“Christianity is a myth that has been literalised.”
Timothy Freke
Here I am at the opening act for what will be the grand guignol, for my very own book of Revelations.
The first of the last,the meanest story ever had then. Infernal, the Denouement.
For any end, there has to be an origin story, and with that in mind, I
suppose it was inevitable that my work would arrive back at the
beginning. I’m thinking of course of Theothantos, my artistic
fumbling’s through the quagmire of dogma and mortality. Dealing with
those questions back then, carried a lot of heft. With the burden of
weighing up the ultimate existential odyssey, I found it easier to
reduce the work to the abstract crevices of a skull.
As Henry Miller once pronounced when talking about Tropic of
Capricorn, he should have waited until the end of his career to do what
he’d tried at the beginning.
Perhaps a decade on, none the wiser, over fifty and certainly more world weary, I feel more able to put flesh on those bones.
And alongside Eliots The Wasteland- I’ve been drawing on some old
stalwarts for spiritual encouragement. Goya’s black paintings, Picasso’s
later years, Otto Dix’s war etchings, Grunewalds Corpus Christi,
Liverpool urban decay from the 70’s.
Perhaps it’s some sort of fait
accomplais, but I want the series to feel like it’s been produced from
the vantage point of an artist, journaling the end of days.
I wish I could say it feels like a stretch.
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)" . 
These past few days I've been ensconced with commissions, but I felt the fact that I gave myself some studio time to begin a new piece warranted an update, so here are the beginnings of my next skull in the series.
Distracted from my mission, the yardstick of milestones has plagued me the last several days.Its the usual guff that reminds me of the leaps and bounds that former paragons had achieved at half my age. Picasso had completed his Blue and Rose periods, set the world of new isms alight with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and was a few years short of Guernica by the time he was 40.
Having broken ground with albums such as Ziggy, Low and Scary Monsters, Bowie's career was already in creative freefall by forty.
And yet, I console myself that Henry Miller didn't write Tropic of Capricorn until he was almost fifty, and Goya (the greatest artist of all time imo) didn't do his best work with the Black Paintings, until he was completely deaf, and half mad in his eighties. I imagine its relative, propelled by impatience for some kind of recognition and an appetite for utterly undistracted emergence. Not that I hold myself in such esteem you understand, I shrivel in such shadows, except...blah, blah, blah-no answers here-move along.
In the midst of keeping a roof over ones head, I let my attention wander to a biopic on Rauschenberg today. He likened art to trickery,literally consigning much of contemporary art as a blag with that knowing grin of his. If only Vincent had known. I often see Vincent as the ultimate martyr-posthumously, art would only ever be the contrived suffering of Ron Ethey or the shabby little suicide of Rothko. Even Pollocks death seemed paint by numbers by comparison. Fuck you Vincent and your miserable stereotype. Fuck you Rauschenberg and your privelidged cynicism.
