Look What The Cat Dragged In.

 8"x11"
Oil on wood panel

Since I've been all consumed by the new series, I hadn't really planned to be in anymore shows until unveiling Infernal next year. 

That was until I was asked by my friend-fellow artist Stephanie Inagaki, to contribute something for an upcoming fundraiser for Luxe Paws, an initiative to help the homeless cat situation in LA.    

Also, my moggie Ronin-the Prince of Purrsia, would never have forgiven me.

Ronin pleading to enter the studio

As DaVinci once noted, “the smallest feline is a masterpiece”, and having already featured  my cat  in the piece –“This Thing of Darkness, I Acknowledge Mine” I opted instead to paint this – salvaged from an old ink sketch, which up until now I’d adopted occasionally as a sort of working logo.

I suppose it could be emblematic of the artists dark flightiness, or at least his sky fall which I’m calling “Look What the Cat Dragged In”. Make of the title what you will.

It’ll be showcased virtually at Copro Gallery on June 6th anyway, with a portion of the proceeds in aid of  LA’s forsaken felines. More details as I have them.

As no small aside, I had the distinct honor of including Stephanie’s work when I curated my Tales from the Darkside show in 2018, so go check out her extraordinarily beautiful, and ethereal work for yourself.

Stephanie Inagaki

Stephanie Inagaki “Anamnesis” (2018) drawing 6.5” x 8.5”

Dear Dreary

 

That’s me speaking from my latest interview with Dahlia Jane for her newly relaunched Upon a Midnight Dreary site.

She’s a dear friend, and we go back donkeys years, or at least not too far back to the days when I couldn’t get arrested, let alone any interest in a show.  Thankfully, she didn’t let that stop her, and in fact this excellent article she penned, was the only notable exception to the complete indifference for my Purgatorium show back in 2014.

She’s been radio silent for a few years, plotting her next move, but in her absence, the blogosphere has filled up the void with dark art podcasts and the like, but I maintain she was the first, so they are all really just riding her coattails.

At any rate, she’s bringing her original blog back, as a chronicle for how artists busy themselves in such times as we live in, and I’m honored to be among the first to be included.

So here it is, in which I chat about daubing during Covidolation, my next series “Infernal”, Fred and Rose West, toilet paper and more.

Give it a gander and spread it about, but please stay home while doing it.

Necrosurrealist David Gough paints ‘Hell on Earth’ against the backdrop of a pandemic

Paleozoic periods

 "And my essays lying scattered on the floor
Fulfil their needs just by being there"

David Bowie-Conversation Piece

That's it, the final flourish-my daubed initials alongside a scuttering trilobite. A little primordial arachnomorph, peering out from the corner of a bygone time. 

An apt note to end the series on then. 

He's also a call back to all of those gorgeously illustrated dinosaur books I had as a child, a relic from my own Paleozoic period if you will. Long gone to some netherland, dusty token corner of the internet, which I inevitably pored over before I began the series. 

Actually, if you look at my piece 'Space Enough Have I, to Lie in Such a Prison" from my last series-Purgatorium-you can see a little Archaeopteryx and Eohippus, in what is ultimately a thread between the two collections.

Speaking of seminal beginnings, I finally caught the excellent Bowie documentary-'Finding Fame'. 
It reminded me that in an older blog post (which is hard to believe is almost a decade ago now) I'd wondered" Pre Ziggy...What spurred that self belief?" 

What struck me, was for all of David Jones's early missteps,through excruciating novelty Gnome records and mime, were the seeds of sustained, exploratory fearlessness he  possessed of creative self discovery and illumination.For him, what started as a vehicle for some sort of notoriety, manifested into creating for the spirit of the mere act of creating itself, as a way of destroying the self..

Coming at the tail end of my own series, about mans compulsive nature for creation and destruction, it's a sentiment I both adhere and relate to. 

Certainly, his passing in 2016 and his final album has informed this entire body of work.

Just over a fortnight to go before the unveiling, and all the final preparation still ahead of me. 

In every sense.


 

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.

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