Art and Cake Review

“In Van Gough’s vision, the devil is not in the details but in the distractions”

There’s a rather grand review of the recent Dark Realism/ Dark surrealism show at Gregorio Escalante gallery, up on Art and Cake LA.  I’m very grateful to the reviewer for their very astute and intuitive summation of ‘The Devil’-my piece in the show. You can read the full article from the link HERE.

The show is open until the 23rd of this month, so if you are in the area, please take a break from the shopping deluge of tinsel and tat, and soak up something that is more Satan’s grotto than the white bearded fella.

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.

The Devil Tarot

“He has poisoned our water forever”

Hunter S Thompson

36″ x 48″
Oil on canvas

Here it is-the completed commission for the 78 Tarot project-Lucifer rising from the primeval, evil pool of mankind that spawned him.  Principally, it takes the elemental subtext of that card , the representation of sinister external forces, the illusionary deception of fear, the physical bondage of materialism, and places it amongst the unraveling detritus that followed George Bush’s pronouncement of Mission Accomplished on board the Lincoln on in 03 May 1- or May day, a sacred Beltane date in the Illuminati calendar and the date that the Gulf oil spill and the death of Bin Laden occurred. Also coincidentally, the date that I put the last finishing touches to the piece. Such dark arcs aren’t lost on me.

I could have comfortably kneeled at it’s dark altar for six months, but the deadline eclipsed any such ambition.

We’re all still kneeling anyway.

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.