Up to the cieling. Down to the floor-notes from an easel by David Van Gogh

Here I am like Virgil in Hades, walking on tinder's whilst feeling the heat ,still a mad dog and an Englishman staying out of the midday sun whilst pushing to forge my day in it.

You can't see, but in between the heat and the madness, I run old films on my computer such as the Agony and the Ecstasy-Chuck Heston acting through his teeth, whilst chewing the Sistine Chapel with his cold dead hand, Rex Harrison as 'Enry 'Iggins playing the Pontiff.

 It's quite epic and splendid actually, the melodrama not diminishing the awesome crippling scale and magnitude of Michelangelo's 5,000 square foot fresco one iota.
Even through the paint spattered glow of my 16" monitor, my jaw slackens at that accomplishment, whilst my little twelve piece vignette of internal first world turmoil dwarves like an anonymous pallbearer in the 16th century.
Or even this one for that matter. 

Sometimes reaching a ceiling is just a reminder of how dense the shadows are cast beneath it.

The Ghost of Vincent.

"The sadness will last forever."
Van Goghs proported final words to Theo

This shall be my first Halloween for some time that I am not exhibiting anywhere.  
Enough ghosts and demons currently in the studio at any rate. 

There's the ghost of Vincent for instance, pinned to my wall, glaring accusingly with one withering eye. The other one-his left one-is looking resigned, filled with marine-flecked melancholy and suffering. That particular eye haunts my own work right now, imposing itself into each canvas like the plucked orb of Horus. 

Did Vincent truly suffer I wonder? 

The romantique parable is of his self imposed exile in Arles amongst spud headed peasants, harboring Daddy issues and a gradual realization of the gargantuan shadow cast by Rembrandt, whilst his search to capture light in liquescence and Oriental line became the vainglorious quest of a failed alchemist. All on his brothers dime I might add, until he ravaged sibling good will and stipend on Absinthe, harlots and Japanese art prints. 
Not the suffering of brokeback tilling of fields from dusk till dawn with the peasants he gilded, or even the nine to five for poor old Vince, just the artifice of the syphilitic Libertine in a garret, the actor slumming it for the Academy. 

 Vincent the artist messiah, the flameheaded madman suffering needlessly, and dying penuriously wretched to save the future of contemporary Art. Vincent a standard bearer for greatness equated with drug addled, ritualized self sacrifice. Vincent the veritable Lou Reed of Modern Art. Vincent and the second shooter, because a death doesn't truly become a myth without a hefty (over)dose of conspiracy.

Mischievous brats with bad aim or not,there go Rothko,Pollock and his ilk making martyrs of us all.Or at least suffering taken to its histrionic, ignoble endpoint with Granto's trite Eye-jaculations;

The residual misery stain's the 20th century and beyond, thicker than impasto, making soothsayers of passive observers hoping to unravel an element of raw human truth amongst the chaos of stumbled ill rendering, whilst faded print's of sunflower's hang innocuously from a million vestibule wall's. 

Fuck you Vincent.

Broken Arted and left on the shelf. An artists cautionary tale of integrity

The older I get, the more convinced I become that the greatest mistake one can make as an artist is the belief that integrity will count for something.

Dennis used to tell me a cautionary tale of someone local who had been an artist-'the real fockin' deal'-here in San Diego, who became so disenchanted and 'broken arted' with his artistic travails, that he just woke up one day and called it quits. Of course he got his own back later by becoming an art critic, but he never picked up a brush again right up until the day he died.

Perhaps that's all an art scene is - a periphery of disappointed cynics.

Being a glass is half empty, unless the other half is topped with spirits kind of artist, I realize it's all relative since I teeter on the cliff of jacking it all in and calling it quits weekly. It's been that way for as long as I remember-swings and roundabouts, artistic highs and post daubing lows are like a balancing act of mercurial equation. Plus my Mother said I'm a miserable bugger.

Except I've been feeling broken arted for a while now. Broken arted as in one too many unrealized dreams, one too many bullshit promises and checks never arriving, one too many lesser artists grabbing the wall space and headline's, one too many canvases unsold....you get the picture, or rather you don't unless it's for a fraction of the asking price.

If it all sounds pretty navel gazing and self pitying,then I suppose it is,so then... why do artist's like myself continue, why paint another stroke and keep climbing walls year in year out?

You know, I couldn't tell you the whys, it's just what I was born to do.

I don't paint splatter or big cats or bigger eyed girls-I wish I could find a pavilion of myself that could, I'd happily spend my days giving the Ryden's or Chueh's a run for their money, but I can't nor do I want to,call it what you like...integrity,stubbornness or plain stupidity. It means I'll never be a darling of the hip inkies, It means I'll likely never see recognition or a healthy stipend in my lifetime and so I guess there's not a lot of whinging to be going on until I do paint spatter, big cats or bigger eyed girls.
Like a martyrs folly, I'll endure until the fucking Van Gogh curse fulfills its promise, that or I warm myself by a pyre of my own making and become an art critic.

Perhaps this is as good as an artist can hope for, perhaps it's just the realization of the work itself that matters, nothing more. If Art is the provenance of a luxury,then food for the artistic soul is the struggle,even if it doesn't bring food to the artists table.


Above: Los Angeles Mausoleum. 3/17/2 6:37 PM