I thought, “I’ve gotta use this.” By now, I’m looking at my former self, and my own innocence and the things that excited me back then. There are a lot of good memories associated with this guy.

Do they have stories that you want to draw out when you’re actually depicting them?

During the research phase, the research would reveal to me, yeah — there was a guy who had half a body, and maybe the research told me some details about his life. There was a character named Popeye, who would pop his eyeballs out. That’s what he did when he was passed out. But the research also revealed that this was an unfortunate fellow. He was an alcoholic. But that stuff I didn’t see any reason to go into.

Lobster Boy was a well-known character. His feet and his hands only had two large digits, which gave him this sort of lobsterlike appearance. They showed him in a very positive light: smiling and happy. But the other side of his life was that he was a raging alcoholic and was eventually murdered by one of his kids because he was just an abusive, bullying individual. That’s one of the few darker stories, but some of them — it’s just to be faithful to the subject matter.

Back then, the audience for these acts revolved around the fascination for the otherness of the sideshows. Are we still fascinated by that otherness, or are we more curious about the long-ago interest in it?

The people who have bought prints or had things to tell me about it, they’re fascinated, I think, by the novelty of these images. They seem to trigger off positive associations with people. A lot of people don’t know that some of these are based on real characters, but people are responding more to the unusual nature and the fact that I have not made them too grotesque.

Who’s in “Sweet Marie”?

She was a real character and she was unfairly depicted as very happy. This image was designed to transform her obesity into something fun, hence all of the circular lines.

And “Mona”?

She was a burlesque sideshow attraction. I intended to make her a bit sexier than the original banner — a kind of innocent, fun, cheesecake sexy.

“Omi”?

This is based on another real character, one that makes for an extremely graphic image.

Tell me about “Spookarama.”

Spook-a-Rama was built in the 1950s at Coney Island. It’s a spookhouse, and it had several cyclops figures adorning the entrance over the decades. I was tickled by how ridiculous this smiling mouth was and is, and that this is an easy character to remember.

Most of these seem pretty unforgettable.

The original graphics, they excite me. There’s something about old magic posters. There’s a romance and a mystery there that just really influenced me to become an illustrator. This is the stuff that fed me back when I was a kid. I don’t understand my own obsessions. I no longer try.