DAVIDGOUGHART

Saturday, April 21, 2012

A Rose by any other name.


“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”

James Joyce

This is Rose Elizabeth Gough, born this past week to my son Thom and his young lady Rachael. Isn't she beautiful? 

Looking at her... thinking of her birth into a world I'd long since resigned as forsaken, makes me realize that some of the hopes, dreams and aspirations I had for the future are contained in her, that any legacy I could have hoped for pales in the remarkable, glorious potential her life brings.

Welcome to the world baby Rose.


Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Joseph Conrad-heart of darkness-painted portrait by David Gough



"Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line."

Joseph Conrad

After reading about a recent one off production
of Heart of Darkness, based on the lost screenplay by Orson Wells, I took a short break from my own dark imaginings to paint this in a few hours today-a portrait of Joseph Conrad.Of course, my generation were introduced to his book through Coppola's version-'Apocalypse Now',making his literature culturally incongruous (perfectly exemplified in Gary Oldmans gritty Nil by Mouth.) in that it encouraged legions of kids to pick up a book that wasn't already on the school curriculum, for the first time.

Anyway, with sketches for the new series still holding me hostage, it was rather nice to paint something that didn't require a great deal of effort or thought.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

My (grand)child could paint that.


Upon seeing his young son Paulo's scrawls, the aged Picasso remarked that he had spent a lifetime trying to paint that way.

It's a favorite anecdote of mine, and if it's seemed that I am oft completely adverse to abstraction, then I've done a disservice to my love of de Kooning,
Auerbach or Guston.

And if I've remarked that abstraction comes from a point of cynical ineptitude, then I am definitely doing a disservice to the third generation of Gough's-as my grandson so effectively proves here, with his total, unselfconscious, immersion into this massively epic painting which he annotated as
"birdies, tcheees (trees), buzz, sky, fog (frog)" .