Episode 553 – Peter Rostovsky

Virtual Memories Show 553:<br /> Peter Rostovsky “I was trained in this notion that art should tend toward a kind of inhumanity, a kind of neutrality. It can have political messaging, but we should mute the expressive nature But as I grow older – not necessarily wiser – I’ve grown okay with myself as an artist. I’ve discovered lyricism, poetry, imagination: all of those things that I once forbade myself from.” How did a hangover in 2015 lead to an award-winning debut graphic novel in 2023? Find out as Peter Rostovsky joins the show to celebrate the release of DAMNATION DIARIES (Uncivilized Books)! We get into the origins of his gorgeously & grotesquely drawn social satire about Hell (& Hell’s therapist, Fred Greenberg), what he had to learn about comics in the process of making his first one, how comics allowed him to wed his polemical nature to a deeply personal story, and why his version of Hell bears an awful lot of similarities to life in NYC. We also talk about what it was like emigrating from Russia to the Bronx as a 10-year-old kid in 1980, how comics helped him learn English, his strategies for blending in as a teen, and how he found redemption & maximalism in heavy metal. And we discuss his history in the worlds of fine art, art theory, internet utopianism, and teaching International Art English, the time he broke up a fight between a sculptor and a painter, whether AI is a McLuhan-esque ‘prosthesis’ for art, his mother’s recent death and how he feels about rendering her in Hell in Damnation Diaries, why I think he needs to write about his occasional childhood exile in a garden in the Hermitage, how giving up his solo studio and joining Dean Haspiel & others in Studio CLOACA gave him a community, and more. Give it a listen! And go read DAMNATION DIARIES! “I was a comics nerd, but I left it behind for a long time. It turns out I had from childhood an archived sense of the medium.”