Enjoy the silence.

 “One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

It looks like I'm staring off into the abyss, pondering the muddy expanse of the soiled nothing, but it's actually that first contemplative pause before something happens, in a space fertile with possibility. It allows the chance as the song by Depeche Mode said, to enjoy the silence.

As the year comes to a close, it's no accident that the piece I'm planning is about the heralding of a new dawn.

In the other spaces in between, I've been reading Chris Hedges new book-"America the farewell tour." Distressing raw meat for a series that is peppered with ill omens hurtling us towards the end times. Take me at my sarcastic best, when I say that if his previous tome-"American Fascism" is a side splitter, this one will put you on the floor. 
At any rate, the irony isn't lost, given that it arrived during a four day power outage, while a place called Paradise burned itself out of existence. Lest we forget the horticulture tips in response,procured from the odious shitgibbon in chief.

The whole thing left a somber cloud that hasn't loomed as bleakly since Cormac McCarthys the Road.

In the face of what Hedges propounds as Durkeim's anomie in real time, it's hard to see a way forward, to not sense that all of our tomorrows shall be a continued assault of cyclical traumas, imposed by the will of a small dogmatic proportion of the populous, intent on nihilism, subjugation and extinction.  If my previous series-Purgatorium-was partially informed by Artaud's essay -"Van Gogh, the man suicided by society", then this one ascribes to a society, in essence suiciding itself.

Whatever hope then, can only come with the vast expanse of ideas, from the reflective silences pregnant with possibility. 

Otherwise, the only sound left to hear will be humanities final death rattle.


. 

Death Rattle

“We are all bound thither; we are hastening to the same common goal. Black death calls all things under the sway of its laws.”
Ovid

“The gormless and the baying crowd right there.
They can’t get enough of that doomsday song,
They can’t get enough of it all”
David Bowie-The Next Day

Another skull.
One more deaths head dug up from the boneyard- commissioned on this occasion-but no less symbolically apropos for the dark times we live in.

When has that not been the case I ask myself?

Its not just my default anymore.
Death is prevalent. Everywhere it seems-because I believe the 242 year old experiment called America is dying.

Or has a suicidal streak running through it at the very least.

It could be these Divided States of Angst. You’ve felt it-that permanent unease we find ourselves in now.
Where acidic cauldrons froth over daily, and drown everything with toxic rancor and insanity.
Where another deadly school massacre, draws pious platitudes from crowing gun fetishists in tinfoil hats.
Where a swamp is substituted for a malfeasant cesspool of corruption, calamity and chaos.
Where every right eye is turned blind to the trashing of democratic norms in favor of trash talk.
Where Nazi’s and Russian despots are ‘fine people’ and the FBI is ‘treasonous’.
Where celebrities and sports figures ought to remain silent, when there is a game show host in power.
Where Evangelicals lament the downfall of Christian family values over a coffee cup, but endorse candidates who are adulterers with an appetite for porn stars and children.
Where an Intel dossier detailing a Presidents penchant for pissing prostitutes is ‘fake news’ but a pizza parlor harbors a Satanic, ritualized, child- sex /murder, cult…

To Mars.

And it’s not just the rank hypocrisy–it’s that there is a faction that seems fervently intent on hurtling us towards some cataclysm. Certainly, The Evangelical Taliban positively creamed its chaste gusset when the bloviator in chief, sought to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capitol. No doubt fulfilling the apocalyptic wank fantasy of every Christian jihadist, hungry for judgement day.

Because making America great means no greater cause than eliciting ‘Liberal tears’, even if the outcome is we are all annihilated in a tweeted, nuclear, maelstrom.

Sitting at the celebrating Bowie concert last week, singing along to songs performed by competent stand ins and his still sizzling former band, it hit me that part of the challenge now feels like the very best of us-the generational voices that would propel us forward, the thinkers of the enlightenment and champions of cultural change, have been replaced by the very worst of us.  Hitch, staring down the barrel of a cancer that would consume him said that he not only feared that he would have to leave the party, but that the party would go on without him.

Except the party ended when the life and soul was gone. Death took him along with all the other vanguard, free thinkers of his generation, and left us with the odious. The avaricious. The volatile. The dogmatists. The bullshitters, brainless barbarians and fools.

With almost uncanny timing, I write this as it’s announced Stephen Hawking has passed.

Intelligence, along with bastions of education and science are now vilified as ‘elitist’, substituted with a brain numbing diet of  TMZ, X-Factor, Fox News and Jerry Springer to occupy the vacuous mind of the plebeian. Little wonder then, there sits a President, perfectly suited for the National Enquirer generation.

Perhaps when they switched on the Hadron Collider it caused a fissure in the space time continuum, and we hit an alternative timeline,  a timeline where every virtue was turned on its head.  Indeed, the year that elected America’s greatest aberration and folly, brought with it a mass exodus of figure heads from every station.

Some might even say 2016 was akin to a rapture.

I really hope that notion leaves some Evangelicals as alarmed as the rest of us are feeling right now.

Except, I remind myself that in that same week as I watched Bowie’s guitarist, Gerry Leonard, lean over his guitar like a little blue rinsed granny, while a crowd of aging fans stormed the stage,  Guillermo Del Toro took an Oscar for his monster movie- ‘The Shape of Water’. As did the horror movie ‘Get Out’ highlighting racism, and finally Bowie’s great friend-Gary Oldman,  for his turn as Churchill in a movie fittingly titled for these times ‘The Darkest Hour’.

it’s a welcome rejoinder that as artists of darker themes, the torch falls to us.

Because as barren as it feels right now, we are on fertile ground.

Wrath

Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword.”

Revelation 6:4

Wrath
Oil on Canvas
36″ x 48″

And so a bloodied harbinger, one of John of Patmos’s magic mushroom induced four. Like a butchers castoff wrenched from the pit of Hades, gallops the crimson steed stripped of its artifices. Give it up then for deaths own points man, here to cleave empires into ferocious war and division. Hooray!
Here he is, sporting the latest fall fashions- jodhpurs and jackboots, along with a swordfish head resembling a Klansman’s hood or a papal Mitre: a false crown for hell’s Borgia general: the preferred head dress of demagogues and blood thirsty zealots. There’s enough in the capes fountain to quench them I believe.  And if there’s any doubt as to which festering dark stable unleashed our Mr (D)Ed, then a blind, rabid diamondback coils from the animated corpses cold dead fist – Gadsen’s relic co-opted as every risible little bumper sticker-now waving into view like Satan’s own spewing cock.

If after all of that, you missed the carrion call of our horseback messenger, the lightning bolt clutched aloft also trebles as a Sig rune, cross and spear of destiny. Talk about the unholy trinity of Swiss army knives eh?
No prizes for guessing what fireworks awaits at the finish line, but I’d wear sunblock if I were you.

Yes, I realize I’m posting this on Independence day, but look-I began this one on 12,21,12- the Aztec dooms date-so  this piece was forged for these end times.
So here we are, July 4th baring down upon this once great nation like funerary pallbearer-one more last supper culminating in a glittering firecracker of whizz bang and char grilled offal.
How depressingly apt, eh?
Two plus millennia that includes a historical cannon of almost mythological prowess-names like Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy echoing through the grand halls of history, all diminished by the wet, shrill, reverberating fart of a coiffed, bloviating, bowel, tweeting in an ill fitting suit. An ignoble and all too fitting end I suppose, if only because the American dream has become a nightmare.

Nostrovia Comrades.

If we’re all still here come November, it’ll be on view at Copro’s upcoming Underworld group show.

All the Devils are here.

36″ x 48″

Oil on canvas

Painted this, one-month last year.

Here’s the obligatory wank I wrote at the time:

“If the inherent meanings attributed with the up-right turn of the Devil tarot, are those of bondage, addiction, materialism, sexuality then how do these external forces translate in a contemporary sense?

With this piece, I wanted to take a traditional, almost secular avatar and revise it to a set of recognizable boundary’s in a culturally and politically relevant sense.

So I used the moment a first term president, stood on the literal flagship,representing an iconographic and establishment figure head-U.S.S Lincoln-to pronounce “Mission Accomplished”
What was accomplished exactly?
Was it a pronouncement to something far more sinister, made as it was on May 1st- or May day- a sacred Beltane date in the Illuminati calendar and also coincidentally, the same date of the Gulf oil spill , the death of Bin Laden, and a decade to the day that I completed this painting.

History has catalogued the subsequent fallout and the measure of swaggering, corporate, militarized, imperial arrogance of that speech far more adroitly than I ever can in paint, but in regards to the framework of the Tarot and its meaning, how do we navigate these murky waters to understand our own complicity to inevitable destruction, and the Cthulu-like tendrils that tumult and take root beneath the surface?

We do so because we are beholden to established power structures, to our acquisitions, our narcissism, to the illusionary deception of fear through the media, the physical bondage of materialism, to superficial totems, to our endless distractions, our disconnection of each other through a wifi connection, our addiction to fossil fuels for the plundering of our Online Articles.

Who are the real Devils then?  Are we the Luciferian aspect-the idolators that impose a hell of our own making upon Earth? And do we have it within our power to break the bonds of enslavement?
Or do we leave  the chance to the turn of a card?”

It’s never seemed more prevalent.

It’s also going to be on display at Gregorio Escalante’s gallery for Chet Zar’s Dark Realism / Dark Surrealism show from December 3rd.

I’ll post more details soon.

Hell is truth seen too late.

What a week ,eh?  A week in which it seems the world has gone utterly barking mad. In the proliferation of editorials and post-mortems it’s hard not to cast this period as America’s final obituary. Hard not to fear the cataclysms and horrors the future holds. Hard not to see the dark specters in the hard lessons of history. Hard not to feel like Nietzsche’s crazed ragman, raging at the sky.

All too easy in fact, in a blighted year that has already been so fucking wretched.

As an artist particularly, its all too easy to retreat to escapism and impartiality, after all-I’ve heard it said that “being divisive, is bad for business old boy”.

Except I see nothing but complicity in silence.

Art-NOW more than ever- has a responsibility to turn a mirror on the unraveling shit storm that will prevail over the coming years. And it may be the only democratizer and means of expression left to those who may fear retaliation for speaking out.

And I will do my bit, as I always have to put my brush where uncomfortable truths lie.

To that end, there is my new series, a direct follow on from Purgatorium, called Paradiso-Edens Fall,a title that may give something of an insight into my dark intent.

Then there is the bridge piece between the two, “Leviathan”-(pictured above) which takes its title from Thomas Hobbes book of the same name.

I shall also be making an announcement about a piece which shall be showing at Gregorio Escalante’s wonderful basement gallery shortly.

To quote Hobbes-“Hell is truth seen too late.” , and for me there is no more critical time but now to tell it.

Would this Monster Make a Man

36″ x 48″-Oil on Canvas

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin

Arriving just weeks after the tail end of my Purgatorium show, and using another Tempest quote for the title, it would be easy to think that this piece, was an outtake of that particular series. Except to say, with its psychic locale changed from the Liverpool jiggers of my childhood (Scouse vernacular for alleyways) to the primal shores of the US,  it’s concerns became much broader.

What’s it about then? Like a lot of my work, I think it deals with the ambiguous notion of place in society, of being a stranger in a strange land, or rather the idea that we are all immigrants in someone else’s territory-be it dogmatically rather than geographically.  The territory here of course being the mythical land of America-the Infant Aztec Sun God, Hiutzilopochtli-dangled  like Achilles over a river of fire by his adoptive Mother, Libertas, the Goddess of Freedom, who you will see is menstruating oil and wears a blazing crown of Scud Missiles.

It’s the moral abyss that comes at the cost of national idealism, and its currently on show at my studio, and available for purchase.

Charles Bukowski portrait painting, by David Gough

"...Made crazy and sick by this,
Made violent,
Made inhuman,
By this.
The heart is blackened..."

"Dinosauria, We" Charles Bukowski
Where have I been?

I've been unplugged from the relentless 'Fuck Yeah-America' and 'Obama still blows' since the news about Bin Laden broke on Sunday night.
As homesick as I'm feeling, it's no bad thing.

I wonder what old Hank Bukowski would have made of all the hoo haw.
Possibly he'd have procured some acerbic sleight or laconic bon mot about cowboy ideology, or perhaps he'd have just sacked off the whole sorry shit and gotten wasted at some seedy dive bar.

He'd have not taken to Twitter or Facebook however-most certainly not.
Anyway, I resurrected his incredible visage, that face that looks ravaged by shrapnel, that jawline that could blot out the sun, those eyes that narrow like razor slashes, and painted it in a few spare hours yesterday.

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."

All the Presidents Men

It's Presidents day here in the US, distinguishable for myself as an extra day spent with the misses. I'd like to say that we have plans, perhaps a road trip to the snow capped hills of Julian, or a wander around Borders before it disappears into the same dusty realm as Hollywood Video and Music Trader, except a week on, I am still nursing some horrible lurgy.

In lieu of anything remotely newsworthy, here then is a rather apt cover expressing my disposition, from that 80's DC classic- 'Shade the Changing Man'. Conjured by Brendan McCarthy who may have been on some psychotropic experimental drug or merely necking Benedryl-but whatever he was on-sadly, you don't see comic book covers like that anymore.

Notes from an Easel-It's a God Eat God World

When interviewed about his classic -'I wanna be your dog'-Iggy Pop once revealed that because everyone seemed to want to play at being God, it might be nice to reverse the first and last letters and be a dog instead.

Taking some license from what Jimmy said, I decided to do the same and so by entitling this study piece-'It's a God eat God world', it gives it a whole other facet.
It was borne out of some of the feelings I've had about America lately, my position in it,the whole 'I'm alright Jack, bollocks to the rest of you' ethic.

It'd be fair to say that things have been weighing heavy on me. I entertain the notion of leaving the US at least every two weeks-perhaps moving back to Europe, or somewhere I've never been.

Here's Iggy from 79 doing it his way on the Old Grey Whistle Test.

Notes from An Easel-disposition manifest

I'm a coiled spring. The last threads on a rope, one drink too many, a bough ready to break.

I'm on the cusp everywhere.A month of toxic affrontary has rendered my nerves as sensitive as the wounded fingers of my hand.Its all just noise of course-I own nobodies myopic world view-nor can I change it. People will try and impose it none the less.
My tongue is swollen from my clenching teeth.I've long since lost my nose to the spite of my face, but I fall further down the cracks of my own oblique obscurity.And whilst my contemporaries become media darlings, I realize it's petulance on my part, that I feel left behind.Meanwhile,ants invade my studio,like little black beads from a Dali painting, scattering in an ordered chaotic frenzy.It's like my disposition manifest.
I'm Antsy.

The work by comparison is cascading out of me like a rich, delicious waterfall. I've no notion where the forms are coming from.
It's like my disposition manifest. And I'm feeling furious at the world-I need to stop reading crap.
The news here is a like a huge bloated worm feeding the bigotry, widening the chasm between truth and the myth of America.

I realise I'm saying this nine years post 9/11.

I painted 'Blind Liberty' like I was having a shower, except the waters are stained and brown like an open sewer, spilling oil, blood and tea. I wonder if I'll ever feel truly at home here.

Head Candy-And into the sea goes pretty England and me

I'm growing weary of America daily-the political and cultural intransigence, the dumbing down and elevation of ordinariness, the raging passive aggression of everything-and its not that the US is unique in any of this, lord knows England is no sepia tinted Merchant Ivory ideal of afternoon tea and fancies either, it just feels at times like having your head encased in concrete.
I really had no concept of what it meant to be passive aggressive before I moved here, and I need to stop reading shit on the internet,blinkered vitriolic opinion-and I realise the irony of me stating as much, but its toxic, and does little for my misanthropy.
I hunger for our return to England shores again in April.

Heres a Blur with 'this is a low' from an album that makes me think of drinking hot tea in London cafes in the rain.

Notes from an Easel-56-Death of Winter

Brushes are growing threadbare again, and a journey to the art store to replenish my fine sables is one of the few things that hinge on me completing the piece in time for the solstice. I find myself in that plateau place where my hunger to progress to the next piece is making the completion of this one feel like an epic struggle.

Unrelatedly related, I read something artist Terry Rodgers said in this months Juxtapoz, about the difference between American and European audiences being that the latter are a little more comfortable with difficult subject matter. Speaking of Americans he says that they 'live in an isolated fairyland and are subjected to amazing religious-based fantasies.' I can concur, although his penchant for painting large photo realistic scenes of debauchery set his mettle a little more in the camp of extreme than my own, it's something I've contemplated a lot of late. For all the peer back slappery I enjoy, I am still not commercially in favor here. It seems all about becoming a name and a gimmick, and perhaps it being the season, I am feeling the draw of Europe because of chronic homesickness, but I do imagine that my art would sit more comfortably in a gallery in say-Vladivostok-than Malibu. The grasp of the human condition is simply surfeit here, the enduring grasp is for the superficial, the contrivance of emotion without feeling-that thing of being constantly connected through Twitter without ever connecting, the paranoid narcissistic horror of aging annihilated by the bronzed skin pulled back across every botoxed cheekbone.

I get lost in the romantic notion of living and working in a studio loft in Berlin or Amsterdam, and wonder if I could make more of a living from my art, in a place where the ravages of suffering are written in the pockmarks and shrapnel pits of the landscape.

Unrelated, I had to laugh today when I read about a progressive church (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) in New Zealand, whose vainglorious attempts to appeal with the unholy masses, extended to a billboard that has the church up in arms (when aren't they) and would give Ron English a run for his money:

Something for the weekend-The Place Inbetween

1.As the week draws to a close, I am putting the final touches to the piece which has taken me almost three months to complete. All being well, I should be able to post a final portrait soon.

The show at Belly Up has also been confirmed for November the 12th, and having seen the venue, I am beside myself with excitement. I shall be setting up my paints for a live painting event at around 6pm, as well as hanging the new piece and others, before the bands come on. Full details are at the following link:

2.And I posted another piece -the mentor painting, which I am reticent to sell because of its personal nature, but space is becoming an issue with so many pieces lining the walls now, and I need to let work go just as I do any emotions that manifest them to begin with.



3.So the best laid plans of mice and men-given my distaste for rodents, the quote always struck me as diminishing human achievement to nothing more than rats foraging for moldy cheese and spreading pestilence and plague with our infestation. Certainly following today's events at the Fort Hood facility, and the subsequent bile peddled by so called experts on various tv news channels, gives one pause that perhaps the sentiment isn't too far from the truth.
Reflection rather than accusation takes precedent at such times, and as I watched the images, I felt moved listening to Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack on my ipod today. Sometimes the endless diatribe of reportage is so numbing, that one feels detached from the true tragedy of such events.

Gough Medicine-American Scream

'The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.'
J. G. Ballard

And Another Thing-Margaret Thatcher, the death of the British Empire

'When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross...'
Sinclair Lewis-1935
Fifteen years ago, an intransigent, extreme and archaic, dictatorship was ousted from office by her own party, following an elected third term in the UK.Though its true to say, that the beginnings of Margaret Thatchers terrible reign, brought an end to a period in the seventies of union discontent, it also brought with it a harsh and cold winter which lasted twelve long years.

During her term in office, Britain endured the Falklands war, The Westland Affair, the end of the coal and the shipping industry, the privatization of the railways, BT, the electric and water boards, the beginnings of the end for the NHS, the reinstated Taxes- Poll Tax (abolished in the sixteenth century), and inheritance tax (a tax which ensures you still pay after your death) , eight million unemployed (the conservative estimate after the book cooking of training schemes).Education cuts and Mad Cow disease (CJD), the re-emergance of puritanical censorship with the moral guardianship of the nanny state. Hillsborough, Dunblane, Charring cross, race and poll tax riots in the streets and a further polarization of negotiations with the IRA. Even my own hometown of Liverpool was abandoned by the Iron Lady to what she proposed as a 'Managed Decline'

 
And whilst the maggots flourished and grew complacently bloated, the poor became more emaciated, and what they call the class divide in England became a chasm.
As the country descended further into the bowels of Hades however, the machinations behind number ten maneuvered, and I watched as a tearful Thatcher was removed from Downing street. It was the only emotion I ever saw her betray.The dark days of the right were numbered, and there was a sense that the working class-through music, through art and culture, were on the move.

 

It's hard for me to reminisce the hope and promise of those times-but when Labour swept in again after so long, with D-reams song 'Things can only get better', it felt like watching life reanimating a corpse.Of course, history has shown that hopes are in vain, that the mess left in the Thatcher years was too far reaching -lopping off a limb is no good when the cancer has spread, but at the very least, the Conservatives were viewed as an aberrant joke-a terrible wrong footing that was the catalyst for the end an empire, a country were it was twenty five years too late for its terrible former premier to be diagnosed with dementia.

I prefix this, because in the insanity of the birther movement, the spitting sloganeering of the teabaggers, the endless, impending, end of days fervor of the evangelists -I see all too well, the failings of my own countries past.
 
The dark unwillingness for change-an unwillingness, that comes spitting the vitriol of judgment, cloaked between the pages of the bible and a pocketful of race hatred. An angry mob, without a taste for irony, resembling the fascist diatribes of the 30's, much more than the institution and leader elect, they are demonizing, all stoked by their own ignorance and those special interests, who balk at change simply because they may end up a little light on change in their pocket.

Perhaps its as Churchill once said, a country does elect the leader it deserves, but having seen the terrible legacy of the Thatcher years, and those still being cast by the long shadow of Bush, it doesn't behoove one to imagine the kind of cretinous demagogue that could be borne from the bastard offspring of a Limbaugh and Beck.