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.