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.

Paleozoic periods

 "And my essays lying scattered on the floor
Fulfil their needs just by being there"

David Bowie-Conversation Piece

That's it, the final flourish-my daubed initials alongside a scuttering trilobite. A little primordial arachnomorph, peering out from the corner of a bygone time. 

An apt note to end the series on then. 

He's also a call back to all of those gorgeously illustrated dinosaur books I had as a child, a relic from my own Paleozoic period if you will. Long gone to some netherland, dusty token corner of the internet, which I inevitably pored over before I began the series. 

Actually, if you look at my piece 'Space Enough Have I, to Lie in Such a Prison" from my last series-Purgatorium-you can see a little Archaeopteryx and Eohippus, in what is ultimately a thread between the two collections.

Speaking of seminal beginnings, I finally caught the excellent Bowie documentary-'Finding Fame'. 
It reminded me that in an older blog post (which is hard to believe is almost a decade ago now) I'd wondered" Pre Ziggy...What spurred that self belief?" 

What struck me, was for all of David Jones's early missteps,through excruciating novelty Gnome records and mime, were the seeds of sustained, exploratory fearlessness he  possessed of creative self discovery and illumination.For him, what started as a vehicle for some sort of notoriety, manifested into creating for the spirit of the mere act of creating itself, as a way of destroying the self..

Coming at the tail end of my own series, about mans compulsive nature for creation and destruction, it's a sentiment I both adhere and relate to. 

Certainly, his passing in 2016 and his final album has informed this entire body of work.

Just over a fortnight to go before the unveiling, and all the final preparation still ahead of me. 

In every sense.


 

Death Rattle

“We are all bound thither; we are hastening to the same common goal. Black death calls all things under the sway of its laws.”
Ovid

“The gormless and the baying crowd right there.
They can’t get enough of that doomsday song,
They can’t get enough of it all”
David Bowie-The Next Day

Another skull.
One more deaths head dug up from the boneyard- commissioned on this occasion-but no less symbolically apropos for the dark times we live in.

When has that not been the case I ask myself?

Its not just my default anymore.
Death is prevalent. Everywhere it seems-because I believe the 242 year old experiment called America is dying.

Or has a suicidal streak running through it at the very least.

It could be these Divided States of Angst. You’ve felt it-that permanent unease we find ourselves in now.
Where acidic cauldrons froth over daily, and drown everything with toxic rancor and insanity.
Where another deadly school massacre, draws pious platitudes from crowing gun fetishists in tinfoil hats.
Where a swamp is substituted for a malfeasant cesspool of corruption, calamity and chaos.
Where every right eye is turned blind to the trashing of democratic norms in favor of trash talk.
Where Nazi’s and Russian despots are ‘fine people’ and the FBI is ‘treasonous’.
Where celebrities and sports figures ought to remain silent, when there is a game show host in power.
Where Evangelicals lament the downfall of Christian family values over a coffee cup, but endorse candidates who are adulterers with an appetite for porn stars and children.
Where an Intel dossier detailing a Presidents penchant for pissing prostitutes is ‘fake news’ but a pizza parlor harbors a Satanic, ritualized, child- sex /murder, cult…

To Mars.

And it’s not just the rank hypocrisy–it’s that there is a faction that seems fervently intent on hurtling us towards some cataclysm. Certainly, The Evangelical Taliban positively creamed its chaste gusset when the bloviator in chief, sought to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capitol. No doubt fulfilling the apocalyptic wank fantasy of every Christian jihadist, hungry for judgement day.

Because making America great means no greater cause than eliciting ‘Liberal tears’, even if the outcome is we are all annihilated in a tweeted, nuclear, maelstrom.

Sitting at the celebrating Bowie concert last week, singing along to songs performed by competent stand ins and his still sizzling former band, it hit me that part of the challenge now feels like the very best of us-the generational voices that would propel us forward, the thinkers of the enlightenment and champions of cultural change, have been replaced by the very worst of us.  Hitch, staring down the barrel of a cancer that would consume him said that he not only feared that he would have to leave the party, but that the party would go on without him.

Except the party ended when the life and soul was gone. Death took him along with all the other vanguard, free thinkers of his generation, and left us with the odious. The avaricious. The volatile. The dogmatists. The bullshitters, brainless barbarians and fools.

With almost uncanny timing, I write this as it’s announced Stephen Hawking has passed.

Intelligence, along with bastions of education and science are now vilified as ‘elitist’, substituted with a brain numbing diet of  TMZ, X-Factor, Fox News and Jerry Springer to occupy the vacuous mind of the plebeian. Little wonder then, there sits a President, perfectly suited for the National Enquirer generation.

Perhaps when they switched on the Hadron Collider it caused a fissure in the space time continuum, and we hit an alternative timeline,  a timeline where every virtue was turned on its head.  Indeed, the year that elected America’s greatest aberration and folly, brought with it a mass exodus of figure heads from every station.

Some might even say 2016 was akin to a rapture.

I really hope that notion leaves some Evangelicals as alarmed as the rest of us are feeling right now.

Except, I remind myself that in that same week as I watched Bowie’s guitarist, Gerry Leonard, lean over his guitar like a little blue rinsed granny, while a crowd of aging fans stormed the stage,  Guillermo Del Toro took an Oscar for his monster movie- ‘The Shape of Water’. As did the horror movie ‘Get Out’ highlighting racism, and finally Bowie’s great friend-Gary Oldman,  for his turn as Churchill in a movie fittingly titled for these times ‘The Darkest Hour’.

it’s a welcome rejoinder that as artists of darker themes, the torch falls to us.

Because as barren as it feels right now, we are on fertile ground.

Article Round up

“It involves equal parts frustration, melancholy,rage, tenacity, and a desire to be heard.”

I am returned from Old Blighty, so whilst I am still reorienting myself to the time difference and readying myself to mix up fresh palettes, here’s some very nice articles from BrutForce regarding my contribution to the Saint Bowie showcase, and a feature all the way from Italy, for MassonCreativita-the transcript of each is republished below.

http://brutforce.com/more-than-a-mortal-man-the-bowie-that-inspired-art/

“Take David Van Gough’s “Starcophagus” for instance. This wooden pentagram-shaped box offers insight into Bowie’s creative process. Romano explains its function through demonstration. Carefully removing the lid, Romano’s hands reveal a pile of cut-up pieces of paper containing Bowie’s lyrics. “This was how he’d write his song,” says Romano, referring to the ancient occult practice of emptying the mind, allowing invisible forces to guide your hand.”

http://massoneriacreativa.com/david-van-gough/

(What is creativity?) DvG: “Its a manifestation of something intangible, a kind of alchemy that goes on where you take base materials, and refashion them as gold, except sometimes you make a Frankenstein monster of all your demons. It’s a little bit like playing at God, in that regard.
It involves equal parts frustration, melancholy,rage, tenacity, and a desire to be heard. Just stir and add a pinch of garlic and hey presto. Afterwards there is either an enormous sense of triumph or defeat. Also possible indigestion.
The method and technicalities evolve certainly, but the aspect of needing to do it, is very much coded in my DNA and the bus route I travel.”

Starcophagus

“I’m an instant star. Just add water and stir.”

David Bowie

And so it was-an interstellar supernova, a blackstar imprinting itself on the cultural ether, forever usurping brands for sneakers and ratings.

I carved my little momento mori star from wood, in the same manner he carved himself, like a totem reaching for the heavens, a trees pinnacle piercing the moon. Perhaps if you put it on a turntable, you could hear Starman crackling through the rings grooves. Perhaps not.
I imagine at the apex of some distant nebula, its only just coming through on a wave of phase anyway.

It’s 1972 forever somewhere, right?

And that’s a reproduction I made of Freddie Burretti’s Ziggy fabric in the well, the green circuit board design that Bowie had quilted to neuter the Clockwork Orange ultraviolence.

I filled the void as he did with his words- re purposing cut up lyrics from his immense catalog, so you can create an entirely new Bowie composition of your own.

By the end, I was as drained as if I’d gone up the hill backwards.

It’ll be on display for the Saint Bowie tribute show at Stephen Romero gallery in Brooklyn, from March 2nd at any rate. Follow the link.

http://www.shishigami.com/srfa/saintbowie.html

Saint Bowie group show

Saint Bowie Group Show,Stephen Romano gallery.
March 2 2016, 5 – 9 pm

“Now my death is more than just a sad song”

David Bowie-Reality.

Arse end of a rough month, an endless parade of souls, friends and acquaintances passing on with alarming frequency and proximity it seems. Like the flood gate was suddenly swung open once the great man left for Mars, or the Blazing World, or Betelgeuse or wherever Demi Gods go.  At times, it’s felt like I’m resided just short of the runway for Necropolis airport. Been reorienting my compass through shows and commissions since, all whilst peering in the rear mirror a little more cautiously.

At the signpost up ahead however, before I make a trip home to watch my eldest lad walk his lovely bride down the aisle, is a welcome stop gap in the none too insubstantial form of the Saint Bowie group show at Stephen Romano gallery. If I told you how many shows I’d been invited to since January 10th, you’d think contemporary art and culture positively resonates with strange fascination. (For suspect bandwagoning  and how not to stage a tribute show to the greatest musician of the 20th century, please reference the Grammy’s)

Which is why it was such a relief to be invited to submit for a show at the Stephen Romano, a gallery in NY-former home and musical stomping ground of former David Robert Jones. Also fitting since it will give me the opportunity to produce something in a little different in spirit as the show promises to be “comprised of artist made devotional mementos, Ex Votos, Santos, Spirit Photos and other reliquaries which mourn the loss of the Starman, and also serve as a means by which to commune with Bowie on the other side. ”

The other and most notable reason for me at any rate, is it gives me the opportunity to pay tribute by giving back,  since proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to support shadhika.org, an American organization which works toward breaking the cycle of poverty, gender inequality and education, empowering and trying to give economic self-sufficiency to girls – help them avoid early marriage, being forced into prostitution, or being trafficked. Anyone who doubts Bowie’s own allegiance to similar causes should look up his lyrics for Shopping for Girls.

Anyway, I’m honored, it’ll be grand eloquent, and tasteful and the show opens March 2 2016, 5 – 9 pm and you can see the full press release here:

http://www.shishigami.com/srfa/saintbowie.html

Aztec Ghost Groove

12″ x 12″ | Oil on Vinyl

Painted on 12″ vinyl record, for the recent 2nd Anniversary show at La Bodega gallery last weekend, it was began as a study and a play on the once mighty Mesoamerican empire.  So you have the dragon God (Quetzalcoatl) manifesting from the spilled blood of it’s indigenous populous, crackling through the grooves of the sacred calendar, and haunting time with it’s vibrations.

Given that it’s only been just over a week since Bowie passed, the message of old Gods and phantom sounds, feel’s particularly raw and prescient.

David Bowie-Miracle Goodnight

Pen drawing from when I was around 17-1984

‘The Gods forgot they made me, so I forgot them too. I listen to their shadows. I play amongst their graves.’

David Bowie-Seven

Everyone needs a religion, whether they would care to admit to it or not.
It’s something to believe in, something to elevate the droll and the mundane, the mortal and hollow promise of the grave.

For me, it was the music of David Bowie. Not just the music actually, it was the visual allure, the spectacle, the retinue of changing persona, the boundless creativity, the ambiguous sexuality, the whole kit and caboodle. And I was an eager disciple, collecting obsessively and voraciously discovering him through anything I could get my hands on: vinyl,concerts, magazines, books, newspaper clippings, grainy VHS.

I’ve mentioned it before, because where you begin as an artist, informs a lot of where you end up, but the 70’s in England were like the ashes of a promise the 60’s had failed to deliver. And yet there he was, a Technicolor, extraterrestrial prophet, delivering perfectly crafted ciphers in the form of mantric pop songs.

Around 95′ I wrote in David Buckleys excellent tome ‘Strange Fascination’,  that we were like ‘pasty necro-punkettes in fishnets and eyeliner-procuring alter egos…only to return to irksome acned little waifs in the morning.’ and it was true, to be a Bowie fan meant you didn’t have to be a working class nobody from an impoverished council house, you could be a different class, a different species entirely.He was your school, because the chalk dusted conformity of the British classroom was so dreary. Bowiephilia was a club that delivered a dizzying myriad education in literary figureheads from Crowley to Burroughs, Isherwood to Mishima and a Art history lesson that included Rossetti, Dali, Heckle, Warhol and everyone in between. It was a cachet of cool, even if it meant you occasionally got a good twating by some Scally’s for liking  ‘that fookin’ poof’.

David Bowie shaped me, he was the big brother and mentor I never had, the creative yardstick by which I have measured every point in my own artistic quest, by which I have challenged myself through his spirit of experimentation. Indeed side two of Low remains the aural backdrop of virtually every painting I’ve done.
His music was also MY solace during some of the most profoundly difficult points in my life, the all too frequent death of friends and loved ones, the personal hardships such as breakups and divorce. He’s been there at the best of times too, without him I would never have met my second wife Lani, who was introduce through a friend I knew on the Bowiewonderworld forum back in 1999.

And now he has gone, ‘the solitary candle’ has extinguished, and the void in the wake of that is too vast to contemplate for now, but what an extraordinary, singularly perfect note to end on.

As has been the ritual of every new waxing-on the day of Blackstar’s release,I excitedly drove all over San Diego before finally getting a copy at Target of all pedestrian places. I’d have driven to Hell or at least L.A to listen to it, because it is an indelible, powerful elegy: the work of a man with still so much left to say.

Except, in his remarkable, copious legacy are the kind of seeds that could fill several lifetimes of magical exploration, transcendence and expanded consciousness.

One of my all time favorite lyrics are from his song Quicksand, it goes:  ‘I’m not a prophet or a stone age man, just the mortal with the potential of a superman, and I’m living all’

May those lines be a manifest for us all.

The Next Day

"Oblivion shall own you-death alone shall love you"
You feel so lonely you could die-David Bowie


That's a detail from the piece "What's past is prologue".
The visage of a Bowie emerging from a bloodied scar could be a pretty apt summation of this year.

Why? Because if 2013 has seemed an endless tide of diminishing returns and fuck you affrontary, one beacon in this annus horribilis was the unexpected release of The Next Day. 

It couldn't have come at a better time frankly.

It's the sound of an aging artist, fully aware of less time ahead than behind, refusing to go quietly.

When I hear it, I think of Goya's painting-"Fight with Cudgels" or even late Picasso daubing images of sirens pissing into the Bay of Biscay.
 
At times if there has seemed little hope than the visual echoes on canvas, the album has been a welcome companion.

For a year that's felt like merely marking time, that much bares witnessing.

Farewell 2013-fare better than I ever did in your care.

Here's to the next day. 

Van Gough's inspiration's and alchemy

Inspired and at the behest of a recent facebook post by my talented daughter-Emma-above is a stack of current obsessions feeding the artistic alchemy. 

By virtue of abundance, it's not quite as diverse or impressive as  Bowie's top 100 list of books, which appeared this week and which I was happy to note does include one of the tomes on my own current pile.

Depending on the canvas consuming me at the time, the list is generally interchangeable of course, and most of the books are digested purely for invocation,  but as latitude and longitute into the geography of the new series, it's a pretty good GPS.

The list from top left is as follows:

Salvador Dali-50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship
Valazquez, the technique of genius by Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido
The Encyclopedia of Mythology by Arthur Cotterell
The PreRaphaelites by Trewin Copplestone
The Divine Comedy with Illustrations by Gustav Dore (translation by Henry W. Longfellow)
The complete works of Shakespeare
Images of Horror and Fantasy by Gert Schiff
Creepy presents Richard Corben-the definitive collection of the artist's work from Creepy and Eerie!
On Ugliness by Umberto Eco
Art of the Late Middle Ages by Hans H. Hofstatter
Van Gogh a self-portrait. Letters revealing his life as a painter selected by W.H.Auden
The Devil-the Archfiend in Art from the sixth to the sixteenth century by Luther Link
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
The Secret Temple-Masons, Mysteries and the founding of America by Peter Levenda
Portrait of the Artist as ab young man and the Dubliners by James Joyce
Like you've never been away by Paul Trevor

Where are we now?

If I've been silent of late, its because I've been using my other voice-the only one that really matters, before large looming canvas's that are like a hungry hole longing to be fed. And whilst I can't show you anything for a while, that's me in the studio amongst the detritus of past-masters and the sketches of my intention,dressed in appropriate attire.




 

Ziggy Stardust painted portrait by David Gough

So Ziggy is forty,hard to believe for anyone who was there when the Starman first played guitar.

I would have only been five years-too young to have a 'lectric eye, pick him up on channel two, between a wave of phase, but in another five his creators message and music would become all encompassing. 

It's been pretty much that way ever since. Of course, Low is and shall always be my album of choice, but it does no harm to recall the wild mutation that came before. Love on ya.

...the rumour spread that I was aging fast

Can't believe this chap is 65, perhaps because it means I am getting older too.He's been a soundtrack to my life for over thirty years now, and whilst we can all lament that there shall be no more new music, there's enough legacy to relive our teens for several life times.

The drawing is from when I was a young dude myself,back in early 1984 I believe.
Below are my ten favorite Bowie tracks-at least this week.

Many Happy Returns Mr Bowie.

1. Ashes to Ashes
2. Quicksand
3. Word on a wing
4. A small plot of Land
5. Always Crashing in the same car
6. Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud
7. This is not America
8. We are the Dead
9. Planet of Dreams
10. Untitled no. 1

Dead/Ends Announcement : David Buckley

For those who have been inquiring about my book-'Dead/Ends' which was originally scheduled for online release today, there has been a small delay of a month or so.

One of the reasons is because we are now going to be fortunate enough to have a contribution by none other than David Buckley, who shall be writing the foreword.

For the uninitiated, David is a tremendous writer and biographer, whose credits include 'R.E.M. - Fiction: an Alternative Biography', 'The Thrill Of It All: the Biography of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music', 'No Mercy: the Authorised and Uncensored Biography of the Stranglers' and the wonderful 'Strange Fascination: David Bowie-the definitive story'-the latter being what I consider the uncontested authoritative work on the Thin White Duke. As if that isn't enough he is also a regular contributor to Mojo magazine as well as writing the official sleeve notes on major Bowie reissues such as 'Ziggy Stardust', 'Diamond Dogs' and 'Young Americans', and currently he is working on a bio "Electric Dreams- the Human League, Heaven 17 and the Sound Of The Steel City", scheduled around the time of the 30th anniversary of "Dare"

A full bibliography is available to read and purchase here:

David Buckley Amazon List

As well as sharing a mutual regard for all things Bowie related, we also both grew up in Liverpool in the Seventies and so this is very exciting and something we are hugely appreciative of.

More news about the official release date for Dead/Ends coming soon.

David Gough inspirations-day two: The Berlin Trilog

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

If memory serves, Low was the third album I bought. It’s dark timbres blew open my universe, gave me a brittle sound-scape to pin all my adolescent, depressive nihilism to, as well as elevating my dilapidated geography to the status of Art. It made me imagine I could be living in Berlin or Paris, anywhere but the grey dirge of Liverpool.

The first of his so called triptych of Low, Heroes and Lodger, has long passed into rock mythos. Bowie’s rehab, exiling to Berlin after the LA cocaine fever of storing his piss in fridges, for fear a witches coven was trying to use his fluids to sire the anti Christ. So, living over an auto parts shop in the Turkish quarter of the city, chaperoned by fellow addict Iggy Pop and former Roxy Music knob twiddler Eno, Bowie set out to make an album of ambient muzik- an album to cut your throat to, as Charles Shaar Murray sniffily stated at the time-but still a counterpoint no less to the gobbing sneer that was the height of punk.

Beset by legal battles, the dissolution of his marriage to Angie-Low and its proceeding album was borne in the shadow of armed guards at Hansa studio by the wall, regular jaunts through Die Brücke museum  and stumbling wasted through Transgender cabaret clubs with Iggy.  I’d argue that Iggy’s the Idiot and Lust for Life form the cannon, The Idiot, opening with Sister Midnight, and Lodger book-ending  with a note for note rewrite in the form of Red Money.

By which point, the man himself was ready to serve notice on the Seventies,  dragging a few Blitz clubbers along to be bulldozed for the Ashes video, before turning his back on them altogether with the polished R&B grooves of Lets Dance.

To a working class lad growing up in poverty stricken inner city, there was little hope of ones world being opened to culture of any kind, but there it was German Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Nietzsche, Ballard, Phillip K Dick, Burroughs, all filtered through the perfection of an angular pop song.

Where else could one hear about Cabaret Voltaire or Dr Caligari, where else could one find aspiration to be something other- certainly not in the stifling of a provincial class room.

Choice Cuts:

A New Career in a New Town
Subterraneans
Joe the Lion
Neukoln
Fantastic Voyage
Red Money