Aldous Huxley

“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Another painted sketch, flexing the painted portrait muscles, while I busy myself for the next series. In this picture,Huxley reminds me of a cross between Jarvis Cocker and myself in my early 20’s .  I think that’s around the time I first read Brave New World. Then of course, it was still a work of fiction, or at least a cautionary tale. Like Orwell’s 1984, I suppose its become a sort of manifesto for the contemporary morass we live in. The Deltas intellectual malaise that is now the modern idocracy. The cultist anathema of the solidarity circle, now the evangelical right wing and the indignant Trump supporter.  Somas sleepwalkers….well, name your poison.

Dark days indeed.

The book had enough of a seminal impact on me to title one of my pieces after it, back in 2014 for my series Purgatorium. I’ll be making an announcement about its follow up series in the new year.

Site update-Portraits gallery

 To showcase a selection of portraits and commissions from the last few years, there's a new gallery on my site entitled 'Visage', and you will find Samuel Beckett (above) in grand company amongst the likes of William Burroughs, Ziggy Stardust, Frankenstein and Lana Del Rey:

http://davidgoughart.com/visage_gallery.html

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.

George Orwell

'Orwell'
Oil on Canvas
11" x 14"

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

George Orwell

So, George Orwell-soothsaying, scribe of totalitarianism, a harbinger of future assimilation-that eternal jackboot on the throat of the proletariat.

'Orwellian', has now become a vernacular as common as lobbing the stink bomb of Nazism, on any legislation or party one refutes (or should that be 'refudiates?')

It's all come to pass in one form or another of course- Doublethink, Newspeak,historical revisionism, peace through endless war with an unseen assailant-was he merely anticipating an endpoint, or did he unwittingly become the architect of a Bible for demagogues and tyrants to cherry pick from?

It doesn't matter, we'll never see his like again, the 'powers that be' would never allow it.

Samuel Beckett portrait by David Van Gough

11" x 14"
Acrylic on canvas

"Birth was the death of him"Samuel Beckett.

So another year. Ho Hum.

Should I be lucky enough to reach relative sagehood, I hope that I do so looking as cool as Samuel Beckett.
What a face-a veritable crumpled road map of life.
What a legacy-although truth be told I'm a little more partial to Joyce.
Each to his own.

I kept this one fast and loose, and it turned out all the better for it.
With a face like that, the rest was easy.

William Burroughs Portrait by David Van Gough

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact"
William S Burroughs

The Poe piece I produced around Halloween was so well received, that between completing the sculpture and working on my book, I thought I'd continue the theme in a few spare hours this afternoon.

So Bill Burroughs-agent provocateur extraordinaire-the minds eye projecting a living corpse,dandy in the underworld, smacked up and shacked up in some seedy insectoid-alien infected apartment, writing virulent, insane prose and re assembling it in a wild turkey fever.

The myth of the man is all the more compelling in that he left the kind of exquisite indelible stain on literature that even the sterility of a shiny new Kindle could not erase.
And then there is Naked Lunch- a murky descent into the grotesques of the mind and the psycho sexual horror of a homophobes, crab infested nightmare, more in keeping with a Surrealists manifesto than any Beat generations wanderlust.

Of course I went on to read Nova Express, Wild Boys, The Soft machine and all the others, but the mercurial oddness of that book has stayed with me, which is why Mr Mugwump is the subject of this latest portrait.

It's also notable in that he has always reminded me of my old friend-John Liddy.