In Praise of the Art Widows.

On the last leg, literally.

 Eleven down, final canvas in progress.Hard to believe.

That's the penultimate piece above- 'Space enough have I, in such a prison'-which like the titles of all the paintings in the series-is a line from the Tempest. 

Been watching umpteen adaptations, and the Derek Jarman one is still my favorite-like a Dorothea Tanning in chiaroscuro, it has Jack Birkett as Caliban, and a winsome Toyah as Miranda. 
This is my version of Miranda...whats that? Looks like my wife? I won't have it - any resemblance to Lani is purely coincidental. 
Actually, that's a lie, Lani is in all of the pieces, quite simply because whatever sun that has risen or set in the studio, it has done so with her blessing.  

Never a hint of complaint, grievance, or resentment for that other bedfellow, for our muses are like mistresses that we spend our hours bewitched and infatuated by.

For all the "oohs" and "ahs" doled out for those concubines gazing from walls throughout history, the Art widows of the world are the true goddesses.

Speaking in tongues-notes from an easel work in progress by David Van Gough

Here I am, working on the beginning of the end, though still four short of that sum when all said and undone. 
Had wanted to be chronological about it, do each piece in sequence, tying the whole grand finale up in a neat bow. 
Then I hit a wall on the one before and apropos with all these blood moons, needed the salvation of retribution, as opposed to merely feeling like a madman chipping at a mountain with a toothpick.

What a caper this art thing is, like inclement weather eh? 

It's at such times that I realize the paintings exist entirely on another plain to their earlier sketched counterparts, and looking backward is often like retracing a forgotten trail obscured by brush or at least a sable. 

I realize I'm talking riddles, but the conversations I have in my head seldom make sense.    

I suppose artists are just cryptologist's of their past.  


 

Building layers of madness-notes from an easel work in progress by David Van Gough

One more pass-I keep telling myself-and this one will be done. I down my brushes and toss palettes, then spend the rest of the evening pacing in and out of the studio to pick holes in it, fighting the urge to paint over it, or at least crack the bastard over my knee.
Who was it said a painting is never finished, merely abandoned? 

Its a kind of neurosis, I'd moot Van Gogh maddening except I'd be so lucky to be ailed by the kind of madness that has one knocking out five paintings before breakfast.
In a nightmarish purgatory somewhere, I work the same painting for a lifetime, the canvas caked ten foot thick with layers.
Quite aptly it'll be titled 'Misery acquaints man with strange bedfellows' when its done. 
This particular bedfellow gives me no rest.

Revolution nine

 

It must be over twenty years since I listened to the White Album in full-its one of those albums that seems so a part of cultural ubiquity (and for me at least) forever associated with the communal toke at college parties, that any impact it could have had, has long since passed me by.  I gave it another 'spin' today,minus the crackles,grooves and hemp: it still held a certain charm that did nothing to imbue an edge for my daubing, even after Helter Skelter had long finished. 
And then 'Revolution 9' kicked in, and it was like standing at the gates of Ceaser's Palace again. 
I wondered how, even in the dizzy haze of 'leb'-the resonance of this quagmire of dissonant sound didn't strike a wake up chord back then. The banshee carrion call of number nine repeated against a jarring backdrop of spectral phaze waiting to be encoded. 
But to whom? 
Manson, the Manchurian candidate?
Manson the cartoon messiah, a serial killer made for a cereal box generation?

I'm so immersed in the conspiracy bullshit-twelve months of revelation since what started as macabre homage to an adolescents love affair with a dead muse, and I can't think straight for the paint fumes and relentless heat.
And yet Revolution 9 sits like a skeleton stripped bare and redraped again as a eureka moment....something doesn't sit right.

Two paintings this week now completed-'Healter Skelter' (anagram of Easter Hell Trek) and 'God of Fuck'-umpteen to go in 24 days. And more weird phone calls that pick up with tapping on the line.
I must be onto something.

Last days of Summer

It's over a month away, and I just took a week off the grid camping in Utah, playing at polygamy, hiking the kind of terrain the Mars rover would photograph,and drinking warm three percent proof wine on warmer night's. 
It's a dry state in a dry climate, only one liquor store we could find, nestled at the back of a gift store,selling native Indian tat made in China.  
Yet there in the valley, surrounded by the austere crag of Saints, its a place that seems mired in ancient forces,the turbulent hum beneath the ground of fossilized spirits and forgotten rites.

Or perhaps it was just the heat, and the grimoire's I was reading? 

When heat hits the high nineties, people get crazy-maybe that's why it's a draw for the congregation of the latter day's, the way the heat feeds the madness and maybe after Utah, hell seems like a Roman bath house. 

Going to have to be off the grid a bit longer-find my religion,the draw of other spirits, other rites, the easel, the artery to Samhain...a sabbatical for the sabbath.
The heat is on, and  September is around the corner, so I shall see you all on more temperate nights....sooner or later.

Sharon Tate

She died 33 years ago tonight. It would have been a balmy evening much like this one. The kind of night when crickets and the motoring whir of the ceiling fan fill's the tranquil air. A night when the doors and windows are pulled back to the hinge for the chance to feel the occasional breeze. 
Nobody should be reminded that Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent also died on that night, but it's Sharon and her unborn innocent who has been cast as death's maiden. The protective veil of celebrity drawn back to reveal the disfigured beauty beneath. The Madonna and her moonchild Paul. 

I spent the day blistering in the studio-Planet Mercury hotter than Hades-working on the Pig piece, feeling the burn of my adolescent desire for her ethereal beauty, quelled only by the distaste of what I am doing. Having to remind myself that the muckraking, the endless questions, the rabbit holes, the embellishment isn't just desecration, its like mining the labyrinth of Laurel Canyon tunnels, it's a search for an innate truth.

And you know, it shouldn't be easy, especially on a night such as this one,when all I have to concern myself with is the color of paint and staying cool.

Life stuff

Sitting in Starbucks amongst the hub bub of normalcy on a Sunday morning. Customers ordering frappuccino lattes, valley girls jabbering a million miles a minute about nothing of note at the next table.
It's difficult not to be reminded of the superficial absurdity of it all, when looking at images from the Tsunami. Nothing so trite as adding some vacuous soundbyte to the incomprehension of 10,000 fatalities on the Twittervese or Blogosphere either.
I shalln't even try.

It does remind you however, of how tenuous everything is, forces you to savor the minutia. At least one hopes it does. That's how it's been this weekend. Drinks and karaoke with family, breakfast with a friend, dinner and a movie with my wife.
For me, the world never makes more sense than in the studio, there I can reorder the chaos. Recapitulate anew. Feel possibly immortal or something.
So progress on the aptly titled 'Osmosis' goes to plan, more layers to add, but it evolves surprisingly with ease.

And I finished another piece for the series of drawings I am working on, which goes by the working title of 'Paradox', but may end up being called 'Flux'.

Tomorrow, I'll be releasing details of my book Dead|Ends-which friends of my Facebook, have already gotten a preview of.

All the life stuff then.

Melancholy Shadow: new painting by David Van Gough

'Shadow'
36" x 24"
Oil on Canvas

'Shadow' is one of those flagship pieces that heralds a new direction, it encompasses all the ambition and direction I have for the new series.

I suppose the work is a manifestation of melancholy, that intangible sadness that I've lived with my whole life, but have come to realize is a default for any artist,when exploring the emotional depths of them self.
I read a lovely quote from the artist Odilon Redon-"I have a feeling only for shadows' which expresses the piece perfectly.I have to say thank you to my lovely model Stacey for being a continued muse, she has an innate natural ability to encompass the physical approximations I see in my head.

The anniversary show at Mosaic is coming up, and since it is a sketch show, I have a few days to prepare some drawings. the recovery disks for my OS are in transit from Gateway, so all being well I should be up and running again properly within the week.

New Year, New Canvas-work in progress

So,the first marks of 2011.

For the first time since October last year, I'm feeling energized by the prospect of painting again, and oddly liberated.
So watch this space.

Notes from an Easel-Legend work in progress-session one by David Van Gough

Sunday night and letting the sublime sedation of a grand days work flow over me.

Without getting too psycho wankery about it, I am never more transformed than when I'm painting well.

David Sylvian is on his third rotation, there's a cool air moving through the studio, I've got nothing clanking around in my periphery and my mind is lilting on a hammock between two palms on a beach in the pacific somewhere.

The dark just flows out of me, like its trickling down my fingertips and through my sable.

Head Candy-Abstract Evolution

Artistically, it probably looks like I'm all over the map at the moment.

It certainly feels that way.
If the only concession to being on EBay, is my artistic evolution through a series of experimental sketches, then so be it.
Like most daubers, there is always that niggle to grasp that middle place between the figurative and the intangible. Abstraction has always struck me as a cynical compromise-a cop out toward a vague, indefinable, incohesion, that immediately separates itself as anything substantive for the viewer to grasp . Often it asks for so much latitude of depth, where often there is none. An arcane spatter for flourishing effect.

There are a few artists I can think of who to my mind bridge that chasm-De Kooning, Kitaj and of course Bacon-come immediately to the fore, and so-expanding on the Ghost piece that I really liked, today I put brush where my mouth is.
The resulting stew (or spew) is what I can only think to describe as the fossilizing of souls, a disintergration of the physical to an ossified intergration with the ether. It also looks apocalyptic, like freshly fried corpses being decimated by some nuclear wind. It was inspired by a vague memory I have of a painting I saw in a magazine in the 70's called Man, Myth and Magic, which depicted a kind of atavism. I also drew on a set of pieces I was painting fifteen years ago, called Dispositions, which were abstract ruminations on the fire weed I'd seen locally, influenced by Graham Sutherlands work.

Anyway, I'm really pleased with the way the pieces are evolving-Ebay chicanery aside-I can see a through line in the set of oils I've been working on, from Disambiguous Foresight to Ghost onwards.

Is abstraction a natural process of an artist evolution, or is just a shorthand I wonder?

Head Candy

I'm finding real gratification in my proliferation at the moment-I don't see too much of compromise to quality either, if anything the reversion to acrylics just allows me the luxury of revision quicker, and of course the fluidity of painting faster gives the line a freshness that perhaps I've been missing with the meticulousness of oils.

The fervor I'm feeling with my work again, is as addictive as any drug, its euphoric and misleading because I know the downside to the natural chemical low after a period of creativity. I need to manage it better and work it to my advantage, because I can't afford to be thrown to the mercy of a mood regression.
Still, I've not been this prolific in a long time-perhaps I am realising that with less time ahead than behind me, I can no longer afford to fuck about-time is simply running out, and I have wasted so much of it, lost to the contemplation of predicament, when I should just have worked through it.

Tomorrow, I am working on publicity for the show on the 16th, along with a commission and speculating a new piece-busy as a proverbial bee then.

Before I forget, here is today's sketchbook post.

Gough Medicine-The Artist

'I never got my license to live-they won't give it up, so I stand at the Worlds edge...'

Iggy Pop-Some Weird Sin, 1977

© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd

Artifact-tales of an Antiquarian-Lani

The muse is eternally intertwined with the artists existence, the role of the model, more than a mere object of infatuation, but a rumination of melancholy, for a beauty that is forever fleeting and technically unattainable. It embodies all the vivaciousness of life through the imagination.

I have painted my wife-Lani,on multiple occasions-always recasting her as some mythical paean to the ethereal qualities of her beauty and my love for her.

The most successful of these pieces, I think was 'Secret Rendezvous' painted in 2005. My first ever piece painted in oils, it was steeped in the classical traditions of Pre Raphalite painting-and the enigmatic portraits of Elizabeth Siddal, whereupon Lani was Guinevere, returning from an assignation with her lover in the forest.
Her torn petticoat on bramble thorns alluded to some of the disapproval we were suffering over our relationship at the time.

Its a piece I'm still quite proud of, and I regret having sold it, as it captured something of a true essence of my wife's mystical beauty.