Notes from an Easel-the Ghost of Medusa-new painting by David Van Gough

"the Ghost of Medusa"
Oil on Canvas
12" x 24"

The mornings are starting to cool, and a dense mist hangs over the wild palms.

I love this time of year.

I've been in a bit of a fog myself this past week, waking in the middle of a night in a frenzy, freaking about the last minute preps for the forthcoming exhibits, living on four hours a night, and beginning each day swirling palettes and consuming copious amounts of tea.

I shalln't truly find the sleep of the dead until the last stroke.

I suppose I'm a man possessed-off the charts and obsessively compulsively picking at the scab of everything I do.

There's some of that in this latest piece I suppose-'The Ghost of Medusa'-though truly its something I've been working towards for twenty years. There are half realized traces of it in drawings I did as far back as 85, it's eerie. Was it prescient or just self fulfilled prophesy? Who cares-I'm in love with the piece-it feels like the herald of a new direction. It's realisation was organic and as natural as breathing-if I must annotate though, it partly has its foundation in the quote from Jack London's novel-'The Mutiny of Elsinor'', which I discovered very recently. In it he says-

"...Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Mayan-Lie (illusion)"

For myself, those words encompass perfectly life's deflections from the shadows of the night.
Along with my continuing obsession with the cosmic resonance of the number three-(Medusa was part of a trinity of Gorgons), I should relate that my dead friend Martin had completed a drawing of Medusa before he died. It hadn't occurred to me until I was working on it. The arc continues.

I have perhaps two more pieces in me before delivery date-though something of a backtrack in the sense that they shall compliment the last gasp of the original Theothanatos series.

Onward and upwards.

Bring it.

Artifacts-Remembering Martin

Its been something like twenty five years since Martin died-hard to believe sometimes-I still see his face so clearly.
Maybe its getting older, but he's been in my thoughts a lot of late. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen on what was known as a 'Youth Training scheme' in those days, and Martin headed the design dept. I guess he recognized some modicum of talent in me then, and it quickly became one of those things of mentor and student. He introduced me to things like Dada and Pop Art, and a set of skills and dictum's that still stand me in good stead today.

He was also a remarkable artist in his own right, producing a series of silk screened images, that had a foot somewhere between Fauvism and photography. He possessed an incredibly dry surreal wit too, which would spill over into projects like painting over sized crisp packets that he had blown up on an old OHP. I recall hours of laughter, and we became firm friends, outside the class.He was 29 when he died in that old blue mini of his from France, which he had customized with red tape. Out of all the friends that I've lost over the years, the shock of his death was the most visceral,I guess because it was so sudden and unexpected,and at the time I dealt with it by mythologizing his death, stupidly, naively casting him as my Carlos Casagemas, but his passing was fundemental to me, and I really miss him sometimes.

Last year, I tried to deal with it, the way I deal with everything-through paint-and had the idea of producing a hommage triptych, which I'd call 'Mentors'-I never got past the first piece(I'd still like to) -but the piece here called simply 'Martin' is the result.