DAVIDGOUGHART

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Van Gough at Molotov Gallery


 Contributing to a little group exhibit later this week-recycling several works from the Man/son thing last year to a showcase at Molotov gallery-here in San Diego. It'll be my first appearance (proper) in my adopted hometown for some time, though as is customary, expect bugger all in the way of fanfare from the usual S.D periodicals. 

Still, since it's my only scheduled show until the unveiling of the new series a year from now, it gives those local folk that were sorry not to make it up to the Hyaena last October, a fighting chance to see the leftovers.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Fiddling whilst Rome burns, by Van Gough















That's the new piece propped on my easel, and it strikes me that sometimes, the work I do- for all its predisposition-eerily resounds the now. 

That sucking sound you hear is the canvas so dense with dark matter, it's like a black hole reflected in an ebon mirror.

It's the parable of Dante: a veritable inferno beyond the soaring temperatures and the demons of my studio, beyond the faux outrage over a Disney Monarch shaking her skinny arse on national tv, and a fallen crop of bloodless children littering the streets to the strains of a news anchors soundbyte. There's another ensuing war brewing like a witches cauldron in the middle east, a reactor in the orient spewing radiation like acid in a well, hubble-bubble, toil and trouble casting the shadow of an apocalyptic endpoint that both feeds the nihilists black imaginings and dismembers the optimists servant.  To be an artist sometimes means being possessed with the rage of the aggrieved and the despondency of the paralyzed.

In other word's it's enough fuel to stoke the fire and extinguish it, if only because as little air that moves through the studio right now, there is no living in a vacuum at such times.