Robin Latkovich’s art is sublime. Kind of like those obelisks in 2001: A Space Odyssey – I can imagine an art critic standing in front of one of his paintings asking the eternal question: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?…over and over, and coming up with some long winded explanation about humankind’s search for meaning in the universe. His color palette – controlled. His medium – mostly oils on canvas. His technique – painterly. His subject matter – the decaying landscape of Cleveland.
You can email Robin Latkovitch at: mrspilledmilk@yahoo.com
What are you working on these days?
With my new work, I wanted to get the grandeur of Sumerian Mythology…Sumerian Creation myth, which is terrifying. I also went to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which just got re-opened…there’s the massive line of over-the -top, melodramatic portraits of the muses. It was the first time I’d seen them. So…I got in there and was as close to being awestruck as I’ve been by almost anything created by someone else. As ridiculous as it is…I just stood there paralyzed. And that was part of my motivation to create something really big.
What about the symbolism of the dragons and rocks floating in the sky…is there meaning there?
A lot of my works have “things” in the sky…it can’t be more specific than “things”…with wings and tails and heads and arms and things. I find that when I finish my pieces a lot of the time, I stand back and they really want to symbolize something…which is maybe partially true, but mostly I just want grandeur, something overwhelming. People create mythologies to explain grandeur. People create symbols to convey grandeur. I just think the world is bigger, more complicated and scarier than us – and that’s what I’m painting. I like painting that causes people to either become violent or curl into a fetal position to protect themselves. I guess heavy metal art is my goal.
Do you have an aversion to color?
No, I like it a lot actually. I used to do a lot of really colorful stuff and I don’t think I could ever go to pure black and white. I never use black – I mix my blacks from other colors…and I don’t think I really have any strong feelings on color, I just naturally gravitate toward subtle gradations. I think if you threw one of these into any alley or rotting neighborhood in this city it would blend in pretty well…and that could be part of it. Cleveland is rotting in a very beautiful sort of way – and that sounds a little pompous…
Kind of like a jaded hippy...
I mean there are people out there who are really sincerely miserable because of the way the city is rotting and would probably not agree that there’s anything beautiful about it. And I also hate the steel flats – I despise them! They represent so much that I despise about people and what they do – the whole blase attitude they have toward everything that’s cancerous in the way they operate. Why is that so beautiful?
I see it as the past age of buzzing economies and now , now we only have like two smokestacks working at a time. Back in the day, when i was growing up, there were like ten of them…
Yeah, there are two huge smokestacks in the midst of this abyss. I mean totally detached from any kind of historic or economic perspective, it’s just this horrifying empty landscape. At five in the morning it looks like another world. But the fact that it’s horrifying and despicable doesn’t make it less beautiful.
Yeah, there’s a common theme in a lot of cleveland art, portraying this apocalyptic landscape around us...
In the 19th Century, all the German artists painted the hills and the mountains…the epic things. And now we have these epic things, which are at least as scary as those others.
