GUNSHO

The Demons are back

I just got back from Frank's. We watched Escape From Galaxy 3. Amazing.

The Demons are making themselves known again.

KYLESA shirt

I'm in the latest issue of Juxtapoz
I'm really happy about it.

I'm heading back to the states on Sunday. Bittersweet return. It's very easy to get used to a place sometimes. I've got a lot of work to do over the next few weeks.

This month has gone by at a fast pace. I had a couple adventures but nothing mad. I've been helping Jane create a life-size sculture of a hirsute woman, that's been interesting.

jane and i went out to visit steven stapleton and he showed us around his amazing place. we took a walk out to the Burren which he basically lives in the middle of. like an ancient post apoc-wasteland, pretty much my dream landscape.

here's some pictures. steven and i tried to access a couple female goats up on a big hill, it took awhile to climb and when we got there we found a couple dead kids (not the human kind).

here's a selection of some recent work i've done over the past month, there's some other commercial work i've done too but i don't feel like uploading it. i've made 2 demons too which i don't feel like scanning yet.

Heroin's 10 Year Anniversary deck. Still sweating from drawing this one. Still in Dublin.

I'm back in Dublin for awhile. Last week I spent most of my time getting some massive reorganizing done. I finally built a shelving system for my inventory of prints which is growing and growing. At this point, I imagine that weight-wise I literally have made a ton of demons.

Friday night I spent hours and hours at Joan D'Arc's house with the Esoterica Gang watching various short films from Frank Difficults amazing collection of cinematic weirdness. I went into a considerable daze during the feature film of the night. We watched Tribulation 99 by Craig Baldwin, probably one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Between viewings I also enjoyed Alec Redfearn's hilarious European tour stories which included an ongoing tale of head-lice infestation.

Fortunately, on my current excursion I have not acquired lice (Jane is considerably hygenic) as of yet but I am significantly jet-lagged and having trouble falling asleep at bedtime. Last night I saw High on Fire but left after 2 songs. The opening band made me crave coffee and feel entirely uninterested in hearing any more live music possibly ever again. Thanks fellas.

So for the next couple weeks I have about 5 illustration jobs to finish before I can get started working
on some new ideas for art prints and begin work on creating more demons. I don't know when I'm going back to the states, I don't need to for awhile. Being in Ireland makes me feel good, it's not nearly as cold and there's no reggaeton.

Jane and I fell asleep for a little while today and I dreampt of a two-headed dragon that rose out of the ocean. The first head scorched the entire Earth with fire breath while the second froze it solid with a freezing wind. I managed to escape by hiding in a cave.

1996 I went to Fatima in Portugal with my father to get holy water to help cure my uncle Tony of cancer. One night I had a dream where I was lost in Mexican ghetto.

The streets were narrow and filled with litter. The buildings all around were no more than 2 or 3 stories. Balconies extended overhead, crackling static radio broadcasts created a hispanic white noise and everywhere children and adults shuffled past me. As I made my way down the street I was approached by a little boy who told me that he knew a way out but, "no one leaves unless they talk to Him."

I followed the boy down an alley filled with debris, dead flowers, toys, old photos. There were candles everywhere, solid wax drippings from every surface, along the walls, the ground, on piles of garbage. There was an area relatively clear of mess where a pathway led to a front door. Beside the door and beneath a large window with iron bars a seated figure shifted under a burlap blanket. The boy told me to pull the blanket off and revealed there in a simple wooden chair sat a shirtless green humanoid. He was barefoot in white jeans. His face was a bulbous mass of tissue, his former features only somewhat distinguishable in a mass of pock-marked and pimpled green skin. Eyes swollen shut. His mouth a circular row of teeth like a fluke-worm. I saw along every inch of his flesh solid little spines like a cactus, protruding from painful sores. The boy told me to touch the humanoid's skin– I reached out to touch his arm and he suddenly grabbed my wrist. I recoiled in pain and pulled my hand away. My arm was covered in small spines digging their ways into my skin. I nervously picked them out but before I could get the to last one it had buried itself deep into my wrist. I stumbled back from the creature, dizzy, feeling sleepy, I couldn't keep my balance and I began walking in circles. The debris was tripping me up, I was falling over stuffed animals and plastic soda bottles. My knees would give out when I tried to stand. I could barely see, I wanted to get out of the alley and I couldn't remember which way I'd come in.

The boy was calling for me to stay, he told me that there was no way out, that I had to stay with the beast in the chair. I was angry, I tried to find the way out but the alley was no longer straight, I was within the middle of tightening spiral that extended infinitely and was contracting to a single point where the humanoid was sitting. Everything was closing in, an invisible force was pushing the trash into a pattern, the walls around me were cracking and shifting, I was on the ground sliding towards the pull of the beast in the chair. I was in a center of a whirlwind. The radio sounds were spinning and repeating themselves, all of the debris and myself was orbiting the humanoid and closing in on him. Everything was tightening and I was being drawn closer to him. His force of attraction was so great that I felt my skin pulling off of me. My hair was being torn out, blood vessels were exploding in my eyes. A darkness was generating and I knew that there was no way I was going to survive. I opened my mouth– my tongue severed and was caught in the spiral, the force began plucking my teeth out, I could feel my lungs turning inside out. I focused on the green man in the center. He stood up and extended his arms, he was waiting to catch me. My body was destroyed and particaleized. Every object spinning had become a fine dust and the beast was inhaling it through his mouth.

I'm working on a drawing at the moment that is driving me nuts. I have quite a lot of work to do before I head back to Dublin on the 9th. Some more work for és shoes, another deck for Heroin, a shirt illustration for Ride the Rockett clothing, and a few other jobs that I can't recall. I'll be strictly working on the demons while I'm in Dublin.

This month has been a cold blur.

Yesterday, Frank took this picture of Mark Elliot and I at Paul Laffoley's.

DEMONS

I'm beginning work on the demons again. The first 24 took a year and a half to produce. When I began I was so obsessed. I spent every day working on them, my intention was to have all 72 complete by the end of 2006. It didn't happen. The process was interrupted when I moved into a new studio. It was difficult to get a footing after, I had spent a lot of money getting things set up in the new place, I didn't have the money for materials for quite awhile. The year passed and by January 2007 I had produced only 13. Essentially I was able to produce 1 per month. I felt guilty about my pace and I'd continually remind myself that it wasn't as easy as maybe I'd hoped it would be. I still needed to make money, I worked a part time job for consistent dough and I was taking on commercial work as well, I was busy. I was offered a show in March or so, I figured that I needed to show at least some of what I'd been working on. In the next few months, I produced 11 more demons.

I made the 24th demon in July. Time has passed by so slowly in some ways. If I put all of myself into the demonology, I'd be able to produce 2 per week. I can draw fast enough, it's a full day of work to print a full run of 150. My dad used to say all the time, "I could do this, but I don't have the scratch. I'll have to find some money somewhere." I never took in to account that the demonology was going to cost me money. I'm not so sharp sometimes. I had to change the pace of production because I didn't have enough money to devote the time to producing all of them in a short amount of time.

I just want them over with and I'm only a 1/3 of the way through. I took the demons on because I loved the idea, it was something that could be a perfect marriage between the things that I'm obsessed with. My intentions were good but since I began a lot of things in my life have changed drastically. Honestly, I almost fear what I got myself into.

There was a point in the Summer when I actually began to worry about the nature of the work and it's effect on me. 10 years ago when my dad died was the last time that my life felt like it is in the state that it is in now. The demons didn't make that happen, it's not supernatural events coming down on me. I chose the work and I'm going to finish the work, but I'm not happy about it right now.

I've realized only recently that the reasons why I used to never show anyone the weird stuff that I made was because I didn't want to wear it on my sleeve. I was never embarrassed by the nature of my aesthetic, I can honestly say that I'm surprised that people are into it, but really I was happier when I was keeping this stuff in my head.

I generally don't like people who proclaim their interest in the occult. I'm wildly unimpressed by occult-oriented scenes. There's very little refuge between those repositories where socially awkward pagans mill about on forums or on the other end of the spectrum where metal-heads, hipsters, bohemians, or otherwise pay shoddy lip-service to the most fashionable mundane aspects of it all. I imagine nothing has changed. Any revival, occult or otherwise is going to led by bullshit and trailed by bullshit. It's nothing to care about and really, I'm not sure why I do. I suppose that maybe it's because I wouldn't have begun the demonology if I didn't think it had a place right now. Who knows? I have no idea. The bottom line is that I have to lighten up.

The past year has been has been one where I experienced a lot of change. I started seeing things in ways that I hadn't before. My enthusiasm changed for many of the things that used to really turn me. I like to think that I have this insatiable thirst for knowledge of strange things, but really, I think that I over-consumed and now I need to relax and just digest so that I don't explode.

I made 24 demons so far, there's some accomplishment in that, especially considering that my output since the years before is so much larger. I just need to work on other things as well. I can bury myself in the demonology, I tried and it doesn't work. Each time I've returned to the project and tried to make a schedule out of it, I've failed. It's an ongoing work, it's going to take some time. It is what it is. As long as I'm trying to only create the demons and I ignore the other things that are generating in my head, everything I try to make is going to suffer.

The demons are powerful entities. There is something to the nature of the work that has effected me in ways that I doubt something less "infernal" would have. I am going to finish the series, hopefully this year. I'm talking with some people about a book, I've got shows lined up. It's happening, it's just better to not cave into impossible expectations and accomplish nothing as a result.

I want this work to exist, but it only is what it is.

Woonsocket is a 20-minute drive away from Providence. It's a small city known for it's large French Canadian population. In the center of the city there is a Salvation Army where I often go if I need some sort of furniture or a coffee cup. It's one of those more off the beaten-path type places where you may find something fairly nice if you look hard enough.

Last night I dreampt that I was wandering around in the thrift store. Nothing was unusual, there were racks of clothes, shoes, old toys, and boxes filled with comic books that no one wanted. On my way out the door I heard the buzzing of bees in my ears and I followed the sound to a pile of skulls and other bones splayed across the floor in a dark corner of the store.

I began untangling antlers, rotting hair, and spines. The bones were dusty, some were disintegrating in my hands. I was accidently inhaling dead vapors and invisible shards. There were deformed bone faces jutting out of a giant dinosaur's femur. I realized that the room was larger than I'd thought, there were these bones everwhere and when I looked up, I saw the sun shining down on me. I was up to my waist in a pile of cracking death. Surrounding me were tall rocky walls ascending higher than I could climb.

I had a visit with Hobomoko last night. I'm suprised I didn't piss the bed.

Dawn of an Evil MILLENNIUM

Sometimes I wake up in the morning with a reoccurring vision of a massive fleshy toxic bag floating above my bed, just lightly tracing a path along the ceiling. It's covered in patches of hair and teeth, fingernails, and goose-bumps. I wonder if it's inspired by one of those giant tumors that a team of tele-visionary surgeons might remove from a desperate Croatian village-woman who has no other option. That parasitic tumor is eating her alive. Her DNA is out of control, the sack writhes and twists, vestigial lips and crooked teeth part to silently scream out as the scalpels begin to carve away at it's mutant sovereignty.

Maybe it's the same big beast that bobs above my bed breathing and inhaling any of the goodness that my heart has. If I lay there for too long looking up at it as it fills itself and expands, my heart will calcify in my chest, my pulse will die, and all that will remain will be the microscopic echoing snaps within a crispy crustacean beneath my breastbone. I don't want to be one of those lonely heartless men. Those guys used to come into the bookstore where I worked and we'd talk about James Joyce, Gurdjieff, and 1970's pop psychology. They lost it sometime long ago.

These days they might be living in a subsidized apartment or if they're lucky maybe an old friend might lend them a room in their basement. Each day they will come out of their caves to get coffee and shamble around the used book store. They'll talk to me about an old medieval text that I've got to check out because the world we're living in today is just history repeating itself. Then, they'll start talking about porno. At night they will travel in packs and scatter like a gang of scared teenagers outside the movie theatre when the cops tell them they can't hang out there.

They've still got a ember of their dignity though, when you press the rewind button on their life, you'll see it in incredible flames scorching anything that touches their restless curiosity. But where are they now? They'll tell you that time passes by so quickly, that they used to be handsome, and that you can be as idiosyncratic as you want to be when you have your youth, but by the time you're old and ugly, no one wants to hear a word that you say.

You're self-aware coughing dusty gray-haired animals and really there's only one thing I want to know from you– when did your home disappear? I just want to know when it was that your seas dried up or when your forests burned down.

So I wake up these mornings in the new room that I'm staying in on a mattress salvaged from an old pull out couch. My lower back always hurts. This morning I escaped the beast again. I always do, but some days I can feel my heart still crystalizing when it sends those cold poisons into my guts. I have to admit these days have been bad. I'm anxious and feel wasted. I'm trying combat it by lifting weights again, maybe get the 25lbs back that slipped off me when I was too stressed out to eat over the past 6 months. I go to the shop and I draw, or I work on the computer. I talk to Jane as much as I can and just wish I was back in Dublin with her. At night I go back to the room and I draw some more. I try to develop new inking techniques, I read books while I'm sketching, I think about colors. I have no idea how to relax, its a state of existence that I've completely lost.

I don't have much food in the new place. I'm still not used to gathering supplies or other simple things like doing laundry regularly. I can pump my own gas, but there's a variety of simple skills that I've realized are fairly beyond me until I get my shit together. Last night instead of going grocery shopping when I was done at the shop, I called Frank and went to Julians for something relatively cheap to eat. Afterwards we went back to his apartment where I often find myself easing out of consciousness in a smokey haze while trying to digest some sort of obscure cinematic treat on his tv. In the spirit of Halloween, we decided to watch Experiments in Terror. It is nearly Halloween, it was perfect for the season. In the midst of several amazing short films was a piece by a filmmaker named Damon Packard. The 1988 short film is called, "Dawn of an Evil Millennium".

DAWN OF AN EVIL MILLENNIUM

I lied there on the couch, shoes still on, barely breathing even and when that film came on. I couldn't move, I didn't want to blink. What I saw were the manifestations of that big morning beast's own thoughts vomiting, slurping and gurgling, tripping, falling, destroying. It was a purity of thought, ingenious chaos, nothing missed, every piece of time fully contracting and pulsing like a slippery disembodied sphincter. Packard's film was it's own language, it made absolute sense to me. I didn't feel inspired by it, I felt validated and isolated and scared. I saw that big beast rising up from behind the TV. It hovered above me as I stared into it's countless maws. I felt nothing. My heart didn't hurt. This film was made by someone who was able to survive some sort of cataclysm and actually build a structure out of the ashes. It was so goddamn smart and gross and funny. This guy let his beast overtake him. It's obvious. You could see straight into the brain of Damon Packard. That is the purity of art.

I woke up in my bed early before dawn. I was confused that I may have still been on Frank's couch, but there I was and like the morning before there was the big beast hovering and I was just laying there staring up at it.

When did my forest burn down and when did I start running away from this thing? I don't want to be obsessed or possessed. Packard's work scared the shit out of me. I saw that beast's mind on the screen. How the fuck can you walk the line? How is it possible? Is there anyone who has ever been able to do it?

When I was a kid, I got nosebleeds. I loved dripping into a cup and watching the red blood separate from the plasm. It was so dark and thick, concentrated pure powerful blood. Now I'm older and everything all fast-forwarded to some point in my life where I find myself in a battle with a deformed perception of reality left over from an unrealized adolescence. These days I sit in a room surrounded by things that are just left over, the things that I've kept over the years, the common denominators. It's all concentrated, boiled down, purity, but it's not comforting. I know why I put the things into the work that I do. I understand it's existence. I'm not trying to shock anyone, I know what I do can be gross, but if I want to, I can tell you exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing and I don't care if I sound like a complete idiot. To tell you the truth, I think I can art-speak the shit out of my work.

This short-term world that everyone is so excited about, the luxury of our existence, the luxury of being able to even produce art, so dangerous in it's entropic power. I know what I am but I don't want to evolve into a toothless disheveled mess because the life has been sucked out of me by my own work. I have no clue how to battle the beast, it's there every day. It's feeding off my obsessions, off of the concentrated powerful purity that depending on how you look at it– is the product of either my evolution or devolution. It's there and I can only imagine that all I can do to fight it is to overfeed it until it bursts. It can't grow infinitely. I hope not.

I don't know if Damon Packard would agree, but I think that he's feeding that beast. I don't know how it's working out for him. I don't know how it's working out for me either.