Tales from the Darkside

Co-Curated by David Van Gough


So how cool is this? Tales from the Darkside-(not to be confused with the old TV series) a single showcase, bringing together-or bridging together to be more precise-the dark art community from all over the world.

Over fifty artists from as far afield as Austria to Alabama.

And what a roster of top talent we have lined up. Having been fortunate to have seen some of the previews for the show, I am overwhelmed by the grand guignol of creative artistry that’s going to be on exhibit.

But don’t just take my word for it, look at that list of names below.
Blurbage details are as follows:

La Bodega Gallery presents
TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE
A Group Exhibition Co-Curated by David Van Gough

From Hieronymus Bosch to Zdzislaw Beksinski, artists throughout history, have explored the darker side of the imagination. Drawing from the monstrous excesses of the periods they created in, or speaking to the inner turmoils of the psyche, darkness in art has been a potent, visual language, which expresses the deeper recesses of the soul.

In the month that is the festival of Samhain, Tales from the Darkside will be a showcase that is both a manifestation of the shadow side of art, and a representation of the best contemporary dark artists working today.

Saturday October 13th, 2018
6:00pm to 10:00pm / Free Admission

Participating Artists :

Alissa Renzetti
Ally Burke
Amber Michelle Russell
Amy Rodriguez
Andreas Nagel
Anthony Champ
Bill Remington
Bri Valdivia
Brooke Weston
Brynn Elizabeth
Carrie Anne Hudson
Celene Petrulak
Clint Carney
Clinton Neuhaus
Cory Benhatzel
Dan Harding
David Russell Talbot
David Van Gough
Donnie Green
Dos Diablos
Edgar Marquez
Edward Frausto
Enys Guerrero
Evgeniya Golik
Gregory P. Rodriguez
Ivonne Carley
Jay Ferguson
Jeff Christensen
Jen Lightfoot
Jeremy Cross
Jessica Perner
Jim Pavelec
Jorge Gutierrez
Karikatura
Katherine Lomax
Lana Gentry
Lee Harvey Roswell
Mark Jesinoski
Martin Woodhead
Matan Chaffee
Megan Buccere
Nannette Cherry
Nonie Cruzado
Paul Neberra
Paul Vargas
RF Pangborn
Rick Dienzo Blanco
Ron Lemen
Sandy Yagi
Scott Holloway
Shane Izykowski
Stefania
Stephanie Vega
Sunol Golden
Tatomir Pitariu
Tehani Farr
Theodore Limn
Tom Haubrick
Vanessa Lemen
Vince Packard
Vincent Castiglia
La Bodega Gallery
2196 Logan Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113

www.labodegagallery.com
www.davidgoughart.com

SD Voyager Interview

“I guess my journey as an artist began with this overarching spiritual quest and being raised as I was, I’d found that the pulpit wasn’t doing it for me.”

In which I talk about my Liverpool origins, dark art and death and the San Diego art scene.

SD VOYAGER INTERVIEW

Having recently celebrated my thirteenth year since expatriating to the US, I’m delighted and heartened to have been chosen to be interviewed, given that this is only the third artists profile piece from my adopted hometown, in which I've exhibited at least a hundred times.

Hopefully, this is just the beginning of an alternative forum that is contrary to the dodgy editorial whims of a certain sinister press in the city-one that highlights artists and not just the closing of another gallery.

Fridom Kahlo-Infinito

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

Frida Kahlo

11″ x 14″ | Oil on panel

Working in the Chicano quarter as I do, its hard not to feel the incandescence cast by Frida’s influence. Her striking visage is ubiquitous, even staring out nobly from a mural to the entrance of La Bodega gallery.

My piece for the forthcoming Tribute group show has our Art heroine reborn as the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, whose resume boasts of being the Aztec god of wind, Venus, the dawn and Arts and Crafts.

In such days when the world seems intent on bloodshed and cavernous divide, a celebration of Frida’s legacy remains one which is thankfully universal to all.

Show opens July 9th | 4pm-10pm. Free admission and open to all ages. Children’s and adult look-alike contest. Art, food, music, merchandise, culture!

San Diego City Beat

“Nobody wants to come home, and be confronted with evisceration’s and mortal truths…”

Here’s quite a nice little recent mention, to accompany an article about Psychedelic Art, which appeared in a recent issue of SD City Beat. Cheers Seth and CB, even though you forgot to park the Van.

80's Hit

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

8O’s hit
12″ x 12″
Oil on panel

La Bodega Gallery
March 19th.

So the 80’s : era of day glo, Yuppies and mulletts, Iran-Contra and Chernobyl, a veritable bonfire of vanities for the decade that taste forgot.

Catapulting into my teens as I was, It didn’t feel like that at the time- I was randy for it all -everything that had been denied me in pre-adolescence was suddenly for the taking, accompanied by low rent video, an incredible soundtrack and an Ad execs wardrobe.

All absolute bollocks of course because in retrospect it was soulless, by the end of it I was utterly miserable, jobless and broke with a first child on the way.

So here you have a collage of  that eras excess, a marketers swirling coke addled dream; Gordon Gekko in the penthouse, full metal jacket, Keith Haring tie with Patrick Nagel sideline, an American Psychometric of the ages, with Freddie Krugers chrome talons extending from it’s slick dimension.

Except there’s grotty Liverpool on the periphary, post Toxteth maelstrom, dockers strikes and another three terms of Maggie’s despotic reign to look forward to.

Real life seldom works on MTV.
Relax, don’t do it.

If my piece Aztec Ghost Groove was a picture disk, this would be the album cover.

The piece will be on display during the I Love the 80’s group show at La Bodega gallery, Saturday 19th March. Contact labodegagallerysd@gmail.com for pricing and purchase details

Dog eat God

10″ x 10″|Oil on panel

…Or God eat Dog, depending on your preferred perspective.

So what’s it about then?

Its a kind of Ouroboros- one of those rather nice little absurdest pieces,which follows Bruegel’s penchant for painted puns and proverbs. Its also that paradox of creator and destroyer-who is being consumed or biliously ejected? As Artistotle remarked “Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”

On display August 8th at the Perfect 10 group show at La Bodega gallery.

San Diego State University Screening Serial Killer Culture

My Man/son showcase is already three years young-hard to believe really.
That it continues to be my most popular and well known series, says something about the public's continuing fascination with the subject, and the none too paltry power of Netflix instant play.
Which is why I shall be honored to be attending a screening and subsequent panel for Serial Killer Culture, at San Diego State University on the 10th of April, alongside director John Borowski, Artist and publisher Hart Fisher, Criminologist Dr. Thomas Gitchoff, Head of SDSU Special Collections Robert Ray, and Federal Bureau of Prisons Retiree Joel Goodman.

Screening starts at 6:00pm at SDSU's Little Theater 161- $3 Students $5 Public.

There will also be an additional night to see the screening on the 11th of April, please note that I shall be unable to attend due to a former commitment

RSVP: http://tinyurl.com/SerialKillerCultureScreening 

Setting Out Ones Stall- David Van Gough comes to La Bodega Galleries and Studios

And so, the show ended yesterday, but it's not over by any rotund ladies long stretch.

Here in the afterlife, Purgatorium will still be available to purchase directly from the gallery until January 2015, and although nothing official yet, we are still Bashing out (see what I did there?) tentative plans to extend the remainder of the show in another form. Details to be announced as and when they happen. 

A million plans a million dreams.

In the interim, there will be no laurel lounging, because the prodigal son is returned, or at least walking in a new pair of shoes. 
Which is why I am stoked to tell you all that from October 8th, I shall be working from the Artist collective at La Bodega gallery and studios in Barrio Logan San Diego, at studio V-quite aptly.

There will be regular shows and I'm looking forward to the local folks dropping by for a cuppa and checking out whats on the easel.

I'll follow with more of the particulars soon,but for now-David it's back to work for you my son.

The City Beat interview that never was

I did an exclusive, comprehensive interview with San Diego City Beat some weeks ago for my book, with the view that it was scheduled for the following issue.

It never materialized.

Whither it ever finds it's way into print, is on the bewildering whims of that particular papers editorship and a continuing indication of the support (or lack there of) that I receive from the media here in my adopted home town.
Sad but true.

Here nether the less it is, in it's full unedited glory.

I must give credit to journo Michael Misselwitz for his great vainglorious attempts to get it in last/last/this/next weeks/years issues.


Upon moving from the UK to the US, why did you chose San Diego specifically?

I wish I could say it was arbitrary, except we moved here purely because it was my wife’s home-turf, and since she had roots here, we thought it would be easier to make that transition from anglophile to American. Of course the reverse proved to be true.
 
It says in your press release that you were effected by what you saw as “extreme fundamentalism” in the media. Can you tell me more about this? In your opinion, what is extreme fundamentalism and how is it affecting media?

Having gotten my news from the good old stoic BBC for most of my life, the shocking thing for me was to suddenly be confronted with news that was delivered as opinion. It wasn’t news relayed as factual, dry reportage-it felt filtered through some scary party rally cry, where the fires of nationalism are stoked through paranoia and the fears of McCarthyism. In some respects, I think a lot of if has a certain amount to do with recapitulating the news as a theater, a sort of aspiration to be the Peter Finch character in Network-”mad, and not going to take it anymore”, but certainly if you look at what’s happening with Murdoch and his crew, the sense is that there is an underlying corrupt agenda beneath the surface that goes beyond mere ratings.

What do you think compelled the San Diego Art Institute to label you their featured artist for 2010?
Firstly, I felt extremely honored when I was approached, although I must admit that when I was told that they felt my work had a certain youthful appeal, there was a small niggling doubt in the back of my mind that I might be recast as some ghastly Ed Hardy knock off. Of course, that’s not giving the faculty or the students enough credit, because as it turned out, the exhibit was received with a great deal of reverence, and in fact I was told that often the kids would come and sit in quiet contemplation through out the day, almost as if they were meditating in church, which I thought was a delicious irony.

When you transitioned the emphasis of your series from the themes of The Theothanatos to the themes of Dead/Ends, you shifted focus from themes of “human origin” to themes death, death’s aftermath, and post-apocalypse. Your book describes the transition as a natural evolution, part of art’s ever-changing intention.Tell me more about this. What inspired the 180 shift?
 
Particularly with this series, the questions seemed so intrinsically part of journey-both personally and conceptually-one question seemed the counterpoint of the other, so: “where do I come from?” would always segue into “how long have I got?”, and those questions became more emphatic, the more I considered loss and grieving-in this case three friends who had expired over a fifteen year period. Eventually one looks inward, and as I had just tured the cusp of 40, all the questions of my own mortality were brought to the fore.
In some ways the work was mercurial, the result of its own rational equation, although the emphasis for me was always more emotive than from a logical standpoint.

Did you abandon the work from The Theothanatos Series completely? If not, what elements were carried on into Dead/Ends, and why?
The series actually culminated in the Ghost pieces, once I’d painted “Is there life after death?” the question seemed to be about decay and legacy. Dead/Ends was the thread-tying them together, plus with the book in mind, there was the connotation that it sounded like dead friends. I suppose if there is one residual element to it, it’s that there was an arc because with an end there is always a beginning that follows, so were back to some framework of origin.

Do you truly believe that God is dead, as implied by the Theothanatos titling? Why or why not?
 
In less the Nietzschian view that implies-for me it was, do I believe in a God at all-an omnipotent figurehead-and sadly I would have to say no. Faced with that realization,the question for me became how does one mourn the passing of something that never existed? The series and the book then I suppose is a reconciliation, but also in doing so makes the assertion that one has an abiding need to supplant one God -or spiritual epicenter-for another.

How long have you been working on The Theothanatos Series and Dead/Ends?






The pieces themselves were produced over a three year period,the book was a year, although I like to think I’d been working towards this series my whole life.
 
If you had to title yourself professionally, what would your title be? How would you describe yourself as an artist?

Titles sound a little too groomed for the nine to five, I’m just a working man trying to survive by doing something I love.


Can you give me a list of your most popular past works?
That’s tough-I don’t know that one could ever label my work as populist, since popularity in any contemporary sense feels like the antithesis of what I do. People have a soft spot for “Incarceration”-I think that piece really speaks of the human condition. Before that, it was probably “Killing Time” (2006) or “Gods and Monsters” (2004). I don’t really know.

When is the exact date for the expected release of Dead/Ends

 Currently its available online from the link below as a limited signed edition until September 30th, after which it shall be available from October through Amazon and various specialist outlets. http://davidgoughart.com/Dead_Ends.html
Any news on the book tour? When will it begin? 

No venues confirmed as yet, but books will be available at the Momento Mori show at Oceanside Museum of Art, where I am showing Oct 15th. Just to say that there will be three or four appearances in the fall here and possibly in LA. I’ll be posting regular updates through my site.

What do you see yourself doing in future with your professional artwork?
Aspiration will be my undoing- the disappointment can be so crushing. I know the work i am doing right now has no agenda beyond the journey, which is utterly fulfilling and enough to me for now. Beyond that-its as unknowable as an afterlife.