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