HAN on American artists:
Angelo T. Robinson creates from a sprawling home studio in Senoia, Ga. Around 30 miles outside Atlanta, he’s near enough to the city to use its energy and resources, yet far enough removed for tranquility. He describes himself as a self-taught creative, feeling that he can learn to do too many types of creative endeavors well to limit the classification to something as one-note as, say, painter. Being an autodidact artist and striver, Robinson has guided himself through many iterations of mediums and a multiplicity of key themes. He excels at much.
Yet his somewhat simplistic bright abstracts remain most moving in my mind’s eye. I even made three installments to procure a pretty pink one with white butterflies for my daughter’s large local art collection, which she and I and her lovely mother have built up together over the years. It was prominently featured in an arts magazine prior and part of a collection of works that took first place in a juried show.
Side note: if you don’t collect art at all, perhaps you should. If you dig it, it’s good art. That’s the essence of art understanding. As long as it’s positive and good, art is beautiful. Don’t call me a critic even though I’ve been paid to do what’s called art criticism. Call me a fan, short for fanatic of art, especially painting. I love the great painters.
Robinson sees super clearly how vivid color produces provocative power, and how a punch of color plainly pleases people. He opines cogently that art “should overtake the viewer so unexpectedly that he or she loses themselves in a moment of exploration, discovery and realization.”
Being an African-American artist from and in the Deep South, there is perhaps too often an audience and art critic expectation to paint about American Blackness and the unique trials, tribulations and triumphs-in-overcoming of the Black experience, which is examined thoughtfully in the (HBO) documentary “Black Art.” Robinson instead more readily explores the triumphs of life across all peoples. Looking deeply at college and pro sports, as example, from the position of a fan. Though he himself was a football star, back in the day. He could still make a tackle or tote the rock.
I first came to enjoy his paintings via a mutual friend: Clayton Brookshire is a creative I know well from living in and then still frequenting the Classic City, Athens, Ga., and the former frontman of the noisecore power musical act hecklehammer, as well as a home craftsman of note and an excellent painter, specializing in large diptych abstracts. I curated a solo show of Brookshire’s paintings in the emerging but still a bit rough around the edges Poncey-Highlands neighborhood of ATL, which runs along the fabled former racial dividing line Ponce De Leon [pronounced LEE-On] Avenue between white-and-black residents and businesses. And in doing so, he heartily encouraged me to meet up with his boyhood friend, Angelo, who I’d previously linked with on social media but never met in person. In lieu of a traditional (and more boring) first meeting, Robinson accompanied me to the annual Atlanta Boat Show at the Georgia World Congress Center, where we spoke as mates aboard myriad schooners. We were fast friends.
Soon, I curated a large solo show of Robinson’s many State of Georgia-inspired works, called “For the Love of Georgia,” in the eclectic (formerly full on and still a good bit hippie) Candler Park neighborhood of ATL. That was followed by a two-man show with Brookshire in Atlanta’s venerable Virginia Highland ‘hood, where I’ve worked at multiple businesses in my many professional periods prior. My blue period(s), if you will.
It felt good to show the works of a college-educated man of color alongside, and playing off of perfectly, the artful expression of a white [bit-of-a-mad]man, who is a construction worker by day and ultra-heavy rocker by night. …My friends aren’t flat. Two good old(er now) boys who grew up down South together, and their vibrant art, on display in its capital city, well north of Ponce.
There’s no place left for old hate in my New South, y’all. The dinosaurs are dying off even as they are preserved in tar, looking alive, like at Los Angeles’s La Brea tar pits. And Angelo T. Robinson, a son of the South all the way across the vast American continent, to the side of it where this pretty mess of a nation began, best emblemizes what we want to be and have become. Beautiful and badass.
To add a pop of color to your life, email Robinson directly at: atrfineart@gmail.com ~ website: www.atrfineart.com
~Editor-in-Chief Han Vance is a resident of Historic Druid Hills of Atlanta-proper and a graduate of the University of Georgia. He’s an art collector and enthusiast, independent art curator, former art gallery board member (dooGallery) and the “mastermind behind ART BOX pARTy,” as seen in Atlanta INtown paper, Art Nouveau magazine and FRANK 151 magazine. Vance was managing editor of Art Nouveau magazine when it was Atlanta- and Miami-based. In addition to American Culture Reporter and Art Nouveau, Vance’s art writing (and occasional photography) has appeared in: Atlanta INtown, FRANK 151, eide’ magazine, Creative Loafing and LOOKBOOK.