Robert Hughes R.I.P

 "Apart from drugs-art, is the biggest unregulated market in the world"


I just discovered Robert Hughes has gone. The last dissenting voice on the quagmire that is the con of contemporary Art.

I still have Shock of the New on my book shelf, and on days when I am feeling utterly futile,(usually when Hirst or Emin's name appear in the news) I fall back on my Youtube stalwart-The Mona Lisa Curse-for solace. That withering stare, that chuckle of contempt, as he eviscerates a Warhol pack rat...Artists, curators, patrons seek it out Here

Emma Goughs Competition series

My daughter-Emma is in her final year at University, and recently began a series which I feel is her best work to date. Entitled the 'Competition' series and dealing with female identity through the use of makeup, I'm hugely proud of her accomplishment and thought I'd share her newest works here.

Incidentally, Emma has a blog of her own and I recommend my followers check it out.

Emmas Blog

Jen Trute-1960/2011

Whilst I am sad to admit that I never met Jen Trute in person, I knew her art.

In the past, whenever I've been too swift to dismiss the superfluous excesses of San Diego's art scene, it's always been a welcome reminder to myself that Jen Trute more than eclipsed the chasm of vacuousness and artifice, with the astonishing yardstick of her mastery.


Technically of course, she was flawless,tossing off the kind of flourishes that would leave the best of us slack jawed on the periphery, but her work also had that rare thing of conceptual clarity-never suffering the obliqueness that so often subdues the viewer, and is a perfect get out card for so many surrealist poseurs.


Despite the darker themes, her work was also as disarmingly bright and airy as the long hot summer days that she spent in her Carlsbad studio, where I paid my respects yesterday.


Like I said, I didn't know Jen,but from the meticulous way that she organized her brushes to the hundreds of carefully mixed swatches she compiled, I can tell you that she was the "real deal". So many of us are just charlatans in the incredible, remarkable wake of her work.

We are all richer for her astonishing legacy and she shall be sorely missed.

David Gough inspirations-day four : British TV Titles in the Seventies

Day four of five things that influenced me as a kid

Perhaps it was the result of some residual psychedelic Acid trip from the Sixties at Broadcasting house's Art department, but there seemed to be something positively unsettling about some British TV in the Seventies.

Whatever it was, the shows titles alone seemed designed in some Orwellian lab, to imprint dark nightmarish visions on an impressionable young cerebellum. Certainly for this artist, they colored an already fevered imagination.

Take 'The Tomorrow People', billed as a children's Television show about superbrained adolescents, no doubt some of the plots would have gone completely over my head even now, But the title sequence still puts the fear of dark Gods into me.



U.F.O came from the same stable as Thunderbirds, except as opposed to puppets it was Aliens that looked in the throws of epilepsy, Ed Stryker and the delicious Gabrielle Drake looking like a throwback to 2001. The end sequence can still give me cold sweats.



Armchair Thriller WAS on usually after Ovaltine and as I was about to be ordered up the stairs, but try falling into a wistful slumber with this sequence resonating in your skull.

David Gough inspirations-day three: Liverpool

Day three of five things that influenced me as a kid

"No one who has any self-respect stays -but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.”James Joyce

Every artist or writer holds a weary relationship with there hometown. Growing up in Liverpool in the Seventies and early Eighties felt akin to living in a warzone.
The architectural contemporary dream of the sixties had been reduced to the urban squalor of a abandoned tenements, whilst dilapidated Victorian alleyways lay strewn with garbage, soiled mattresses and bursting couches. Burned out cars sat on faceless gray estates, while shipyards heaved with rusted old vessels on banks of shit colored mud-bygones of an industrious era. Everything felt like decay, particularly when you lived by a cemetery.

These were the playgrounds of my youth.



It's all too easy to heighten reality, recast it as some romantic, resilient 'Boys from the Blackstuff' morality play, but the truth is far from ideal. Still looking back at pictures from that era, I can see the influence that those times had on my creative geography.


All photos copyright Dave Sinclair, for more of his incredible images go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/dave_sinclair_liverpool_photos/

David Gough inspirations-day one: Kevin O'Neill-Nemesis

Day one of five things that influenced me as a kid.

2000ad was a British sci-fi weekly, borne from the same year that brought us punk and Star Wars-in fact you could say it was a beautiful bastard child of the two.
To any kid with a rapacious imagination, it was a revelation.

In its tenure, it brought to the fore some formidable comic book talent- Brian Bolland, Mike McMahon, Dave Gibbons and my favorite Kevin O'Neill.

The story goes that O'Neill had been an office junior at publishers IPC,who having shown some aptitude, was thrown the bone of an art assignment on one of Tharg's (the alien editor) strips.
Such were the times back then.

He quickly elevated to covers, before regular duties were assigned to titles such as Ro-Busters, ABC warriors and the magnificent Nemesis the Warlock.

Nemesis was like nothing in comics that I'd ever seen before-an angular headed ET freedom fighter touched by mystical madness.
With perfect foil-Pat Mills writing an anti religious parable about alien cleansing exterminators wearing KKK garb led by a tyrannical Torquemada, O'Neill's imagination was free to indulge his neurotic, scratchy renderings with all manner of weirdness and progeny.

It wasn't even comics, it felt like the twisted mind warp of someone who had been genetically cultured from the same petri dish as Bosch melded with some alien offspring.

This was no comic for kids.

Indeed, his work was to come under the scrutiny of comics code censorship, which has always left me to marvel at what manner of grotesque horror he had to tone down, given the full tilt that did make it to print.



Then of course America beckoned and off he went to illuminate Marshall Law, Batman and his more recent stellar work on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which I collected just because.
However, it's his Art on Nemesis with it's gothic detail and demented subversion that upon revisiting, can conjure again, all the artistic aspirations, sense of play and enthusiasms I had as a child.

Art of the Shay Man

"Greed" Oil on Canvas

I first became aware of Shay Davis's work around two years ago. Vast sprawling canvases, full of surreal, multi layered grandeur and bathed in luscious gorgeousness, as well as all manner of dark progeny.

Be it a centaur impaling a rattlesnake with a trident, wild western bandit's sparring on a clockwork railroad, disembodied heads sprouting tentacles or a monumental stone head, rocking on brittle stilts like a propped boat, dwarfing a diminutive elephant sprouting from its jawline below, every piece was painted with the meticulousness of a grand old master.

Unsurprisingly I was to discover upon meeting Shay, that each piece takes months to complete, and that he is currently sequestered for hours completing what will surely be his magnum opus-The Seven Deadly Sins.

"Pride" Oil on Canvas

I've since been honored to share wall space and a growing friendship with Shay, and even if on first appearance, he does remind one a little of a more affable Joaquin Phoenix, it should come as no surprise then that he is also to feature in his own documentary entitled 'Shay Vision' which premiers April 8th at the Birch North Park Theater, here in San Diego.

Tickets are $10 with $1 of every purchase donated to the San Diego Visual Arts Network. For full details go to the following link, get your tickets soon, as this event promises to sell out:

http://www.shayvisionmovie.com/

All the Presidents Men

It's Presidents day here in the US, distinguishable for myself as an extra day spent with the misses. I'd like to say that we have plans, perhaps a road trip to the snow capped hills of Julian, or a wander around Borders before it disappears into the same dusty realm as Hollywood Video and Music Trader, except a week on, I am still nursing some horrible lurgy.

In lieu of anything remotely newsworthy, here then is a rather apt cover expressing my disposition, from that 80's DC classic- 'Shade the Changing Man'. Conjured by Brendan McCarthy who may have been on some psychotropic experimental drug or merely necking Benedryl-but whatever he was on-sadly, you don't see comic book covers like that anymore.

Object D Art-Ryan August R.I.P

The older I get, the more I realise that the sudden death of someone you know, never lessens with the shock of its magnitude. That's how it was today when I read the status update on Ryan August's Facebook.

Thats the strange, detached way of things these days, no longer does someone sit you down to prepare you for tragic news, you discover it cycling through a 'social network'.

Regardless, the cold hard facts aren't any less tragic, any less revelatory -Ryan died in a car accident on Saturday night.
I wish I could tell you we were tight buddies-I wish I'd had that chance-except the truth is I only knew him through sparodic emails and Facebook, and the fact that he was a great advocate for my work and hundreds of other artists through his splendid zine-'I want your Skull.'
His enthusiasm and passion for the subject, was a cohesive spirit to all the other 'boneheaded' denizens out there, and a singular champion of all things skull related.
The irony of course is, that I received my own copy of the latest issue with my own minor contribution Saturday morning.

An accomplished artist and tatooist in his own right, he touched so many with his vision, but of course the greatest legacy he leaves behind are his wife and son who will miss him more than any of us can imagine.

Object D' Art-Frank Frazetta-R.I.P

Frank Frazetta-February 9, 1928 – May 10, 2010

As a kid, there were two artists I wanted to be when I grew up. One was John Bolton, the other was Frank Frazetta.
I'll never forget the thrill of first seeing the cover of Creepy, on a newsagents shelf in Liverpool-the image of a sword wielding, frenzied warrior battling wierd bat demons, scored itself immediately to my little cerebellum,and beheld everything my adolescent imagination comprised up until that point, in one beautifully rendered image. It had nothing to do with my surroundings, and everything to do with some internally, amplified fantasy world.
Over the years, there were so many more covers to discover- savage, hellish, beasts, barbarians with axes glistening with blood,sultry buxom vixens writhing at there bootstraps-each one an iconic image, always a technicolor candy wrapper to the monographics within.
Sadly,in light of the post Star Wars blitz, Frazetta's work seemed a tad old fashioned-a relic of a bygone age, sword and sorcery shtick that carried the stigma of overgrown boys still living with there Mums and Dads.

And yet, I see his influence is everywhere, from the art of Bisley to Brom, to the Teutonic digital renderings of a World of Warcraft module, his legacy cuts a swathe through the driveling digital posturing of his imitators, because technically, he was a master.

In this era of p.c proselytizing , its hard to imagine a world where images of inflated sex kittens bent provocatively before a squirming serpent barely raised an eyebrow, let alone emblazoned the cover of a boys comicbook, but his work represented such a time of unpretension and unselfconscious.
And whilst he has long since been embraced as a seer, in the record of a certain 'art history', respect is overdue.

Object D' Art-Eliza Rickman

I first became acquainted with Eliza Rickman's very unique musical prowess when I was showing at the Hive earlier this year-accompanied by a miniature piano called a Schoenhut, and looking like a beautiful Burtonesque, Victorian, porcelain doll, her fragile allure belied the set that followed.
Kicking off with a potent version of Dear Prudence, she sounded somewhere between the mellifluous tones of Mary Hopkin and Siouxie Sioux, fed through a worm hole that plays the balmy side show static of tinkling pianola. This was to be no obscure karaoke act however, the retinue of songs that followed-with self penned titles such as 'Black Rose', 'Lily Love', Over Cold Shoulders' & 'Cinnamon Bone', revealed a delicate, haunting quirkiness to sanguine themes of bittersweet longing and friendships past.
She also posessed the kind of bohemian black eyed enchantment of every willowy French girl who ever sat outside a cafe clutching a Sylvia Plath novel that I was captivated by as an art student, with the exception that this lady had acres of true talent, actually read all of those books and was and is a true starlet in waiting.

Guild the Lily-her debut cd is available to download, and she is also playing here at the Ruby Room in San Diego on the 18th of December.

Object D' Art-Dark Vomit

On general release from today, is something which I believe shall be the flagship project for how art shall be viewed in the future. The Interactive Art Show Video game, is more than your trad shoot em up fare, consisting of fifteen artists-the San Diego Surrealists as I believe we shall be known-it includes, annexes of gallery rooms, host to a variety of subterranean denizens-curators of the nightmare visions by the artists in residence. Appropriately, my own area is a dank dungeon, and the scene of a decapitation by guillotine:

The Interactive Art Show

It was produced seemingly in the blink of an eye by fellow artist-Dark Vomit-Kelly Hutchinson, whose exceptional pop surreal painting is one of the many highlights of this project. His canvases are either inhabited by those terrifying symbols of many a childhood nightmare-garish, sneering clowns,such as the corporate avatars of capitalism- McDonalds and Jack, to the Joker and the puppet from the Saw movies. Or the icons of American tapestry, altered through the mutated multi-ocular lens of a mushroom trip, or emasculated like John Wayne in a dress for a cotton candy parade, all rendered with the deft brush of an old master in a classical setting.

http://www.darkvomit.com/

My favourite works, are those with the toy plastic dentures, rabidly snapping from the brittle necks of skeletons, riding crows or about to consume some cute chicklet-a momentary innocence lost to the jaws of death.

Artwork copyright of Dark Vomit ©-reproduced with kind permission

Unsurprisingly, he has just become the feature of a Juxtapoz article which you can read here:

'Knee Deep in Dark Vomit'

A big Thank you to Kelly for my inclusion in this very exciting project, to all the other artists for making the game a gallery powerhouse, and a special thanks to the really lovely artist-Celine, for giving me a tip of the hat to begin with.

Object D' Art-Tomi Ungerer-Agent Provocateur

'My anger is essential to my work,-Humour is a defense mechanism against the evils of society.'
Tomi Ungerer




I first became aquainted with Tomi Ungerers work, upon discovering his dark little tome-Testament-in an even darker corner of a Liverpool library in the very early 1980's.
The naive, fluid economy of brittle line drawings, belied the psychological and political depth of his renderings-from the protest posters of the 60s, to the flabby skinned,pearls and fur draped caricatures of high society,stiffing one another with a leer, or the Belsen style corpses humping sadomasochistic machines (when not fleecing swine tied to kitchen furniture,that is), the stark expressionistic monochrome of his sardonic humor, cut through the dung like the knife carving blood trails on the jacket.

A popular children's illustrator and broadsheet cartoonist in the US during the fifties and sixties-Ungerer-seeing too many parallels between the Nazi occupied township of his childhood, and the war in Vietnam, became incensed and returned to his native Europe in 1971, growing more subversive in the approach to his craft.

Recast as 'agent provocateur' no stone of modern malady was left unturned and tossed in vitriol, be it a world choked by greed, overpopulation and industrialization, the sacrificial bloodletting and bomb stockpiles of the warmongers, or the alienation of sexual perversion-now more than ever-his work peels back the thinly veiled skin to reveal the stark bone of societies distemper beneath.

Notes from an easel-work in progress-the Valley stage four by David Gough

I've never worked so meticulously before-but the precision of perspective and angles requires nothing less-my concentration so acute that at times I have to remind myself to draw a breath.

The image haunts me, and my mind finds itself hearing Bowie's 1972 rendering of My Death by Jaques Brel for some bizarre reason-particularly the lines 'whatever lies behind the door...'
The performance of which has never failed to move me, particularly at the denouement where Ziggys final lines are eclipsed by the audience cries.

I am Jacks Pride and joy

My daughter Emma-who I miss as if I'd lost my right hand-sent me a wonderful e-mail this morning, featuring an installation piece that she had produced at college. She didn't include a title, and will probably kill me for this, but its a wonderful work (and I say that without a hint of bias) that explores themes broadly resonant beyond her years. To quote:

"This piece was meant to symbolise the constructions of all relationships. It purposely is meant to look like a chain, to show the strength and bond within a relationship. I have made the links different sizes to show different points and factors of being in love. Some are really small, some are thicker than others and some are long and thin.
It was inspired by Jackson Pollock and Eva Hesse. I have hand stitched them together to show the long and hard hours that go into making something work, I have also used thick acrylic paint, and I have embroidered it heavily in thread"

She is just eighteen by the way.

I am so very proud.

On an entirely separate note , I've tried to think of a multitude of ways these past two days, that I could address the death of J.G. Ballard, but I really don't think I could say it as well as Neil Gaiman did in his post.

Suggested Reading: The Atrocity Exhibition.