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

After a weeks sabbatical from the new piece, I was hungry again. There is something transcendental about the almost imperceptible pace of working the minutiae, I imagine it to be the closest thing to the repose of meditative prayer, for myself at least. Still a long road ahead to my final intention, but I do see a light at the end of my own corridor.

And Another Thing-Margaret Thatcher, the death of the British Empire

'When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross...'
Sinclair Lewis-1935
Fifteen years ago, an intransigent, extreme and archaic, dictatorship was ousted from office by her own party, following an elected third term in the UK.Though its true to say, that the beginnings of Margaret Thatchers terrible reign, brought an end to a period in the seventies of union discontent, it also brought with it a harsh and cold winter which lasted twelve long years.

During her term in office, Britain endured the Falklands war, The Westland Affair, the end of the coal and the shipping industry, the privatization of the railways, BT, the electric and water boards, the beginnings of the end for the NHS, the reinstated Taxes- Poll Tax (abolished in the sixteenth century), and inheritance tax (a tax which ensures you still pay after your death) , eight million unemployed (the conservative estimate after the book cooking of training schemes).Education cuts and Mad Cow disease (CJD), the re-emergance of puritanical censorship with the moral guardianship of the nanny state. Hillsborough, Dunblane, Charring cross, race and poll tax riots in the streets and a further polarization of negotiations with the IRA. Even my own hometown of Liverpool was abandoned by the Iron Lady to what she proposed as a 'Managed Decline'

 
And whilst the maggots flourished and grew complacently bloated, the poor became more emaciated, and what they call the class divide in England became a chasm.
As the country descended further into the bowels of Hades however, the machinations behind number ten maneuvered, and I watched as a tearful Thatcher was removed from Downing street. It was the only emotion I ever saw her betray.The dark days of the right were numbered, and there was a sense that the working class-through music, through art and culture, were on the move.

 

It's hard for me to reminisce the hope and promise of those times-but when Labour swept in again after so long, with D-reams song 'Things can only get better', it felt like watching life reanimating a corpse.Of course, history has shown that hopes are in vain, that the mess left in the Thatcher years was too far reaching -lopping off a limb is no good when the cancer has spread, but at the very least, the Conservatives were viewed as an aberrant joke-a terrible wrong footing that was the catalyst for the end an empire, a country were it was twenty five years too late for its terrible former premier to be diagnosed with dementia.

I prefix this, because in the insanity of the birther movement, the spitting sloganeering of the teabaggers, the endless, impending, end of days fervor of the evangelists -I see all too well, the failings of my own countries past.
 
The dark unwillingness for change-an unwillingness, that comes spitting the vitriol of judgment, cloaked between the pages of the bible and a pocketful of race hatred. An angry mob, without a taste for irony, resembling the fascist diatribes of the 30's, much more than the institution and leader elect, they are demonizing, all stoked by their own ignorance and those special interests, who balk at change simply because they may end up a little light on change in their pocket.

Perhaps its as Churchill once said, a country does elect the leader it deserves, but having seen the terrible legacy of the Thatcher years, and those still being cast by the long shadow of Bush, it doesn't behoove one to imagine the kind of cretinous demagogue that could be borne from the bastard offspring of a Limbaugh and Beck.
 

Gough Medicine-The Artist

'I never got my license to live-they won't give it up, so I stand at the Worlds edge...'

Iggy Pop-Some Weird Sin, 1977

© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd

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.

Gough Medicine-Tyrants Fall

""Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants...and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always."
— Mahatma Ghandi

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

Hours are dedicated to the piece a day, and yet it feels like I'm working at a snails pace, so diminishing seem the returns-its the ultimate game of endurance, and I'm gritting my teeth all the way to the end-somewhat ironic when you consider the subject matter.

You can't tell from the photograph, but I've subtly begun to fill in the marble effect on the walls-I was undecided up until this point whether I was going to replicate the hallway in the Whaley house completely, because it seemed that marble had a conotation of 80's sheen. It struck me however, that as death is indiscriminate, regardeless of ostentation or ghetto, so should my approach, and so it stuck.

Showboat-Faith and Formulas at Thumbprint

Temperatures soared at San Diego's hottest art venue -Thumbprint last night-not only because the collected throng there, was a veritable barrel of Chile's for the city's hottest outsider talent and eye tamales, but because the temperatures for a September evening set just below the point where paint begins to melt.

Despite the heat of the night, attendance was healthy, and my thanks as always to Johnny Tran and Nomad for hosting the event, as well as all those people who came along to view the art and say an enthusiastic hello. My very gracious thanks to Dan Allen and Brian Dombrowsky who are fellow collaborators from the video game, and who made a special journey to visit and meet me in person.

Here are a selection of photos from the event below:

My gorgeous and endlessly patient wife-Lani-loved this piece:

Long shot showing the work of featured artist-Mofo. Johnny Tran just gliding out of view in the foreground.


Its all for one, and one for all-Dan, myself and Brian from the Dark Vomit video project.

Encouraged by Mister Tran, I took an hour out to do some live painting, on a canvas which will be a collaboration with other artists attending future events- the results of which are as thus-I think I'll call it Endgame.