End times

As October and the Man/son show draw towards Hallows end, it seems as good a time as any to let you all know that this blog is going on hiatus. I couldn't tell you how long radio silence shall be in effect, but for a while now, I have been finding myself longing to return to the Luddism of paper journaling. 

I've grown weary of trying to shout over the noise, and there is an innate power in a certain silence which I miss, and need to explore again. 

What I can tell you is that behind the cyber curtain, I shall still be creating. Duties on Purgatorium shall recommence, which promises to be my most epic undertaking, comprising as it will 32 pieces in all. 
 The preparations alone, from the stockpile of books I want to research, to the actual job of putting paint on canvas, I envisage will take me well into 2014-endtimes willing. 

The good news for those inclined, is that postings on the Cielo Drive blog shall resume next month,as there are still threads to tie up in that regard. 
I shall also continue to occasionally post on facebook here .

 Which just leaves me to say thank you for sticking with me, through thick and thin, and in the meantime, should any radically, drastic news be forthcoming, you shall hear about it first. 

Bad Vibes: The Devils Business by David Van Gough

"I'm the Devil, here to do the Devils business." With those words, Tex Watson scatter-shot the oncoming carnage at Cielo Drive with diabolical import.

Tex-who like Susan Atkins-would conveniently find God in the cold concrete realities of a State penitentiary 6" x 8".
Tex, whose parole would be advocated by Susan Struthers, the daughter of the slain La Bianca's.

But that was later. There were grander forces at play in Tex's telemetry before Cielo Drive.

Several hundred years of bad vibes "man",sacred geometry's, archaic symbols, clandestine orders, dark intentions, threads colliding and colluding on the psychic human tapestry, to form the foundations of a sinister architecture.

Or in the words of Manson...


"From the world of darkness, I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment."





The Man/son show runs until the 31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA.  

The Death of the '60's by David Van Gough

 

"There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days. The stench of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders." 
David Bowie talking about living in LA in the 1970's

August 9th 1969. It was meant to be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius....the final median before the new decade.Two weeks on, the grainy spectacle of the Moon landings still resonated, mollifying the shadow of Vietnam and two dead Kennedy's. It was also the anniversary of Nagasaki*, as well as the birth date of Ed Gien. Two disparate moments, connected by a thread no less devastating in its repercussion.

For whilst the events at 10050 Cielo Drive that night, paled when measured against the true horror of 80,000 deaths, the fallout that radiated from the bloody carve up of a pregnant celebrity and her three friends was a secession on the hedonism of the decade, farther reaching in the collective conscious (or conscience) of America's fucked up tapestry, than any atom bomb.
The dawning of the new age was ritualized with the blood of an innocent.

That's the true travesty of Manson legacy, the true infallible obscenity, a decade christened by a faux slain Madonna and her unborn infant.

The 70's stillborn. 

There could only be ashes beyond.

* for those wanting to pursue further Occult significance around the date, the flag from Nagasaki is the five pointed star, with five hermetic crosses in the center.


The Man/son show runs until the 31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA.  

Man/Son preview night on Cartwheelart

Saturday was the official opening night of the Man/son showcase, and was easily my most successful show to date. I could give you all a full account, except the wonderful people at Cartwheelart have done it so much more eloquently than I could. Thank you Lisa at Cartwheel, thank you Hyaena, thank you Dahlia Jane who looked incredible in her Manson dress especially made for the occasion, and thank you everyone who came out and supported me.

Cartwheelart article

Paul is Dead by David Van Gough

Around the time the Beatles were supposedly seeding there waxings and sleeve artwork with messages that one of their number was deceased, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski conceived a child who would be named Paul.

Had Sharon been hastily Cesarianed-as Sadie ghoulishly considered- Paul Polanski might have been born as an offering for Charlies Collective.

Paul Polanski,  an infant spawned of sacrifice and ceremony like Rosmary's baby, a lion cub born of Jupiter like one of Crowleys moonchildren birthed in ritualized blood, a pupae that could be imprinted as a Monarch for the new dawn.

Paul would have been forty three years of age this year had he lived. What kind of life would be brought to consciousness by a baptism of slaughter and fire, I wonder? What kind of Man?

A son of man?

A son of Manson?


The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am  

Pig by David Van Gough

It was the doorway of a new perception, a doorway to carnage, smeared with Sharons blood the word "Pig"-a welcome matt, a single label pronouncement that could have come courtesy of Orwell's Animal farm.

On the fag end of the 60's, Police, politicians and squares were pigs.  If you were the man, you were a pig. Tricky Dicky was most certainly a pig. And to Charlie's far out assassins, Sharon and her four friends, with there beauty and privileged Hollyweird lifestyle, were pigs of the lowest order,ripe for the butchers knife.

 I wonder if Atkins knew she was conjuring allusions to the pregnant Egyptian Goddess, Neuth as she daubed the letters on the door with her blood stained towel. I wonder if she knew it signaled a ritual passage for a birth of a new dark age.

Sharon's new role, sacrificial Mondo Goddess haunting the vacant B-movie lots. Sharon as Eve and the rotten Apple record. Sharon as Aphrodite from the succulent fruit of Dionysus. Sharon as an adolescent artist's muse, a phantom sex symbol of flickering white porcelain for the late night double feature. Sharon as dead Madonna and child castrating the 70's like Adonis's boar, a limp tail curled like the number six, like a semaphore.

We are the pigs, for the threshold beyond the bloody epitaph makes a narcissist of us all.


The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am 

Healter Skelter by David Van Gough

"When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again."

The twists and turns of Helter Skelter, led Bugolosi into the hall of mirrors, one which he saw himself reflected,forging a lucrative new career writing the most successful 'true' crime fiction novel ever. 

Helter Skelter-or Healter Skelter as it was written in blood on La Bianca's Freezer, a killer's catchphrase to hang with the shopping lists, postcards and fridge magnets.

"Listen" asks Bugolosi cupping his ear to the ground...Intoned in McCartneys raw vocals, in the shredding guitars, was the Devil unleashed? 
Was he? 
Was this song Charlies Catcher in the Rye, an inferno of annihilation embedded in-between the first note and Ringo's blistered fingers, composed to awaken the Mansonian candidate.  

Helter Skelter coming down.

He(a)lter Skelter-recapitulated. 
Easter Hell Trek
Hell retake rest
Lethal Seer Trek  
You begin to sound like Bugolosi.

And yet...and yet,at the base of the downward spiral,in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Laurel Canyon, echoed in the coyote howls of Death valley, or in the hollow of native Indian bones beneath, or scrawled in the bloody epiphets of  victims blood, lies something dormant. A specter that stains the ether beyond the hallucinogenic haze. A dark totem constructed of ritual murder, ancient orders and corrupt organizations.

And when I get to the bottom there is her-Sharon Tate, the disfigured goddess, eternal mother of the stars,leading me back to the top again, the questions swirling as I go around and around the serpent again to the tail,stoking the fires of hell.

The hell of Helter Skelter.



The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am

God of Fuck by David Van Gough

 

Around about the same time I was born, Charles Manson met Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme on Venice Beach, introducing himself as the self aggrandized 'God of Fuck'. 

He wasn't wrong, because the amount of Charlies Angels, willing to spread the gospel as well as their nubile thighs for the holy father, numbered around thirty by the time of trial.  

I thought of Charlie- instilling his message with his divine wand  and I painted the Scorpion from Revelation's fiery Pitt, engorged with blood and the eternal eye of Horus, like a phallus weeping blood and semen. 

I thought of the bullshit Beatles/Bible hybrid that counted for pillow talk in his Hippie harem, and painted a copy of the White album under his arm. 

I thought of the LSD that he doled out like Spanish fly and painted the little green tab as holy sacrament . 

Charlie-the cartoon messiah, small hands, big head, like a marionette who had gotten loose of his strings, 

Charlie-the literal God of fuck sewing his poison seed.

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am

War by David Van Gough

 

War, may have been etched in Charlies black heart, and in the Swastika on his forehead but it was Tex who got to do the crafty work on the plump gut of Leno LaBianca. 

The war Manson hatched was black against white, but in the bloody epitaph of each letter lay seeds of a light and darkness battle, beyond the color of skin. 

It was branded there in the lines of the slashed W, ascending and descending to form the square and compass of Freemasonry. 

It was there in the anarchist A, and the occult numerical values of the R: 6+6+6. It was there buried in the word reconstituted as the alchemical symbol for the Hermetic cross and its directive "As above, so below"
 

And it was there resonant in the Eastern mysticism's and ancient Hindu deities that informed the era-Kali with arms like a decade of blood spattered tendrils brandishing tools of death, along with Lennon's decapitated head, hanging like a semaphore on the love and peace generation forever.

War-that's what it was good for.

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am

Something Witchy by David Van Gough

Do 'Something Witchy'....Those were the instructions Manson allegedly gave to Tex Watson before the family went slaughter happy at Cielo drive, thus forever saddling the murders with  cabalistic connotation. 

That and a few several hundred other associations.

For me, the straying tendrils of madness all converged at the taloned toes of Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Theosophic mystic, seer, witch,and general bullshit artist with a parlor trick that could give David Copperfield a run for a saps money.

In the ancient Tibetan grimoires she discovered, said to reveal the future of humanity, I wondered if she divined the shitstorm her literary foray's would unload; Adolf, hot for the Madam's petticoats,hatching the little matter of his grand master-plan to incinerate an entire race, or anyone else who didn't fall into Helena's Aryan seven step theory. I wondered if she envisaged the fuhrerling subvert her adopted Hindu symbol for the sun and taint it until the light was tar black with the congealed blood of millions.

I wondered in her bugeyed reverie's if she determined a Charlie Manson-a bastard son of Mengele's Eugenic fuckery- brain fried like a KF Chicken,(or Bluebird) cooked by CIA lab chef's, spiced and peppered with Eastern philosophy and LSD, carve the Madams little totem over his minds eye, but not before getting his disciples to do some home style buffet carving of their own.

If Tex and his cohorts-Charlies Angels- were faking Something Witchy that night, then it came in the wake of 80 years of occult dressing post Blavatsky, precisely at midnight August 9 1969, heavy with the invocations of dark symbols, ritualistic style murder and Ma(n)sonic lore.

I wondered all this and I painted Blavatsky's withering left eye exploding and morphing into the serpentine 's' of Himmler's guard and the lightning bolt of the O.T.O. 

I saw Hitler and his tyrannic stare arced into a bloody sickle, an axis connecting the S to form the hood of a 3, the sacred number of the Scottish rite.

I saw Manson, inbred maniac,mutant child of the two sneering at their ordered schemes with blanket chaos swirling in his programmed, drug addled brain.

I saw it all as an ectoplasmic loop, the Madams mink reanimated by one of her seances-shrieking death and thought...."You fuck with the devil, and someone gets their finger's burned eventually" 
  

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am 

Man/Son: the Haunting of the American Madonna-a series by David Van Gough

Here it is, the full measure of the Man/Son showcase, a months work -the culmination of a years research, of which seven of the pieces were completed in two weeks. I've sworn never to undertake such a task again.

For all its hardship, there have been revelations for me, the revelation that convinces me that dark evil forces exist and are perpetuated by powers with sinister agenda's.That the connections around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies understanding. That for all our supposition to the contrary, this so called modern world is imposed by a dark ancient will, that uses ritual murder, arcane rites,symbols and talisman, sinister architecture and sacred geometry. 
That mostly, this path I was on wasn't just the search for clues in a detective story, but a spiritual one, seeking a sense of reason in the harrowing chaos, pivoted on the gruesome killing of a beautiful woman and her unborn child.

This is the heart of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna.

 

Bad Vibes
24" x 36"
Mixed media

 Something Witchy
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

 

War
16" x 20"
Oil on canvas

God of Fuck
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

Healter Skelter
24" x 36"
Oil on canvas

 

Pig
16" x 20"
Oil on canvas

  

Rise
30" x 40"
Oil on canvas

Paul is Dead
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

 

Death and the Maiden
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

Death of the 60's
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

Computer Love

Those of you who bought a copy of my book-D3ad/Ends last year, will know that I was very honored to have David Buckley write the introduction. Distinctions are rare enough for me, but when accolades such as Buckley's foreword come along, they far outweigh the complete disinterest I still endure from some quarters.

Which is one of the reasons I wanted to let you know that David has a new book out, about the electronic doyens of Krautrock - Kraftwerk. For those of us that wore out the grooves of Autobahn in our dingy bedrooms, It promises an extensive delve into the dark cybertronic heart of the band as well as a reminder of times when futurist avant garde pop was still being played on the radio.
It also boasts one of the most beautifully designed book covers ever.

You can get your copy on Amazon, from the link below:

Kraftwerk Publikation

Bad Vibes painting by David Van Gough

This piece is called Bad Vibes, and is something of a key for the series I suppose.
Its the final piece, and although I'm a day from calling it a day-or at least a month, I could argue that the quagmire of madness and festering research, that surrounds the Manson case will never end. 

It struck me yesterday, that given ten years I could find myself still peeling back layers, and that this entire series could look like a different beast by then. Perhaps I'll do an anniversary edition with some bonus tracks.

Perhaps not.

As far as this particular project goes, all will be revealed soon.

First P/Review at Midnight Dreary

The ever eloquent Dahlia Jane, has just previewed the show over at her darkly blog-Upon a Midnight Dreary-where you can see previews for three of the works for my Man/son show, alongside her usual razor sharp insights by clicking the title link below. Thank you mon amie...

Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna

Man/Son Press release

Hyaena Gallery Presents:

MAN/SON and the Haunting of the American Madonna

Oil Paintings by David Van Gough

October 1 through October 31

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 6, 8 pm to 12 am

 

Hyaena Gallery

1928 W. Olive Ave.

Burbank, CA 91506

hyaenagallery.com

Bill Shafer, Director

info@hyaenagallery.com

Artist Website: http://davidgoughart.com

On Saturday, October 6, David Van Gough reveals a dark new series inspired by one of Los Angeles' most enduring and infamous villains.  From Aleister Crowley to Charles Manson, Liverpool to LA, MAN/SON explores an artistic evocation of America's occult underbelly.  Taking cues from the bloody epithet's left at the crime scenes, and associated key phrases, the series draws upon his own year-long research into what he terms as sinister architecture, conspiracy, clandestine rituals, magic symbols and the tragic muse-Sharon Tate, recapitulated as the American Madonna and child.

Artist Statement:  

Growing up in Liverpool in the 70's was akin to living in a forgotten town.
The golden gate to the new frontier that had been the shipyards lay dormant.  The modern tenements that had been constructed on the promises of post-war zeal two decades earlier, now lay in ruin.
And the Beatles had disbanded in 1970.
Yet they were still ubiquitous.  The chorus of moptop's echo on every wireless was Liverpool's swansong.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in California, time had been called on the Sixties.  And a dreadful pall hung over the subsequent era like an incomprehensible epitaph: Helter Skelter and the Manson Murders.
Back in my Liverpool bedroom overlooking Anfield cemetery, a few yards from the railway line where four year old Jamie Bulger would be murdered by two boys in the mid 1980's, I was immersed in the subculture of fantagoria -- Hammer Horror, Dennis Wheatley, Man,Myth and Magic -- little realizing that terrible events in an affluent suburb of LA, and a song by Liverpool's favorite sons, were intertwined with Friday night Horror staples such as Rosemary's Baby and The Fearless Vampire Killers.
In my journey, there have been threads that go beyond mere happenstance, symbols and ciphers that are window dressing for something profound and dark beneath. In commencing then with the new series, utilizing the tragic muse and slain Madonna figure of Sharon Tate as a symbol for an endpoint, there was a need to relate and process that which is beyond understanding.
Peter Levenda's words in Sinister Forces Book III sum it up for me, "...for the occultist-there is truly "no such thing as coincidence," or more accurately, that coincidence is a clue that deeper connections exist between observable phenomena, that another force of nature is at work that we don't understand."

The MAN/SON series seeks to make sense of those fatal events of 1969, and what I have come to term as sinister architecture.

Artist Biography:

Working out of San Diego, David Van Gough is an oil painter who strives to expose the darkest recesses of the human spirit on canvas.  A self-proclaimed necrorealist, Van Gough grew up steps from a cemetery in gritty Liverpool.  Tormented throughout his life by Catholic guilt, mortality and paranoia, his paintings are fevered exorcisms, which comment upon both the futileness and poignancy of the universal human condition.

Gough was the Honoree Artist of 2010 at the San Diego Art Institute.  In 2009, Gough was published in the book Gothic Art Now.  In 2011 Darq Matter Publishing released Gough's collection of fine art and essays D3ad/Ends. He has exhibited at San Diego Art Institute, Oceanside Museum of Art, The Hive Gallery, Alexander Salazar Fine Art, Alternative Café, Mosaic Gallery, and Thumbprint Gallery.

Publicity contact for more information, interviews, high resolution images:

Dahlia Jane Upon a Midnight Dreary

847-712-2688

dahliaj@ymail.com   uponamidnightdreary.com

Hell to Skelter

It peaked 106° here on Friday, at least outside-in the studio I've been running a fever-a temperature akin to the lava flow of a volcano on the surface of Mercury. I've been living, eating and breathing the work. 

I wake up and go to sleep with it percolating in my brain, to the point were I've lost all objectivity on whether what I am doing is good anymore. I look at the work lined up at various stages of finish and I think it is-at least I hope it is-for Sharon Tate at least. 

A good friend in a similar storm, said something like that in such circumstances, one should supplant the concept for any finnesse, and as much as I try to remind myself that I am trying to accomplish in a month, something that should have taken me ten, it niggles at me as much as the nest of ants that I stem around the sugar bowl, daily.

Press release goes out tomorrow, I believe, a week to deadline and all will be revealed. In the meantime above is another detail teaser of the Healter Skelter piece.

Conspiracy fever

Amongst the works in progress, I'm realizing there's a very real path to madness in conspiracy. You begin to seek spurious connections and make irrational equations in everything.

Implausibity suddenly becomes possibility....the paranoia of numerology,a website that is a predictor to doomsday, the Illuminati, David-fucking-Icke. Its like a piss poor episode of the X Files-the ones after Mulder and Skully left.

And yet with the quagmire surrounding the Manson case, how can one damn so much such staggering coincidence?

Or are the elements merely the colliding threads of cosmic architecture, a sinister undercurrent with no purpose?

I walk this path daily, and I realise its not healthy, but eight to ten hours amongst the ravages of paintings,the unrelenting heat, the fumes and the shadow of Manson,will do that to you.

Speaking to a friend the other day about the series, I realized that wading through the mire of bullshit, is no different than setting a rationale for God-its like trying to fit chaos and happenstance into a divine plan for the a clandestine order of an omnipotent mind. 

What a great title actually, perhaps it should be the name of the final piece . I am just over half way, With just two weeks to complete another six pieces.

I remind myself theres enough insanity there.

From Madam Blavatsky to Charles Manson, Liverpool to LA, David Van Gough explores and artistic evocation of Americas occult underbelly, through a series inspired by one of its most infamous murders. Taking cues from the bloody epithet's left at the crime scenes, and associated key phrases, the series draws upon his own year long research into what he terms as sinister architecture, conspiracy, clandestine rituals, magic symbols and the tragic muse the pregnant Sharon Tate, recapitulated as the American Madonna and child.

Revolution nine

 

It must be over twenty years since I listened to the White Album in full-its one of those albums that seems so a part of cultural ubiquity (and for me at least) forever associated with the communal toke at college parties, that any impact it could have had, has long since passed me by.  I gave it another 'spin' today,minus the crackles,grooves and hemp: it still held a certain charm that did nothing to imbue an edge for my daubing, even after Helter Skelter had long finished. 
And then 'Revolution 9' kicked in, and it was like standing at the gates of Ceaser's Palace again. 
I wondered how, even in the dizzy haze of 'leb'-the resonance of this quagmire of dissonant sound didn't strike a wake up chord back then. The banshee carrion call of number nine repeated against a jarring backdrop of spectral phaze waiting to be encoded. 
But to whom? 
Manson, the Manchurian candidate?
Manson the cartoon messiah, a serial killer made for a cereal box generation?

I'm so immersed in the conspiracy bullshit-twelve months of revelation since what started as macabre homage to an adolescents love affair with a dead muse, and I can't think straight for the paint fumes and relentless heat.
And yet Revolution 9 sits like a skeleton stripped bare and redraped again as a eureka moment....something doesn't sit right.

Two paintings this week now completed-'Healter Skelter' (anagram of Easter Hell Trek) and 'God of Fuck'-umpteen to go in 24 days. And more weird phone calls that pick up with tapping on the line.
I must be onto something.

Postcards from the Edge

Postcards for the show arrived today, and the shit suddenly felt real. Paint spattered in my studio headspace for eleven hour stretches, its easy to forget the endgame, which is no bad thing.

Livin devil may care...painting detail of Helter Skelter by David Van Gough

It's a sneak peak wip for what will be the pivotal 'Healter Skelter' piece for Octobers show, and at times it's felt I'm on a downward spiral.

I wonder if I shall ever feel adequately prepared 'enough' for the work I am undertaking? I mean the hours of research, the contemplations,the journaling, the nest of snakes the understanding unleashes. From book to canvas, Utah to Vegas.... and talk about juxtapositions.

And so it was, another brief sojourn, this time to visit my son who is there this week with his girlfriends family.

I was prepared for the heat, but not the parable of literal Hades manifest there. In my readings and writings and questing for my mission for the Man/Son series, I've developed a theory called sinister architecture, which you can attribute psychically or geographically, depending on your side of the fence (or defense), but in Vegas it's there, so blatant and balls out as to be blase-a caricature of Babylon, a eulogy of self aggrandized American myth with deities, demons and gargoyles bought wholesale, sitting like guardians atop an abyss of excess, whilst a Black pyramid ( the hotel Luxor named after its counterpart and glorious city of God Amon-Ra in Egypt) shines a single slivering beacon into the pliant sky, like a temple of the Golden Dawn. 

 It's there when you realize the will to the spectacle, the council of magi that must of requisitioned it all, because look beneath the surface at the pantheon of occultist reference and reverence,  Vegas isn't just the pretentious child of gangsters, investors,accountants, architects and artists, its the mindset of dark understanding.

Perhaps that's what my study and research has given me-as unwashed and often callow as I feel on this journey down the rarebit hole I've dug for myself-my mind and eyes and minds-eye are open as never before,  attempting to articulate in paint.

Last days of Summer

It's over a month away, and I just took a week off the grid camping in Utah, playing at polygamy, hiking the kind of terrain the Mars rover would photograph,and drinking warm three percent proof wine on warmer night's. 
It's a dry state in a dry climate, only one liquor store we could find, nestled at the back of a gift store,selling native Indian tat made in China.  
Yet there in the valley, surrounded by the austere crag of Saints, its a place that seems mired in ancient forces,the turbulent hum beneath the ground of fossilized spirits and forgotten rites.

Or perhaps it was just the heat, and the grimoire's I was reading? 

When heat hits the high nineties, people get crazy-maybe that's why it's a draw for the congregation of the latter day's, the way the heat feeds the madness and maybe after Utah, hell seems like a Roman bath house. 

Going to have to be off the grid a bit longer-find my religion,the draw of other spirits, other rites, the easel, the artery to Samhain...a sabbatical for the sabbath.
The heat is on, and  September is around the corner, so I shall see you all on more temperate nights....sooner or later.

Sharons Back

 

It's still wet, and the light is casting a glare making for a piss poor photo, but I think 'Pig' is almost done. I kept it loose and raw, sometimes scoring into the wet paint with toothpicks or the end of the brush.

I had considered painting it onto an actual door-though not 'The' door. 
I think Trent Reznor still has the original anyway, from his time at Cielo drive.
Time and the logistics of scale put paid to any idea I had about using any door anyway, but am thinking of incorporating another element  when it comes to framing.

Despite the vileness of the content, this series-more than my others seems very much informed by a spirit of painterly experimentation-seeing what I can do within the parameters of traditional figurativism without degenerating into abstraction. 

I hope it conveys a sense of the 60's anyway.

Robert Hughes R.I.P

 "Apart from drugs-art, is the biggest unregulated market in the world"


I just discovered Robert Hughes has gone. The last dissenting voice on the quagmire that is the con of contemporary Art.

I still have Shock of the New on my book shelf, and on days when I am feeling utterly futile,(usually when Hirst or Emin's name appear in the news) I fall back on my Youtube stalwart-The Mona Lisa Curse-for solace. That withering stare, that chuckle of contempt, as he eviscerates a Warhol pack rat...Artists, curators, patrons seek it out Here

Sharon Tate

She died 33 years ago tonight. It would have been a balmy evening much like this one. The kind of night when crickets and the motoring whir of the ceiling fan fill's the tranquil air. A night when the doors and windows are pulled back to the hinge for the chance to feel the occasional breeze. 
Nobody should be reminded that Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent also died on that night, but it's Sharon and her unborn innocent who has been cast as death's maiden. The protective veil of celebrity drawn back to reveal the disfigured beauty beneath. The Madonna and her moonchild Paul. 

I spent the day blistering in the studio-Planet Mercury hotter than Hades-working on the Pig piece, feeling the burn of my adolescent desire for her ethereal beauty, quelled only by the distaste of what I am doing. Having to remind myself that the muckraking, the endless questions, the rabbit holes, the embellishment isn't just desecration, its like mining the labyrinth of Laurel Canyon tunnels, it's a search for an innate truth.

And you know, it shouldn't be easy, especially on a night such as this one,when all I have to concern myself with is the color of paint and staying cool.

Board Games-Ouija Board commission project by David Gough

 
Here is one of the pieces I've been sequestered upon of late. Its the frontispiece for a Ouija board, which will eventually be inlaid into a light box cabinet. The only remit I had was to do what I do, but to include the actress Elizabeth Short-better known to the initiated as the Black Dahlia. 

 

 This gave me carte blanche of course to instill a full gamut of occult imagery by way of Kenneth Anger in the Victorian parlor.

I'll post more pictures once the cabinet has been fully assembled.

Ziggy Stardust painted portrait by David Gough

So Ziggy is forty,hard to believe for anyone who was there when the Starman first played guitar.

I would have only been five years-too young to have a 'lectric eye, pick him up on channel two, between a wave of phase, but in another five his creators message and music would become all encompassing. 

It's been pretty much that way ever since. Of course, Low is and shall always be my album of choice, but it does no harm to recall the wild mutation that came before. Love on ya.

Manson Show at Hyaena gallery in October.

Further to my previous post, I am delighted to reveal that I shall be showing my Manson/Tate themed works at the wonderful Hyaena gallery from October 1st, until October 31st, with an opening on the 6th. 

Which means that between now and then, I'll be firmly ensconced in my continuing research as well as realizing the pieces for the show. 

Part of the reason that my sister blog-one hundred and fifty Cielo drive-has been on hiatus is because I'll be revisiting my Liverpool hometown in July, which will take me to some places of interest-Hitlers presumed haunts, architectural sites, as well as the obligatory Lennon routes. At this stage, I'm not sure if the showcase will include just the paintings, or my research notes and journals, but I do foresee a possible book to tie it all together at a later date.