The cover of David Gough's new art book features Legend, one of my all-time favorite paintings. Painted in 2010 and showcased in October of that year at the Hive Gallery in Los Angeles, the painting will always hold an extra special place in my heart because I met David, a kind and kindred spirit, when I was standing enthralled beneath this work.

D3AD/ENDS chronicles David Gough’s Theothanatos Series.  Latin for Death of God, the series represents three years of painting as exorcism.  Plagued with a deepened awareness of mortality brought about by the sequential death of three mentors and a rejection of faith, Theothanatos became contemporary surrealist David’s way of finding his way back to the light.

David is the consummate tortured artist, harnessing his pain to explore the darknesses inside us all.  ”Death has cast its blackest shadow throughout my life,” he writes, “yet as a muse for all my mercurial unravelings, there has been no other so constant, none so seductive.”  In many ways the creation of art is like the quest for the holy grail, for immortality.  And if the power was mine, I would grant David’s paintings that gift that they may be viewed by future generations as a meditation of life, loss and the artifice of faith.

Almost every page I turn, I think, that’s my favorite painting in the series.  Until I get to the next page and realize that that’s my favorite.

Alongside the paintings, David includes background statements about his life and work.  Many weekends I can be found following artists around and badgering them with questions.  Few are either able or willing to articulate their intentions as well as David does in this book.  And why should they be?  They communicate through their art.  But David is gifted with the ability and openness to communicate visually and through words.  In mini-essays throughout the book he shares his inability to hack it in commercial advertising, his anger at God when his father suffers a near-fatal accident and a drunken flirtation with suicide.  Spiritual, but not religious, I tend to deify great artists like David, believing that their talent and inspirations must come from a higher place.  But David is so persistent in revealing his flaws, I’m doubly reminded of humankind’s imperfection and transience.  As moved as I am by the paintings alone, they become even more powerful through the writing.

Pages 12 and 13 show Incarceration and Axiom, paintings which assert that we can all be prey, not just to death itself, but to the fear of death, which isolates us from the living and makes us cling to false faith.

Disintegration: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

On page 16, David opens up about his teenage drug experimentation, writing about his pursuit of, "the total mindgasm of hallucinogenic submission." Instead of spiritual revelations, he was confronted by a little dog with a trippy swollen head.

The Evisceration of Adam shows a powerful religious icon representing original sin stripped bare.

The rich colors in David’s oil paintings are beautifully printed.  The book also includes an affectionate foreword by David Buckley, author of several music biographies including Strange Fascination: David Bowie.

D3AD/ENDS is available to order for $25 here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2011 at 11:27 am and is filed under Read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.