A belated update on the paintings that have kept me busy for the past few months. All of the following are oil on wood, measuring 10×10″, and all are currently on display at Cleveland’s Rotten Meat Gallery.
The Souls of Things
Tag: Paint
Show Announcement!
After some months of preparation, I am terribly excited to announce an upcoming solo show of my work at Cleveland’s Rotten Meat Gallery. In Defense of Absurd Cosmologies will feature recent paintings, including the completed Falls series, as well a number of brand-new works from this year. The opening reception will be on March 14th, from 6-10pm.
Djinn & Tonic
…an infamously difficult drink to prepare, if only because djinn are, as a rule, deeply suspicious of citrus.
They Live!
Either mostly or entirely done with this series! It’s primarily about animism (a subject about which I have some thoughts), and secondly about making something unabashedly decorative. Each individual piece is designed to function as an icon (in the religious sense- what artist hasn’t secretly aspired to make something people will pray to?), and will bear titles such as The One Who Oversees Seemingly Significant (but insignificant) Coincidences, The One Who Overseers Things You No Longer Think About, and so on.
making/doing stuff/things
The Flag
Invasive River
Fiji Mermaid
The Falls
Part of a recent series of paintings based on the work of American scholar of the weird Charles Fort (b.1874, d.1932).
The inspiration (and source of the accompanying text) is Fort’s Book of the Damned (1919), a massive tome that consists largely of hundreds upon hundreds of accounts of strange objects and substances falling from the sky, obsessively gathered from centuries worth of almanacs, scientific journals, and eyewitness accounts, and interspersed with flagrantly bizarre stabs at explanation (at one point, he proposes the existence of an antigravitational atmospheric zone- the “super-sargasso sea”- where lost objects end up and are occasionally dislodged by errant wind currents). These explanations are, I suspect, tongue-in-cheek, intended not so much to provide a believable theory to account for these events as to show what such a theory would have to look like.
The paintings are oil on wood, ranging from 24×18″ to 10×8″ in size. Ultimately, for each painting, the corresponding text will be printed on a separate panel, matching the width of the painting and displayed directly below it. Better images to come.
“…there is mention of a fibrous substance like blue silk that fell over Naumberg, March 23, 1665”
- The Falls: flakes
“Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky- ‘from a clear sky’.”
- The Falls: paper
“Substance like charred paper fell in Norway and other parts of Northern Europe, Jan. 31, 1686”
- The Falls: worms
“London Times, April 14, 1837: That, in the parish of Bramford Speke, Devonshire, a large number of black worms, about three quarters of an inch in length, had fallen in a snowstorm.”
- The Falls: disk
“A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.”
Wild Man Variations, pt.2
Robin Harper Latkovich 