Art depicting death

It’s almost Halloween, which means David Gough’s paintings of skeletons and other macabre musings usually get some extra attention. But the artist is quick to remind people of his works’ more important meaning.

“I want to avoid that sort of kitschy, Halloween-y, orange-stocking and pumpkin-heads kind of thing,” says Gough, who grew up with a view of a cemetery from his bedroom in Liverpool, England, and moved to San Diego in 2005. “Death, for me, is omnipresent.”

Gough’s oil paintings are beautifully done narratives often dealing with the cruel inevitability of mortality. He recently released D3AD/ENDS, a 32-page book that explains the concepts behind his work and his obsession with death through surprisingly open anecdotes and well-written descriptions of several of his paintings.

In the book, Gough talks about how, when he started on his series “Theothanatos,” he initially wanted to focus on what he perceived to be the polarizing nature of mainstream news media in the United States—he grew up with the BBC and says he wasn’t used to the religious undertones and politicized viewpoints in his daily news. But as Gough worked on the series, a few of his close friends died and the trajectory changed.

“I started to realize that the series was more about my own mortality and how I felt about it,” Gough says.

Both the book and the paintings provide an interesting and intimate look at an artist coming to terms with the fleeting nature of life. Two of Gough’s paintings are in Memento Mori: Remember Your Mortality, an exhibition based on the same theme, on view at the Oceanside Museum of Art through Sunday, Oct. 30, with a special Art After Dark Death costume celebration from 7 to 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28.

“I’m still trying to understand the significance of it all,” Gough says about his investigations into death. “But I guess the idea that everything is chaos, there is no order—it’s an uncomfortable notion, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with it.”