Paradiso's Fall

Though it may seem a little premature, best laid plans being what they are, I thought I would let you all know where a majority of my focus is going to be for the next fourteen months.

Following on from 2014’s show Purgatorium -I am honored to announce that  Paradiso’s Fall, will be debuting at The Dark Art Emporium in Long Beach, March 2019.

Though it may seem a ways off, experience has shown me that if time waits for no one, then it accelerates at light speed in the studio.

Over time, I’ll be posting works in progress, possibly even video peaks throughout the next twelve months, so I hope you’ll continue to follow me as I take another excursion down the rarebit hole.

As always the support and encouragement you provide sustains me like a manna, so my indelible thanks.

Paradise Lost and Found

Yes-yes, it’s been over a month I know.
So where have I  been?
Hitting the books and burning them. Misfiring in every direction. Having an existential crisis every five minutes.
The usual then.
Maybe its the albatross of turning fifty, the inevitable dulling of the flame, time waiting in the wing, impending nuclear war, this humidity, or maybe I just suck-I don’t fucking know-but for two months, scrawl as frantically as I might, page after page-nothing jibed for the new series.

So it’s true to say something felt amiss in Paradiso-like discovering an angry wasp nest in the garden. No really, I’m not being metaphorical when I say that. It hangs beneath the awning outside the bedroom window, growing bloated and more angry like a festering boil daily. It’s mere presence a blight in my peripheral minds eye, to the point that every few hours I  relieve myself from what I am doing to check it’s progress.

It’s been like the buzzing in my head, an insectoid creepy crawl beneath the skin. Every corpuscle telling me to its time stir up the hornets nest, regardless if I get stung.

Also, did I mention this fucking humidity?

Abandon all hope then. Or at least the last two months.

Time to shed moleskine, sharpen pencils, start afresh.

If only because one should be naked and unadorned when being reborn in Eden.

So what you are seeing is the first seeding, a gollum emerging from the mud-or at least the burnt umber.

Now if we could just do something about this humidity.

Making a little Eden

No, I haven’t shuffled off this mortal coil.  Not yet. A moral one perhaps, and rather fittingly for these end of days, it’s more of a spiral than a coil, but I digress.

If I’m honest, hitting the half-century mark has felt like a need to hit some sort of reset button. David Van Gough version 5.0. Software updates to include curmudgeonly scowling at the car radio, dodgy knees and a complete  shutdown by 11:30pm.  “Forget that I’m fifty cos you just got paid.”

So in between the manna of commission duties, I’ve been brewing. Stewing. Boiling. Scrawling. And for all the buzzing in my head, it feels like I’m preparing a soup made of flies. Next on the menu, Paradiso’s Fall. If Purgatorium was the entree of a three-course meal, this one is the main. It’ll taste strangely delicious, trust me.

Of course, it’s meant retreating again, closing up shop at La Bodega, dispensing with the three-hour daily commute and wandering no further than the canvases in my little-converted studio/garage down the hill. Not a soul other than the ones that haunt my visions. No sound, other than the whispering pines, the cackle of crows, and the usual voices in my head.

In these dark days of endless noise and looming annihilation,  it’s as close to Eden as one can hope to get.