Crimes of our Times

Plenty of criminal activity happening these days of course, not least America's hellbent descent into full bananas republican, but this is from a recent webcast, in which I talk to John Borowski,who featured me in his Serial Killer Culture documentary, about my former Man/son series, modern day conspiracy, growing up in Liverpool as well as giving a peek into my next series-Infernal.

Watch it below.

Filmmaker/author John Borowski: http://johnborowski.com

Serial Killer Culture is on Amazon Prime

Battling Demons

"And when the barrator had disappeared, he turned his talons upon his companion and grappled with him right above the moat. But sooth the other was a doughty sparhawk. To clapperclaw him well and both of them fell in the middle of the boiling pond"

Dante-Divine comedy-Inferno: Canto XXII

Dante had been expelled from his native Florence by the time he wrote his magnum opus. Battle worn from the conflict with the Ghibelline’s in Campaldino, betrayed and exiled following his rift with the Papacy, and heart sick following the death of his unrequited beloved-Beatrice, the long descent through the circles of Hell must have seemed like a refreshing morning stroll by comparison.

No such reprieve from the hell and damnation that has been this year unfortunately. Pandemic still hanging like a biblical pall, while the straitjacket of institutional racism becomes torn at the fabric of Americas seams. Hardly surprising and frankly-long overdue, given the four hundred millennia that includes a legacy of human chattel, lynchings,segregation and injustice.  Add the imperfect storm of endless black by blue murders, and four rancorous years of ear bleeding dog whistles, and we find the median that was Junes gloom, drowning in it’s inevitable, turbulent, flood. 

 So there’s a lot of that informing this latest piece, the Inferno’s battling demons-Calcabrina and Alchin-talons drawn and teeth barred as they fall into the seething black pitch-a ready made conflict that conjured for me at least, not only the fractured divide between the white Guelph’s and black Guelph’s that vexed Dante’s era, but the racial one that has spanned from the Mauritanians in Visigoth’s Europa, the riots in my native Toxteth back in 82, through to present day America.

Along with it, my own redress to not fall on the sword of only ‘paint what you know”, because broadening ones palette should always extend literally, if we are to confront the white demons of our own.

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”

Leper Messiah

"Illness brings ugliness in it's train"
Umberto Eco-On Ugliness

"He was an elemental being, so primitive that he might have 
spent the twenty-three years of his life immured in a cave." 

 The Elephant Man and other Reminiscences-Frederick Treeves

Joseph Carey Merrick then -the so called Elephant man- the king of "freaks."

When we think of him, we envision a shadowed, leprous phantom-like a lurching masked and cloaked sack of hidden pestilence, wandering the hazy cobbled alleyways, or the crowded platforms of the Victorian age.

A sad and noble figure, where the body outside, betrayed the internal virtues of the soul, deceived as he was by the rancorous tumors and putrescent flesh that ravaged his flesh, like some gruesome Ganesh figure.

Here of course I have him unadorned and entirely naked, reveling in the perversion of his decay, a spectacle of deliverance, for a defiled deity. 

Reading through Treeve's manuscript again, speaking of Merrick as a man whose existence had been so beleaguered, and yet had "passed through the fire" and emerged "ennobled...free from any trace of cynicism,resentment,or grievance" feels like no less than a savage indictment when compared to the daily morning dreadlines, that catalogue whining privileged and entitlement from those who would claim to hold the edge on piety.

 In an era of malediction and malady, where the ugliness stems from within,it is the internal body then, that betrays the external one.

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

Mother’s Superiority Complex

” Those midwives to history, put on their bloody robes"
― David Bowie-Teenage Wildlife.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

A fellow artist recently noted , how prescient my prior series must seem, given the times we find ourselves in. Another friend charitably referred to me as a conduit.

Believe me, it gives me little comfort to see the turmoil of my inner landscape, reflected on any real one.  And following that train for a moment, I should perhaps be more than a little unnerved, given that the new series is subtitled “the denouement”.

Except, as someone who see’s themselves as possibly more of an anthropologist than an artist,  I’m no more unique than anyone who views history as just writing on the wall.

For instance, here’s a particularly unpleasant character whose been seeding her way through my sketches for quite a few years now. With her withering stink eye, I suppose she’s come to represent a certain, old, righteous indignation. A glowering factotum, judging disapprovingly at the viewers prying gaze from beneath her cowl, whilst yielding fealty to the most reprehensible of deeds.

There’s a lot of that about lately, given that a whole segment of society clings to the boast that 100,000 deaths would be the results of someone performing a very good job, whilst another sits blissfully deluded by the notion that C-19 is all just a conspiratorial hoax.

We should all be so lucky.

At any rate, I’ve no doubt that heat they feel, isn’t just from feet being held to the fire, but the dial turning all the way up to total hell unleashed on earth.

So whilst we wait for the full toll, I entreat everyone to stay safe, stay home and make a sanctuary of yourself.

Mining Tour

“Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper.”
Charles Bukowski.

The first proper work from the new studio then, and I’ve taken the literal bull by the horns, or at least the Minotaur.

I’m following a tradition of course that spans from the Chauvet caves, the Canaanite God Moloch,  to the Labyrinth, through the gates of the Seventh circle of the Dantes Inferno, all the way to Picasso easel and beyond,  but the beastly half man/half bull progeny of Pasiphae, threads it’s way through the culture of our collective subconscious, like a primal avatar.

There are moments when I relate to the Bovine headed creature of Crete, locked away in a dark subterranean maze of my own making, especially in the face of such days as these.
It’s not until I leave the studio on occasion and venture down the mountain to the local town that the outside-like Theseus wielding his club-gets in, as it did today, standing in line at the grocery store.

Shelves ransacked of produce and toiletries, lines out the door, as peoples carts brimmed over with canned goods, water jugs, frozen food, pasta-a surreal precursor to some Steven King inspired nightmare.

It’s the lemming fever of hysteria of course, a literal viral panic about a pandemic that has people, literally shitting themselves in their quest to hoard enough soft ply, to wipe every arse from here to Wuhan. When Plato imagined the end of the Republic,  I daresay he didn’t foresee the hoarding of toilet roll as a harbinger to a populace prepping to watch it from their enamel thrones.

Still, it’s a frigid poke in the collective small of ones back, one that reminds us that society is ever fragile, and a single crisis away from teetering into bedlam and chaos. 
A sobering reminder that all it will take, is a spark of righteous entitlement, to ignite the kindling that has been the unraveling landscape of these past four years.

Because bulls fare better in labyrinths than in grocers shops.