Chin Wag with Chet Zar

Here's a real treat. I had the honor of being invited onto the mighty Chet Zar's, Dark Art Society podcast recently, talking about all manner of things. Influences, origins, art stuff and our shared appreciation of Withnail and I. 
To use a quote from that film, just when thought "the only programme I was likely to get on was the fucking news!"
Anyway it was a blast and I thoroughly enjoyed our "chin,chin" wag. Thank you so much Chet. 
Listen to me waffle here:

https://soundcloud.com/darkartsociety/david-van-gough-ep-97

You can also become a fully fledged member of the D.A.S from the following Patreon  for as little as a buck a month.

www.patreon.com/darkartsociety

Sugar Buzz

Back after a bout of dreadful lurgy following my holiday sabbatical home. Home by turns wasn't so sad, but magic,idyllic- all the Raymond Briggsesque, warm family hearth of brewing parochial Englishness I could hope for. 

So here I am, mid January 2019, sequestered in the studio once more,frantically staring down the barrel with less than the final two months to go before the opening. Lumee!!  No more did that reality descend like a vampires teeth, than when opening the pages of the latest Hi Fructose magazine, and this rather lovely snippet confronted me. 

It's a big deal, an honor and very welcome first as things go. Thank you HF and Dark Art Emporium, a much needed sugar buzz, that other high energy drinks fail to.

Still two more pieces to go, so no time to lose before showtime.

Mood Board

 'And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?"

Jerusalem-William Blake


That's quite a mosaic of madness there, comprising a tapestry of transcendent terror, from the deathly pall of a blossoming mushroom cloud through Rubens beefy original sin, by way of Jattault's lord of the flies, to the gnarled toes of Grunewald's Corpus Christi and the feeding trough in Jonestown. It's all there, a visual totem that could redouble as a mood board for the nations psyche, but actually depicts all my artistic preoccupations for a year that has been creatively fulfilling and parochially foreboding.  

Welcome relief then, as I prepare myself to return to Old Blighty for the holidays.

Of the many gifts my life has been blessed with this year, the greatest of them all will be meeting my beautiful grandson -Atticus for the first time. Because any legacy I could hope to leave, shrinks in the great shadow of that one. 

As it should.

Which just leaves me with the wish that your Solstice be filled to the brim with love and libation, and the hope that along with prosperity and health, the coming year brings lucidity and accord. 

Enjoy the silence.

 “One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

It looks like I'm staring off into the abyss, pondering the muddy expanse of the soiled nothing, but it's actually that first contemplative pause before something happens, in a space fertile with possibility. It allows the chance as the song by Depeche Mode said, to enjoy the silence.

As the year comes to a close, it's no accident that the piece I'm planning is about the heralding of a new dawn.

In the other spaces in between, I've been reading Chris Hedges new book-"America the farewell tour." Distressing raw meat for a series that is peppered with ill omens hurtling us towards the end times. Take me at my sarcastic best, when I say that if his previous tome-"American Fascism" is a side splitter, this one will put you on the floor. 
At any rate, the irony isn't lost, given that it arrived during a four day power outage, while a place called Paradise burned itself out of existence. Lest we forget the horticulture tips in response,procured from the odious shitgibbon in chief.

The whole thing left a somber cloud that hasn't loomed as bleakly since Cormac McCarthys the Road.

In the face of what Hedges propounds as Durkeim's anomie in real time, it's hard to see a way forward, to not sense that all of our tomorrows shall be a continued assault of cyclical traumas, imposed by the will of a small dogmatic proportion of the populous, intent on nihilism, subjugation and extinction.  If my previous series-Purgatorium-was partially informed by Artaud's essay -"Van Gogh, the man suicided by society", then this one ascribes to a society, in essence suiciding itself.

Whatever hope then, can only come with the vast expanse of ideas, from the reflective silences pregnant with possibility. 

Otherwise, the only sound left to hear will be humanities final death rattle.


. 

Toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble

All Hallows upon us again, witches night. There may not be pyres of crowing hags, just the flickering candle light through the drooping hollow of carved pumpkins, but it pales against the incandescent burning of the midnight oil ahead of me, as I settle back into duties for Paradiso’s Fall, just five short months away.

I’m feeling like I’ll need eye of newt to accomplish everything I want to.

This is me working on a piece which looks like it could be ready and basted in time for Thanksgiving, but continues a  thread that I started on the Manson series regarding cults and the dangerous hive mind of group think. Salem, Jonestown, Heavens Gate, The Children of God, MAGAt’s.

Whatever  scary movie double bill you stream tonight, remember there is nothing so bone chilling as the horror of current world events.

Happy Samhain everyone.

Phenomena movie award

This is a project I started last year, but actually has its origins in a piece from over a decade ago. “Gods and Monsters“ from 2005, was I believe my first artistic fumbling’s into arcane territory. 

‘Gods and Monsters”-(2005) acrylic on canvas, 16″ x 20″

I think I sold it for buttons on Ebay, such were the times back then, but it was adopted a couple of years later for the cover of Peter J Carrol’s excellent, The Apophenion: A Chaos Magick Paradigm, from which I didn’t make a bean from, such were the….well, you know the rest.
But I guess you can’t keep a good painting down, because it’s been resurrected, readopted and repurposed as the official “Uncanny” trophy award for the Phenomena horror cine festival in São Paulo. The award will go to winning participants-80 nominees of the likes which include Blumhouse’s Mandy, and a documentary produced by Benicio Del Toro The Rise and Fall of Buffalo Brown by Philip Rodriguez.

I am beyond honored.

Design for award front

As I write, the festival is already under way, but it runs until the 4th of November in two cities, Paraty (Rio de Janeiro State) and São Paulo (State Capital), and the screenings will be free of charge in all five different venues, so perfect celebration for All Hallows then.
https://www.phenomenafest.com
I want to thank Cauê Castelo, Phenomena & La Matta tv for working with me to capture my vision in glittering three dimensional silver.

Official Phenomena poster, featuring my characters in Moebius style, by Diego Porto

The Divine and the Divined

18″x 18″
Oil on panel

My own contribution from the recent Tales from the Darkside show at LaBodega.

Rather drolly-or should I say troll-y, I got some push back on this when I posted it on social media from the usual self righteous quarters. How oddly ironic, that the dogmatic ever entreat that they be accepted in every faction of existence, yet never seem willing to extend the same courtesy themselves. 

Happy Holidays from Starbucks anyone?

Regardless, they are a ways off the mark in their usual bobble headed outrage for this one.
It was originally planned for the series I’m working on “Paradiso’s Fall”, which has become something of a vignette of ill omens, pointing towards what I perceive as man kinds inevitable demise. I’m hearing the term “personal apocalypse” coined a lot since I first used it some months back, but I believe it’s a predisposition inherent within us all.

This piece, portraying the mother-the holy vessel or paragon of virtue, literally transformed to the symbol of that final nail, is just merely another emblem of a paternally manifested future, inherently pushed to its own end. If you’d have said “Enola Gay” and “Little Man”you’d have been on the money.

Anyone who further missed the point, clearly didn’t see the whacking great atomic symbol, smack bang at the center of the piece. But then, I daresay nuclear proliferation in the hands of a madman who loves to push buttons, barely warrants a  semblance of grey matter either.
The worm coiling from the cuff, is just a further token of dehumanization, as we slither back toward the primal dirt from whence we came.

So perhaps its biblical after all.