Cagliastro’s Feast:

Bad table manners at Djinner time

11″ x 14″ | Oil on canvas

For the uninitiated, Alessandro Cagliastro (also known as Joseph Balsamo) was a self styled occultist from the 1800’s who developed the disreputable distinction of being a charlatan or as Thomas Carlyle put it- ‘the Prince of Quacks’. His reputation wasn’t helped by his legacy as a forger par excellence, or by his connection to the Marie Antoinette Diamond Necklace affair. There’s something of case for him being a forebearer of Crowley’s however, a kind of 0.1 version and in fact, the great beast himself claimed Cagliastro to be one of his early manifestations.

He is also the author of the esoteric manuscript, The Most Holy Trinosophia, and was the founder of the lodge for the rite of Egyptian Freemasonry, which would prove to be curtains for the old magus when the inquisition put him on a charge of being one of its paternal members.

Here, I have him seated at an altar for the knights of Malta,surrounded by his props and uncorking a djinn- no doubt spinning tales of treasures in the distant Mount Pellegrino, to the duped cracked skull of Marano. Yet there’s an overshadowing menace bearing down on the com media dell’arte. Something which is always peering from beneath the surface, a primal fear of dark foreboding and ancient rite as represented by the seven headed dragon of Babylon.

It’s the notion of something ancient being played out over time, a return to the themes I touched on in the Man/son series, and it’s given me something of a flavor of what my next body of work will look like.

Cagliastro’s Feast will be on show during the Dark Matters show,at Bash Fine Art from this coming weekend through the 26th November.

War by David Van Gough

 

War, may have been etched in Charlies black heart, and in the Swastika on his forehead but it was Tex who got to do the crafty work on the plump gut of Leno LaBianca. 

The war Manson hatched was black against white, but in the bloody epitaph of each letter lay seeds of a light and darkness battle, beyond the color of skin. 

It was branded there in the lines of the slashed W, ascending and descending to form the square and compass of Freemasonry. 

It was there in the anarchist A, and the occult numerical values of the R: 6+6+6. It was there buried in the word reconstituted as the alchemical symbol for the Hermetic cross and its directive "As above, so below"
 

And it was there resonant in the Eastern mysticism's and ancient Hindu deities that informed the era-Kali with arms like a decade of blood spattered tendrils brandishing tools of death, along with Lennon's decapitated head, hanging like a semaphore on the love and peace generation forever.

War-that's what it was good for.

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 

Man/Son: the Haunting of the American Madonna-a series by David Van Gough

Here it is, the full measure of the Man/Son showcase, a months work -the culmination of a years research, of which seven of the pieces were completed in two weeks. I've sworn never to undertake such a task again.

For all its hardship, there have been revelations for me, the revelation that convinces me that dark evil forces exist and are perpetuated by powers with sinister agenda's.That the connections around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies understanding. That for all our supposition to the contrary, this so called modern world is imposed by a dark ancient will, that uses ritual murder, arcane rites,symbols and talisman, sinister architecture and sacred geometry. 
That mostly, this path I was on wasn't just the search for clues in a detective story, but a spiritual one, seeking a sense of reason in the harrowing chaos, pivoted on the gruesome killing of a beautiful woman and her unborn child.

This is the heart of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna.

 

Bad Vibes
24" x 36"
Mixed media

 Something Witchy
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

 

War
16" x 20"
Oil on canvas

God of Fuck
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

Healter Skelter
24" x 36"
Oil on canvas

 

Pig
16" x 20"
Oil on canvas

  

Rise
30" x 40"
Oil on canvas

Paul is Dead
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

 

Death and the Maiden
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

Death of the 60's
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas

Livin devil may care...painting detail of Helter Skelter by David Van Gough

It's a sneak peak wip for what will be the pivotal 'Healter Skelter' piece for Octobers show, and at times it's felt I'm on a downward spiral.

I wonder if I shall ever feel adequately prepared 'enough' for the work I am undertaking? I mean the hours of research, the contemplations,the journaling, the nest of snakes the understanding unleashes. From book to canvas, Utah to Vegas.... and talk about juxtapositions.

And so it was, another brief sojourn, this time to visit my son who is there this week with his girlfriends family.

I was prepared for the heat, but not the parable of literal Hades manifest there. In my readings and writings and questing for my mission for the Man/Son series, I've developed a theory called sinister architecture, which you can attribute psychically or geographically, depending on your side of the fence (or defense), but in Vegas it's there, so blatant and balls out as to be blase-a caricature of Babylon, a eulogy of self aggrandized American myth with deities, demons and gargoyles bought wholesale, sitting like guardians atop an abyss of excess, whilst a Black pyramid ( the hotel Luxor named after its counterpart and glorious city of God Amon-Ra in Egypt) shines a single slivering beacon into the pliant sky, like a temple of the Golden Dawn. 

 It's there when you realize the will to the spectacle, the council of magi that must of requisitioned it all, because look beneath the surface at the pantheon of occultist reference and reverence,  Vegas isn't just the pretentious child of gangsters, investors,accountants, architects and artists, its the mindset of dark understanding.

Perhaps that's what my study and research has given me-as unwashed and often callow as I feel on this journey down the rarebit hole I've dug for myself-my mind and eyes and minds-eye are open as never before,  attempting to articulate in paint.

Last days of Summer

It's over a month away, and I just took a week off the grid camping in Utah, playing at polygamy, hiking the kind of terrain the Mars rover would photograph,and drinking warm three percent proof wine on warmer night's. 
It's a dry state in a dry climate, only one liquor store we could find, nestled at the back of a gift store,selling native Indian tat made in China.  
Yet there in the valley, surrounded by the austere crag of Saints, its a place that seems mired in ancient forces,the turbulent hum beneath the ground of fossilized spirits and forgotten rites.

Or perhaps it was just the heat, and the grimoire's I was reading? 

When heat hits the high nineties, people get crazy-maybe that's why it's a draw for the congregation of the latter day's, the way the heat feeds the madness and maybe after Utah, hell seems like a Roman bath house. 

Going to have to be off the grid a bit longer-find my religion,the draw of other spirits, other rites, the easel, the artery to Samhain...a sabbatical for the sabbath.
The heat is on, and  September is around the corner, so I shall see you all on more temperate nights....sooner or later.

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.

Board Games-Ouija Board commission project by David Gough

 
Here is one of the pieces I've been sequestered upon of late. Its the frontispiece for a Ouija board, which will eventually be inlaid into a light box cabinet. The only remit I had was to do what I do, but to include the actress Elizabeth Short-better known to the initiated as the Black Dahlia. 

 

 This gave me carte blanche of course to instill a full gamut of occult imagery by way of Kenneth Anger in the Victorian parlor.

I'll post more pictures once the cabinet has been fully assembled.