Bad Vibes: The Devils Business by David Van Gough

"I'm the Devil, here to do the Devils business." With those words, Tex Watson scatter-shot the oncoming carnage at Cielo Drive with diabolical import.

Tex-who like Susan Atkins-would conveniently find God in the cold concrete realities of a State penitentiary 6" x 8".
Tex, whose parole would be advocated by Susan Struthers, the daughter of the slain La Bianca's.

But that was later. There were grander forces at play in Tex's telemetry before Cielo Drive.

Several hundred years of bad vibes "man",sacred geometry's, archaic symbols, clandestine orders, dark intentions, threads colliding and colluding on the psychic human tapestry, to form the foundations of a sinister architecture.

Or in the words of Manson...


"From the world of darkness, I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment."





The Man/son show runs until the 31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA.  

Pig by David Van Gough

It was the doorway of a new perception, a doorway to carnage, smeared with Sharons blood the word "Pig"-a welcome matt, a single label pronouncement that could have come courtesy of Orwell's Animal farm.

On the fag end of the 60's, Police, politicians and squares were pigs.  If you were the man, you were a pig. Tricky Dicky was most certainly a pig. And to Charlie's far out assassins, Sharon and her four friends, with there beauty and privileged Hollyweird lifestyle, were pigs of the lowest order,ripe for the butchers knife.

 I wonder if Atkins knew she was conjuring allusions to the pregnant Egyptian Goddess, Neuth as she daubed the letters on the door with her blood stained towel. I wonder if she knew it signaled a ritual passage for a birth of a new dark age.

Sharon's new role, sacrificial Mondo Goddess haunting the vacant B-movie lots. Sharon as Eve and the rotten Apple record. Sharon as Aphrodite from the succulent fruit of Dionysus. Sharon as an adolescent artist's muse, a phantom sex symbol of flickering white porcelain for the late night double feature. Sharon as dead Madonna and child castrating the 70's like Adonis's boar, a limp tail curled like the number six, like a semaphore.

We are the pigs, for the threshold beyond the bloody epitaph makes a narcissist of us all.


The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am 

Something Witchy by David Van Gough

Do 'Something Witchy'....Those were the instructions Manson allegedly gave to Tex Watson before the family went slaughter happy at Cielo drive, thus forever saddling the murders with  cabalistic connotation. 

That and a few several hundred other associations.

For me, the straying tendrils of madness all converged at the taloned toes of Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Theosophic mystic, seer, witch,and general bullshit artist with a parlor trick that could give David Copperfield a run for a saps money.

In the ancient Tibetan grimoires she discovered, said to reveal the future of humanity, I wondered if she divined the shitstorm her literary foray's would unload; Adolf, hot for the Madam's petticoats,hatching the little matter of his grand master-plan to incinerate an entire race, or anyone else who didn't fall into Helena's Aryan seven step theory. I wondered if she envisaged the fuhrerling subvert her adopted Hindu symbol for the sun and taint it until the light was tar black with the congealed blood of millions.

I wondered in her bugeyed reverie's if she determined a Charlie Manson-a bastard son of Mengele's Eugenic fuckery- brain fried like a KF Chicken,(or Bluebird) cooked by CIA lab chef's, spiced and peppered with Eastern philosophy and LSD, carve the Madams little totem over his minds eye, but not before getting his disciples to do some home style buffet carving of their own.

If Tex and his cohorts-Charlies Angels- were faking Something Witchy that night, then it came in the wake of 80 years of occult dressing post Blavatsky, precisely at midnight August 9 1969, heavy with the invocations of dark symbols, ritualistic style murder and Ma(n)sonic lore.

I wondered all this and I painted Blavatsky's withering left eye exploding and morphing into the serpentine 's' of Himmler's guard and the lightning bolt of the O.T.O. 

I saw Hitler and his tyrannic stare arced into a bloody sickle, an axis connecting the S to form the hood of a 3, the sacred number of the Scottish rite.

I saw Manson, inbred maniac,mutant child of the two sneering at their ordered schemes with blanket chaos swirling in his programmed, drug addled brain.

I saw it all as an ectoplasmic loop, the Madams mink reanimated by one of her seances-shrieking death and thought...."You fuck with the devil, and someone gets their finger's burned eventually" 
  

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am 

Sharons Back

 

It's still wet, and the light is casting a glare making for a piss poor photo, but I think 'Pig' is almost done. I kept it loose and raw, sometimes scoring into the wet paint with toothpicks or the end of the brush.

I had considered painting it onto an actual door-though not 'The' door. 
I think Trent Reznor still has the original anyway, from his time at Cielo drive.
Time and the logistics of scale put paid to any idea I had about using any door anyway, but am thinking of incorporating another element  when it comes to framing.

Despite the vileness of the content, this series-more than my others seems very much informed by a spirit of painterly experimentation-seeing what I can do within the parameters of traditional figurativism without degenerating into abstraction. 

I hope it conveys a sense of the 60's anyway.

Sharon Tate

She died 33 years ago tonight. It would have been a balmy evening much like this one. The kind of night when crickets and the motoring whir of the ceiling fan fill's the tranquil air. A night when the doors and windows are pulled back to the hinge for the chance to feel the occasional breeze. 
Nobody should be reminded that Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent also died on that night, but it's Sharon and her unborn innocent who has been cast as death's maiden. The protective veil of celebrity drawn back to reveal the disfigured beauty beneath. The Madonna and her moonchild Paul. 

I spent the day blistering in the studio-Planet Mercury hotter than Hades-working on the Pig piece, feeling the burn of my adolescent desire for her ethereal beauty, quelled only by the distaste of what I am doing. Having to remind myself that the muckraking, the endless questions, the rabbit holes, the embellishment isn't just desecration, its like mining the labyrinth of Laurel Canyon tunnels, it's a search for an innate truth.

And you know, it shouldn't be easy, especially on a night such as this one,when all I have to concern myself with is the color of paint and staying cool.

Manson Show at Hyaena gallery in October.

Further to my previous post, I am delighted to reveal that I shall be showing my Manson/Tate themed works at the wonderful Hyaena gallery from October 1st, until October 31st, with an opening on the 6th. 

Which means that between now and then, I'll be firmly ensconced in my continuing research as well as realizing the pieces for the show. 

Part of the reason that my sister blog-one hundred and fifty Cielo drive-has been on hiatus is because I'll be revisiting my Liverpool hometown in July, which will take me to some places of interest-Hitlers presumed haunts, architectural sites, as well as the obligatory Lennon routes. At this stage, I'm not sure if the showcase will include just the paintings, or my research notes and journals, but I do foresee a possible book to tie it all together at a later date.

Rise-New painted portrait of Sharon Tate by David Van Gough

'Rise'
Oil on canvas
30" x 40"

'Rise' was one of the inscriptions left in blood on the wall of the La Bianca residence.
According to Linda Kasabian, Manson had instructed her and the other girls to leave a sign....'something witchy'.

Mired then, in the never-ending miasma of Satanic verse, cabalistic rite and sinister forces, the ritual murders of nine people with Sharon Tate caste as Madonna and child, become's part of the tapestry of American folklore.The truth melting away with dimming embers of a candle, that death in its most senseless form, can only be comprehended when it is engulfed in subterfuge of conspiracy. Or something like that.