Recently, I went to an art opening in Santa Monica, where a doorman stood guard, clipboard in hand like at some private party or club. A spiral staircase led to a basement gallery where new works by David Van Eyssen were on display that combined film and still images layered upon each other and interacting in various ways, projected on screens or shown on flat screen TVs.
The Gannoughs Suite (2019) by David van Eyssen
At times, there were video images that unfolded in a loop and appeared among the still images – sometimes they appeared through the other images – here and there the images were interrupted by striations on the screen, delivering an overall effect to the viewer like a memory or a waking dream. Van Eyssen’s work is best described as a visual collage, a work of art that is as much a painting with images as any made with conventional paints on canvas.
For the exhibition, David’s new work was being displayed on a variety of 4K OLED screens that LG, the electronics company, had provided for the event, including several of their amazing new home theater Cinebeam projection displays – basically boxes that stand as close as some 10 inches from the wall and can project 4K images (still or motion) on screens as large as 100 inches, as well as some conventional large TV screens that Van Eyssen was using to display the work.
I found the work compelling. It reminded me of early experimental film, or the assemblages of found objects by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, as well as the installations of Peter Forgacs that combine found footage in ways that speak to memory.
In a recent Van Eyssen work, “The Gannoughs Suite” (2019), meant to be displayed on two 4K OLED screens, we pass through a country landscape, a house, a person, a horse, a person fishing, a home, the churning sea – one image washing into another — all in a stuttering motion of images in striation filled screens, to spacey-trance like sounds.
David Van Eyssen
A few weeks later, I went to meet with Van Eyssen at his home high in the hills above Laurel Canyon. Our conversation began inside his home and ended at the top of his garden that has a vista that extends from Griffith Observatory all the way to Santa Monica. I was as curious to hear about how this new work came to be, as I was to learn about the person who made it.
Afterwards, as I was writing up the notes of our conversation, it all seemed so incredible that I wondered: Can it all possibly be true? For a moment, I thought: Could he be making it all up? Was David as much fabulist as artist? So, I began to fact-check the particulars of David’s story – and, despite my innate skepticism, it is all the more remarkable for being true.
First things first: Yes, David’s is a story of privilege – of white, moneyed privilege – and the privilege of the intellectual and artistic elite — but it is also a tale of self-created talents – wide-ranging creative and business abilities and an ability for self-invention across several generations that seems almost genetic.
David’s grandfather, Mark Goulden, was a celebrated British publisher, chairman of W. H. Allen, who during his career published Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Bertrand Russell and the cartoons of a young Walt Disney. His mother, Shirley Goulden was a popular children’s author, most notably of “The Royal Book of Ballet.” His father, John Van Eyssen, was a South African-born actor (Orson Welles’ Othello, and most notably the role of Jonathan Harker in Hammer Films’ “The Horror of Dracula” ), who became a literary agent for the Rank Organization, representing Franco Zeffirelli, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, before becoming worldwide head of production for Columbia Pictures (outside of the USA), where he worked on such films as To Sir with Love, A Man For All Seasons, Georgy Girl, and Oliver! Before becoming an independent producer dividing his time between New York and London. His parents divorced while David was still young, and his father’s later companion was Ingrid Bergman.
Suffice to say, David grew up surrounded by all manner of creatives, and there were authors, actors and filmmakers around him in a book rich environment. Beyond that, his father, having befriended Bernard Berenson, had a very good art collection. So he was exposed to great art at an early age and was encouraged in his own drawings as a child.
David attended Westminster School in London, a storied old British private school. While there, he wrote a lot. However, he discovered the Art room – which didn’t seem to interest any of the other boys at school, so he had the run of it. He would do posters for each of the school’s plays and he made paintings. One day, when he was 14, one of his teachers said, “Do you mind if I show this to someone?” He had no objection. Goldsmith’s offered him a show (he was 14!)
After the show, strangely enough, all his work was stolen. His teacher told him, “that’s a good sign. Someone thought it was worth taking.”
He also wrote poetry. He was introduced to Arthur Miller ( who had been one of his father’s clients) who was, David recalled, “very kind” and suggested he audit classes at Yale which Miller’s daughter, Rebecca, was then attending.
However, when it was time for David to go to college, he chose U.C. Santa Cruz to study creative writing with George Hitchcock. He didn’t take to Santa Cruz and instead transferred to UCLA which allowed him to design his own program of study. For his senior honors thesis project, he adapted a long-neglected Samuel Beckett work, staged it as a one-man show and filmed his performance.
Upon graduation, David decided to pivot again and returned to making Art in London. A chance meeting at the dentist’s with his idol, Francis Bacon, and their conversations inspired him further. He began work that was conceptual and was also installation art. Given a commission to do an installation for Tony and Jeannie Pritzker at their Los Angeles home, the Pritzkers in turn introduced David to Bobby Kotick, the founder of Activision, the video game manufacturer. David did an installation for Kotick that was a conceptual library of burned books. Soon enough David had started his own video game company rooted in interactive storytelling, developing a prototype called Cryogenia with Christopher Lee. He also created a prototype for video game based on Fritz Lang’s M. Bill Block, then an agent, saw the work and began to represent David.
When his father died, David came back to California. He shot a short interactive movie, The Passenger, meant to be streamed in episodic form. He then joined the second digital streaming platform ever, Digital Entertainment Network to produce new digital series. Propaganda Films represented David as a commercial and video director while he amassed a number of independent clients as a boutique agency and production company before becoming a partner and creative director at iBelieve Media. At iBelieve, David, in partnership with Fallon Minnesota ending up Godfather-ing the BMW film series. Developing Terrorvision, and the digital series Thirteen led to Paramount Pictures giving him a first-look housekeeping deal to write, direct, and produce TV and digital series. After which, in 2012, led to David’s successful branded digital series RCVR financed by Motorola and Machinima/Google which began to take on a life of its own.
And if that’s where our story ended, you would say David had a pretty good run.
But wait… there’s more.
In 2014, David was diagnosed with a Stage 4 melanoma that had already metastasized. He became very ill and was given a prognosis of between 2 and 5 years. In LA, David was treated at first with surgeries which did not completely remove the cancer.
Through a family friend’s recommendation, David was admitted for treatment at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where his doctors developed a custom-built treatment plan of targeted chemotherapy along with a innovative new immunotherapy treatment, which saved his life. The MD Anderson team that developed the immunotherapy treatment for melanoma would win the Nobel Prize.
That being said, while he was in the midst of his treatments and perhaps at edge of life itself, he had a series of hallucinations or waking dreams in which he saw stars dying and new ones being born. His memory was changed and colors and sense intensified in ways he’d never before experienced. David came to believe that he was “seeing the cellular system as an infinite cosmos.” It was as if, David said, “I became a piece of science fiction.”
Once he had regained his health he discussed this with his doctor. David wondered if he was perhaps witnessing the death of his own cancer cells and the rebirth of new healthy cells? His doctor said that was something no one had been able to film – or really visualize.
David soon formed Lucid Science, a partnership with two producers and a group of doctors at Cedars-Sinai to create allow doctors to see cancer and the immune system in virtual reality and to develop new diagnostic tools using 3D mapping and machine learning.
As he began to explore VR, he also created a company, Immersiv. to create VR and AR experiences. His first project: An Innerspace Odyssey, a voyage through the human immune system (just as he imagined it during treatment). David saw great potential in this experience for patients to visualize their own healing.
So here he was, nearing 55. Given a second lease on life, David decided he would devote what time he had to making art.
Chemo had left David with certain memory gaps and occasional chemo brain. And so, it is no coincidence that his new work is about time, memory and place.
When his Uncle died of Alzheimer’s he left David a photo album that included many pictures of him and his family when he was around ten years old. David also found some 8mm movies he had shot of his first visit to New York. So he took pictures of the pictures in order “to make them mine,” and started to make his new work from the layering of these images and others.
And like the memory problems he has experienced, in the artworks, “there is eradication of the image and partial imaging, and the black dots and flashes and hues,“ David explains that in the works he includes what he calls “interference patterns” which are the fracturing of the image. For David, he says, “seeing is a fractured remembering.”
The finished works have 200-300 layers of photographs. The process of making these artworks is connected to David’s experience as a filmmaker. However, as David explained, he is no longer making films, he is “making paintings that breathe.” When creating these works, David feels very much “part of the visual painting tradition.”
Using LG’s short throw 4K projectors and working with the electronics giant is also a reflection of David’s entrepreneurial and creative instincts. “I am always looking for ways to distribute what I make,” he said.
David Van Eyssen is making art. His work, his career – his life – would be remarkable even if he were not just back from death’s door. But all he has been through, David believes, has brought him to this work. And it is worth seeing to believe.
For further details or to schedule an appointment to view David Van Eyssen’s sound and motion work, contact: Luke Thornton at Believe Media, Los Angeles (323) 645-1000. The Gannoughs Suite will be on view as part of a group show, impART, 10/28-11/6 at IN MY ALL(E)Y 1040 S Olive Street Los Angeles, CA 90015.
