The Eternal Battle progress 1

What to say about my latest outing? I could tell you that this one has been five years in the making.The huge canvas is at least that old, and the piece itself was meant to be the focal piece of the Purgatorium series, except time put paid to that. I never thought I’d gotten the idea right you see, so it was reworked as a dozen sketches over the years, before being shelved until very recently.
That was when I realized it should have been vertical instead of horizontal all along.
If nothing else, this tumultuous year has offered perspective.

The Eternal Battle is just a working title for now, but that’s Hitler and Van Gogh scrapping it out by the way, which is part of an ongoing theory I have about creative destruction and artistic failure in the 20th century. That would make a great title of a modern thesis actually-perhaps Mathew Collings should option it.  Perhaps not.

Lots of shows between now and the year end, but I’ll keep battling away on it and posting progressions in the interim.

Celestine

Extinction Dance
60" x 48"
Acrylic on canvas

Someone I've recently had the good fortune of getting to know is a lovely young artist who goes by the name of Celestine. Having exhibited together at a couple of group shows here, it was a real pleasure the other day then to be given a personal tour of her solo exhibition at Pulse gallery.

Celestine-or Fei as I know her-was raised in China, and although she trained briefly in what she calls 'the Russian school of painting' when she was young, didn't begin her artistic odyssey until very recently.

One would never know.

The mess you left behind
30" x 24"
Oil on canvas

Her work seems thematically placed somewhere between the sensual half light of 80's film noir stained by an underbelly of vice and the muscular strokes of expressionism. Her paintings give that uneasy vantage point, through the so called Hollywood high life, late night last bubbles of bourbon and cocaine, and the toxic haze of cigar smoke.

The brittle beautiful child of Terry Rodgers and Eric Fischl without the sterility.

Beautiful Liar
40" x 40"
Oil on canvas

Sadly it's the final day before her show comes down, but anyone in the vicinity should catch this showcase if they can. Everyone else should follow what she does here-I fully intend to:

Celestine-in Darkness and Light.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin thinks the arts are frivolous.

So bereft of intelligence is this repugnant, homecoming spleen queen, that she completely lacks the faculty to contemplate the sense of irony in that statement.

Do you know why Palin hates the Arts? Because as I've written before Art is "...an ever evolving amoeba that continually redefines itself, but can define whole cultures with a flourish, visualize the future dreams that are the foundation of empires, encapsulate a human epithet or a profound moment in world history" Basically then, everything this troll lacks in understanding, everything that is counterpoint to the Republican dream.
Why does the media here continue to give a platform to this ghastly woman? Because she is the the dribbling mouthpiece of extremes that a certain withered arm of the tabloid is ravenous for?
Because she is some homegrown champion of a Pleasantville,white supremacist, time-warp?

Perhaps.

For me she represents everything that is currently stagnant about America-myopic, vapid, self obsessed, indignant, unrepentant, draconian, toxic-a catchall chasm of bilious soundbites bathed in the star spangled banner of apple pie,scripture and poison.

To waste another adjective on her behalf would be to give her more credit than her twisted sense of the universe could process, and yet there she is undeniably squatting on column inches like Snooki, or some other piece of cultural excreta,but that's what it is to be fodder, that's what it is to be truly "frivolous."

Exploding Muse-new paintingn by David Van Gough

Exploding Muse

Acrylic on Canvas

11" x 14"



I worked on another study today, for what I can only call my series of exploding muses. Fatigue prevents me from writing a detailed exposition on the why's and wherefores of these pieces, but suffice to say there's something of an expression of decaying beauty in there.

Notes from An Easel-Old Haunts-new Ghost painting by David Van Gough

'Ghost V-The turmoil of Years, '85 and '92'Acrylic on canvas
11" x 14"

Just as the last Ghost felt symbolic of a year, this one seemed distinctly placed between 1985 and 1992. Both of those years of course were significant in that Martin and Ian died in them. There's an arc there, and the yellows and blues seem part of a palette that embodies the garishness of the times,heightened by the muddiness of monochrome. Hopes dashed.

It's always been my intention to work like this, i'ts as close a relative as I can get to ambient, avant garde Jazz I suppose-speaking in terms of form and texture, making tangible those things that aren't,

Notes from an Easel-Hollow Death throws-new painting by David Van Gough

Here it is-'Ghost IV-the spirit of '79'

I'm enjoying the way the paint develops the forms, almost in the manner of a Rorschach ink blot, morphing into an organic mass. The series continues to deconstruct, into I suppose the figurative abstraction every artist evolves to.

But is it caricature or a shorthand?

Head Candy-June Gloom

No kidding. If the mercurial grays of May, felt more than tinted with post holiday blue, then this month has been obscured beneath the blackened cloud of financial instability and some pretty harsh kick in the teeth realities.

Sales have been dire, and I find myself falling on the sword of my resolution that I would make at least $500 from art a month.The truth has always been as sharp as a broken bone-unless you are an artist lucky enough to be adopted as a media darling or the splashy savant of some sniffy downtown gallery, then you forever teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. It seems to be my default, and as much as I press and I push to cut a swathe and redress the balance, the trad fucking stereotype of the artists garret looms like a terrible long September shadow.

Still, nobody has had the incredible presence of mind in this damned desert to rhyme die with July yet, so this next month may afford a different shade.

There is a potential exhibition I am considering, which may be the biggest thing I've done yet, but is something of a gamble, in that it requires the same boring old chestnut.

And then I have it on fairly good authority (or at least an email) that the printed issue of 'I want your skull' should be available this week.

Finally there is the art itself-I come so close at such hard times to calling it quits forever, making a pyre of everything and consigning myself to never painting another stroke. And then I remember that the interminable, terrible, need to create has nothing to do with money.

it never did.

Notes from an Easel-Epiphanys

Going through the remnants of the folio I brought back from England, I was struck yesterday with how much of a struggle my artistic pursuit has always been.
I don't mean in a technical way-at varying degrees I've improved as anyone would when they do something over an extended period of time.
Even thematically I've always steered true to the convictions of my muse.
No, the struggle has come in the face of indifference, rejection, poverty and obscurity and I don't think that I really ever gave myself the credit that I've remained so focused on the goal of my passion, and making some sort of life with art in it as a foundation. I guess I'm recognizing that no matter how much life has kicked me down, the desire to create something has been a positive that I've returned to again and again, inspite of it.

Even if at the end of it all, I am not recalled in whatever annals by virtue of even a footnote-and as I get older, the realisation of that strikes me as more than a possibility now-my art has given me more than it has taken,and perhaps that's all I could ever have hoped for.

And Another Thing-Brow Beating

"Eventually I'm going to be run over and completely forgotten by the people who paint big-eyed children"Robert Williams

Whilst at some sterile mall somewhere the other day, I was drawn to the promise of starting 2010 early by enlivening it at a calender kiosk.

Amongst the tat of doe eyed pups, Twilight vampires and Irish valleys was the obligatory 'art' section, consisting of Thomas Kinkade, Louis Royo, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. Perhaps its something to do with the ever homogenization of modern vacuous culture, but It struck me that the public's perception of what constitutes 'art'- which is to say relevant art-is ever diminishing. I had to ask myself, is that a bad thing?
I am reminded of a time, when the section would have been consumed by the usual Impressionist stalwarts and Mucha art nouveau flourishes. The elitism of high brow gallery's took the lions share of wall space, and if there was any concession to so called low brow, it was through artists like Norman Rockwell and Beryl Cook. Of course there was also Dali and Giger to keep us purists happy, veritable sore thumbs, able to traverse the gaping chasm between both camps with imagery that defied category and the technical virtuosity of an old master.


This isn't to say, that I don't find work like Kinkaids excreble-I do-I decry most modern tastes and long for the days when art isn't relegated to matching the curtains- but because I do, does that mean that it ceases to exist as a yardstick to current cultural ideals? As such it probably inhabits the same space as a Hogarth three hundred years ago, or that poster in the 70's of a girl in tennis gear flashing her arse cheek. People-unfortunately, are just not that deep, and time, seasons the bubble gum on the sole of history's shoe with the value of artifact.

An artist friend of mine was once leveled with the charge that their painting was to art, what Merlot was to wine, which was only amusing until you realized how many bottles of Merlot are sold everyday.

Art-it seems, no longer exists in an oppulent bubble for the sniffy borgeouis, and like that tremendous scene in Sideways with Paul Giamatti, loses nothing in its flavour when consumed in the context of a fast food joint.

And Another thing-Con Art

'I kept hearing David's plaintive cry, "I just wish something would break soon."' relates former manager, Kenneth Pitt in Marc Spitz's excellent new book- Bowie biography.


Reading those lines, its the Bowie I connect with the most. I think of him there, mired in pre-fame anonymity...'down on my knees in suburbia, down on myself in every way...' he would sing later on the 'Buddha of Suburbia' title song.
For nine years he schlepped himself around every dead beat, dead end repository, starving for his gravy, but still an indomitable talent never the less. Pre Ziggy, he couldn't even get arrested let alone a break. What spurred that self belief? Certainly he wasn't delusional, but in the face of such endless disappointment, I imagine he must have believed that he would die in the obscurity of his Beckenham roots-demons dance you to the precipice of defeat so many times as an artist.

There go I without the rest.

Robert Williams-the godfather of pop surrealism, makes some rather wonderful observations about the artists lot in this months anniversary edition of Juxtapoz too. A soundbyte every two sentences, I could pour over his eminently quotable delivery for hours, or at least every time I take my leave to the bog, which is where I do a lot of my ruminating in all honesty.

To paraphrase: 'In the last 30 years, the most gifted have had to make do with occupations as commercial artists. The fine art establishment has purged itself of beautifully executed imagery, and Art has become what Marcel Duchamp hoped for-whatever the artist points as Art.'
Though his consternation is largely pointed at the continuing adoption by the elite for abstraction, its a valid point that holds more than a cistern of water, particularly when you consider the most recent excreble contribution by post modernists figurehead, Damien Hirst, and the inevitable legion of platinum gold card collectors, that will be fawning over his shabby,Francis Bacon knock offs.

Capital "A" Art is a con, and I suspect the true artisans are those practitioners such as the Hirsts, Emmins, and that guy who glued elephant shit to a canvas whose name escapes me now. Those artists that parlay any true draftsmanship for the shock value of the emperors new clothes, and good for them-art history is littered with as many poseurs as it is Van Gogh's, auteur's rather than artists-why not give a kick to the establishment, take the money or even the Monet and run as it where. There is no honor in the artists garret, believe me.
For myself, I imagine that means I've taken the lesser road then, part of the marginalized that Williams advocates, but still no less hungry for that break as Bowie was in his suburban ennui.

Object D' Art-Dark Vomit

On general release from today, is something which I believe shall be the flagship project for how art shall be viewed in the future. The Interactive Art Show Video game, is more than your trad shoot em up fare, consisting of fifteen artists-the San Diego Surrealists as I believe we shall be known-it includes, annexes of gallery rooms, host to a variety of subterranean denizens-curators of the nightmare visions by the artists in residence. Appropriately, my own area is a dank dungeon, and the scene of a decapitation by guillotine:

The Interactive Art Show

It was produced seemingly in the blink of an eye by fellow artist-Dark Vomit-Kelly Hutchinson, whose exceptional pop surreal painting is one of the many highlights of this project. His canvases are either inhabited by those terrifying symbols of many a childhood nightmare-garish, sneering clowns,such as the corporate avatars of capitalism- McDonalds and Jack, to the Joker and the puppet from the Saw movies. Or the icons of American tapestry, altered through the mutated multi-ocular lens of a mushroom trip, or emasculated like John Wayne in a dress for a cotton candy parade, all rendered with the deft brush of an old master in a classical setting.

http://www.darkvomit.com/

My favourite works, are those with the toy plastic dentures, rabidly snapping from the brittle necks of skeletons, riding crows or about to consume some cute chicklet-a momentary innocence lost to the jaws of death.

Artwork copyright of Dark Vomit ©-reproduced with kind permission

Unsurprisingly, he has just become the feature of a Juxtapoz article which you can read here:

'Knee Deep in Dark Vomit'

A big Thank you to Kelly for my inclusion in this very exciting project, to all the other artists for making the game a gallery powerhouse, and a special thanks to the really lovely artist-Celine, for giving me a tip of the hat to begin with.

Object D' Art-Tomi Ungerer-Agent Provocateur

'My anger is essential to my work,-Humour is a defense mechanism against the evils of society.'
Tomi Ungerer




I first became aquainted with Tomi Ungerers work, upon discovering his dark little tome-Testament-in an even darker corner of a Liverpool library in the very early 1980's.
The naive, fluid economy of brittle line drawings, belied the psychological and political depth of his renderings-from the protest posters of the 60s, to the flabby skinned,pearls and fur draped caricatures of high society,stiffing one another with a leer, or the Belsen style corpses humping sadomasochistic machines (when not fleecing swine tied to kitchen furniture,that is), the stark expressionistic monochrome of his sardonic humor, cut through the dung like the knife carving blood trails on the jacket.

A popular children's illustrator and broadsheet cartoonist in the US during the fifties and sixties-Ungerer-seeing too many parallels between the Nazi occupied township of his childhood, and the war in Vietnam, became incensed and returned to his native Europe in 1971, growing more subversive in the approach to his craft.

Recast as 'agent provocateur' no stone of modern malady was left unturned and tossed in vitriol, be it a world choked by greed, overpopulation and industrialization, the sacrificial bloodletting and bomb stockpiles of the warmongers, or the alienation of sexual perversion-now more than ever-his work peels back the thinly veiled skin to reveal the stark bone of societies distemper beneath.

And Another Thing...

This weekly article will be an opportunity for me to vent about something:

"Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind."Charles Caleb Colton



I've heard it said that art and commerce will never make good bedfellows-the corporate homogenization of what is a cerebral, spiritual and sometimes visceral occupation always seeming incongruous amongst the pie chart machinations of the boardroom.
One might think then that the world of advertising-or graphic design, might at least be a fitting agent for a modicum of creativity within that geography.
I realise my age may be showing here, but when I began my tenure as a designer, some twenty odd umpteen years ago, the artists studio, consisted of hefty art boards, slide rulers, rotring pens,scalpels and paste up.In some quarters, hot metal type was still in use, and anything you speculated was composed with good old fashioned magic markers and balls out talent.
At this point, I'm want not to come on like a granddad at the disco here, but I saw my first computer in a studio in '88. After that, everything began to change, and if you were not prepared to pull with the punches, and get with the 'program', then you were a redundant Luddite-a dinosaur relic of an age when being in advertising had something of a elite romantic sophistication to it*
Nowadays of course, everyone is a designer-Kids working at Blockbuster can knock off a a little bit of Flash with some nifty clip art and Photoshop knowledge, and can invigorate a Myspace page to award status.
Whilst online, companies like Crowdspring, demean the process further, by providing a catalyst between client and artist, where you provide several designs along with a million others, in the hopes of winning a lottery of a miserable $200.

Is it any wonder then, in such a milieu, that there are so many maggots on the periphery, ready to exploit the process, and treat artists as expendable commodity. Of course, the industry has never been short of bastards-the same could be said of any corporate setting, where a stabbed back comes as regular and as iced as your morning mocca latte. And yet, personal experience with this-and believe me when I tell you that there are tales I could relate of the most evil 'low ball' personal affrontary-all leads me to believe that with the advent of things like Craigslist, the continuing recession, the ubiquity of designers, and the death knell of the unions in the 90's, the rabid dog is off the leash and there is nobody to watch it.
Creativity nowadays is perceived as nothing more than pixels on a screen, terminology replacing what was once a highly regarded position diminished to the moniker 'Mac Monkey'.

It is an age when true draftsmanship no longer carries any currency-where lofty titles such as 'developer' hold the lions share in terms of pay scale, for what amounts to typing code into a Joomla template.

And whilst I have no aspiration to adopt a working knowledge of CSS this or PHP that, I could if I wished, the difference therein being then, whether said developer could ever hope to do the same if asked to do what I can.

I'll leave you with a memory I have of a designer I worked with a few years ago-an old school artist of some advancing years from the halcyon days, who came aboard to work up some marker visuals for a formidable campaign for laminate flooring.
After several days of work, he produced what were the slickest hand rendered ,clever ads I have ever seen, securing the client against agencies who had used the usual computer generated trickery.

The story doesn't end there-my friend, upon handing his invoice to the director was greeted by apoplectic consternation-"You want how much for three days work?" was his retort.

To which my friend paused momentarily with a sort of here we go again look upon his face and replied...

"Three days work boss, but a life times experience."


*For further exposition see an episode of Mad Men.

Notes from an easel part 22-a return to your regular programming

This is my third stab at this piece, which originally found itself as almost a throwaway concept, about the absurdity of dressing death up. Of course I felt I'd said it much better with Axiom, so this was my satirical approach, almost an Alfred E Neuman version from MAD magazine. Of course, whenever I'd show the piece at events, it got a lot of attention, so I've finally decided to work it up properly, with the exception that I've developed it to a further level, and may include an additional dimension to it.

Anyway, here is the sketchbook version, with the rough markings on canvas below. Incidently, when my daughter-Emma-first saw the piece, she said the little bunny characters painted on the skull looked like something called 'Miffy'. My intention had been to do a Hello Kitty style character, but thought I'd create my own . Apparently someone got there before me. How bizarre.


Following on from Sundays Exhibit at Thumbprint, there was a very nice video which popped up on my Facebook from the event. Thankfully, I appear in the background, for a few seconds (although I was interviewed that day, which should surface sometime soon) its a lovely momento.

The Video is Here

Notes from an easel-new painting by David Gough-Sacramenstrual

Theothanatos X-Eve/Sacramenstrual
24" X 36"
Oil on Canvas
2009

Primarily with this work, I wanted very much to observe the symbolic contradictions that exist within religion-or at least within the holy sacrament and the way women are treated. From the ingesting of Christs blood- offset against the vilification of the unchaste (Eve-Magdeline) symbolic of a bloodied hymen through the virtuous elevation of the virgin, to the doctrine charge of impurity and desexualisation of women during the menstrual cycle in Leviticus 15 (some cultures still sequester females in menstrual huts), echoed by the torn red curtain of the confessional, and the 'rivers of blood' snaking between the columns.

I'm hugely proud of the accomplishment of this work, its evolution was very much an ongoing organic process.
I'll make prints available soon.

Sacramenstrual-work in progress by David Gough

I had intended to post more wip's, but my camera went wayward following a live painting event. For whomever discovered it, those final pictures will garner such delights as an exquisite half naked young female, being body painted like some Gigeresque extra. I kid you not.

So, in between side projects, a bout of flu in which I caught up my Netflix and the entire first season of Weeds, and some sweat time at the gym, I've been tickling away at the new piece.

Provisionally entitled it-'Sacramenstrual.'-thanks to my new digital camera, you can see how its developing. There's still a ways to go with some glazing and finnesse, but for the most part, conceptually my intent is there.

Notes from an easel-sex and death work in progress by David Gough

I guess I'm as heady as any man would be, having studied a picture of female pubenda for a duration-though any frustrations are borne from the snail-paced process of layering with oils. It's something else though-the sensual scent of turpentine and linceed, the smooth malleability of lush greens, ochres, crimsons and flesh white, the acid flow of pinot sliding down your throat...you learn to take your time, as in all things-better to savour the sensation. My browser static for hours on the incredible yardstick of Jenny Saville (imo the last great figurative artist of our time), I lost myself and my sable, in the beautiful fragility of a hipbone pushed against translucent skin.

Tonight that feels like all their needs to ever be.