Stillborne

“Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.”

Medusa-Sylvia Plath

24′ x 36″
Oil on canvas

I’ve painted Medusa before, or at least her ghost, which was if memory serves, prompted by reading some Jack London.

This one-partially inspired by Plath’s gorgeous poem about her mother-also supposes what might have happened had the Gorgon queen avoided being dispatched by Perseus’s sword, and gone on to conceive Poseidon’s progeny.

Yes I know, she has a head of eels instead of snakes, but it felt rather more in keeping with Athena’s wrathful spite mocking the mariner God, as well as a nice chance to continue a symbolic trope I started with Origins of a Black Hole.

I’ll be showing the piece at Copro gallery, for Chet Zar’s first Dark Art Society Group Show this Saturday through October.

Snake eyes

I’m working on a little diversion here- a side vent from the lava’s bubbling under current of Infernal.



Of course it’s for a show….yes, yes-I know I was no longer going to participate in group shows for the foreseeable future-but when the Dumbledore of Dark Art-Chet Zar invites you to the first ever Dark Art Society show at Copro, you don’t hesitate.

What’s with the Gorgon then? Ah well…all will be revealed soon, but I tell you my mind has felt like a nest of snakes (or in this case, eels) lately. Restless, tangled, fermenting.
It’s been like painting my physiognomy manifest.

The show will be opening just in time for the feast of Samhain month, and I’ll post full details along with the completed painting soon.

Paradiso’s Fall Opening. Artist Reception-March 9th

So you do a show, and of course you hope that somehow the planets will align. That people come and like what they see. That your work will connect with the visitors, and hopefully make a few sales, cover your costs, and if it all falls short of your hopes, then you’ve still done the graft at the end of the day, because the doing is ultimately the reason for the season.

Except, after years of accepting your lot-when it goes beyond that, when your hopes are surpassed , it can be every bit as paralyzing as disappointment. Which is why it’s taken me over a week to to say that I’m feeling flabbergasted-humbled-incredibly blessed.  The friends, the visitors, the collectors, my fellow artists, the curators Jeremy Schott and Jeremy Cross, my wife Lani…my mad gratitude.

You can see previews of the show Here
Paradiso’s Fall closes at The Dark Art Emporium- March 30th.

 

 

With Vincent Castiglia

With Evgenia Golik

With Tatomir Pitariu and Bill Shafer of Hyaena

With Chet Zar

 

With Lani

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

Riding a dark horse.

Back in the saddle on this one then.  Pushing my charge to the finish line while I manifest the next series.  If memory serves, I began this one at a live painting event at the Ruby Room in San Diego, on what was purportedly a Mayan predictor to the end times-12/21/12. Of course, it turned out to be the usual load of apocalyptic bollocks, but given the current state of world events, one wonders whether the countdown to midnight was merely set in motion on that date.

Each day feels like a dark revelation in new levels of madness now, a hangman’s breakfast for a world ever on the precipice of some fresh horror, all delivered by a bloviating buffoon tweeting diatribes of inanity and petty gripes, like an indignant, salivating ape lobbing feces.  And whilst my beloved England comes to grips with another night of deadly attacks by radicalized zealots, the true modern day terrorism it seems is on the collective psyche.

For one of the envisioned pieces, I’ve been researching Jonestown and Heavens Gate, and though I’ve grazed the draw of cultism before of course with the Man/son series,  it’s been unnerving not to draw parallels with the ease by which the masses can be so easily subjugated here.  As if the contemporary pied pipers are political and pastoral pontificates, enchanting with arias of disenchantment, hypnotizing the dogmatically obstinate. In these dark days, it’s hard not to feel like all is lost, like the experimental petri dish marked mankind has mutated into some monstrous pathogen.

Which reminds me, I watched my friend Chet Zar’s wonderful documentary “I like to paint monsters” the other day, and he said something in it which really struck a chord, and to paraphrase, it was that dark art makes sense of a dark world that doesn’t. It’s a moving and hugely inspiring film if you haven’t seen it (please do), but it reminded me that the artists role is more important than ever, and that I’ll keep doing my part to fathom the unraveling shitstorm, in the event that we make it for future generations to disseminate.

Conjoined 7

So on the day millions of women from around the world took to the streets against the new dark ages and muddy California Skys cascaded a tumult in accord, a little corner of Bergamont station was marking these times of dark herald, with Chet Zars Conjoined 7.

I could tell you of phantoms and hellions from every corner of the underworld, of mystical dervish shadows from  Hades bubbling craters, but it would be better if you saw it for yourself. After all, Darkness should be the visual anecdote of storytellers, not the reality manifested in halls of power.

Thank you to Gary and Chet, my fellow artists and everyone who braved traffic and downpour , the show is on display through February 11th.

Leviathan

Oil on canvas-42″ x 80″

“And because the constitution of a mans Body, is in continuall mutation; it is impossible that all the same things should alwayes cause in him the same Appetites, and aversions; much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object.
Good Evill”

Thomas Hobbes-Leviathan

Or the great metaphysical war between Hitler and Van Gogh, two historical figures parallel in the singularity of their ambitions, both failed artists within their lifetime,  yet so divided in that failures resolution.  Be it Ego or Id, creator or destructor, the paradox of dualism is manifest.

I realise I’m putting Descartes before the horse here.

I suppose they represent Post-contemporary paragons of the underdog, framing the entire 20th century and beyond. certainly when thinking of Van Gogh as the Godfather of Modern Art, there is the notion that there is some nobility in failure, when the truth so often comes at a cost whether the destruction that manifests is internal or as in Hitler’s case external.  I have to say, a lot of my thinking was informed by reading Artaud’s “Van Gogh: The man suicided by society” Particularly the haunting lines:

“Nobody ever wrote or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, invented, for another reason than to exit from hell. Each paint brush touch/strike (coup de pinceau) on the canvas is worst than an event.”

And yet Adolf had the presence of twisted mind to obliterated that “self-event” by creating Hell on Earth.

Lennon (the fuhrer’s antithesis) said it best when he confessed: “part of me suspects I am a loser, the other part God almighty.”

As I said previously here, it’s taken the best part of five years to bring it to some realisation but given that I completed it a week before the inauguration, the theme is eerily resonant-conjoined twins of diametrically opposed worldview, battling as Babylon falls like a sandcastle, whilst the architect King Nimrod (also an allusion to that other Nimrod totem of destruction) self-combusts in his zealous appetite to reorder the universe.

Having just watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation and read a recent interview where he perhaps wrongly charges the art world with some of the responsibility for the post-truth, Brexit / Trump outcome, it behooves me to wonder how we as artists can best characterize what we do, given the events and influences that inform us.

The painting will be on show alongside other artists works for Chet Zars Conjoined 7 show at Copro Gallery from January 21st.

Conjoined 7 at Copro

In which a selection of dark, underworld beasts, demonic progeny, and feral fiends shall assemble before a hypnotized throng. No I’m not talking about the inauguration, but Chet Zar’s annual Conjoined show at Copro gallery in L.A of which I shall be honorably participating.

The show opens on the 21’st January, and since at the time of writing, I am still putting the final touches to my largest piece to date, I better get my skates on.

Copronasan Gallery

Bergamot Arts Complex,
2525 Michigan Ave T5,
Santa Monica, CA 90404