Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

R.B. Kitaj | London to Los Angeles | Exhibition Film




In London, the Piano Nobile Gallery presents the exhibition -  R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles. This short film features interviews with Marco Livingstone, a leading specialist on Kitaj’s work; Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery; and the artist’s daughter Dominie Kitaj.

R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in a decade. It provides a chronological overview of Kitaj's career, exploring the relationship between his art and the places he lived. 

The Piano Nobile Gallery explains that "Although he travelled widely, spending seasons and sometimes whole years in California, Catalonia, Paris and New York, Kitaj made London his home from 1959 – the year he entered the Royal College of Art – until 1997. For the last decade of his life, from 1997 to 2007, he lived in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes little-known early work of the fifties, the groundbreaking ‘collagist’ work of the sixties that established his reputation, and the life drawings and glowing paintings of the seventies, continuing through to Kitaj's rediscovery of painting in the eighties and his final period in Los Angeles. An accompanying publication includes original essays by Andrew Dempsey, Marco Livingstone and Colin Wiggins, in addition to extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, now held by the Tate Archive and published here for the first time."







Gregg Chadwick
The Diasporist (Portrait of R.B. Kitaj)
30”x22” monotype on paper 2011


 

Friday, June 02, 2023

Van Gogh Museum 4K Virtual Tour || Exhibition ‘Van Gogh In Auvers'


From the Van Gogh Museum:

"Vincent van Gogh lived in Auvers-sur-Oise from 20 May 1890 until his death on 29 July of the same year. He was tremendously productive in these months and made several of his most renowned masterpieces, including 'Wheatfield with Crows' and 'Tree Roots'. In the anniversary year of 2023, the Van Gogh Museum and Musée d’Orsay are organizing a major exhibition about the final months of Vincent van Gogh’s life, which he spent in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. The exhibition 'Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months' is on view from 12 May until 3 September 2023." Find out more: https://www.vangoghmuseum.com/vangogh...


 

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Late Light


Gregg Chadwick
Jordaan Window (Coffee in Amsterdam)
25cm x 25cm oil on wood 2010


Late Light 

by Philip Levine

(January 10, 1928 - 2015)


Rain filled the streets

once a year, rising almost

to door and window sills,

battering walls and roofs

until it cleaned away the mess

we'd made. My father told

me this, he told me it ran

downtown and spilled into

the river, which in turn

emptied finally into the sea.

He said this only once

while I sat on the arm

of his chair and stared out

at the banks of gray snow

melting as the March rain

streaked past. All the rest

of that day passed on

into childhood, into nothing,

or perhaps some portion hung

on in a tiny corner of thought.

Perhaps a clot of cinders

that peppered the front yard

clung to a spar of old weed

or the concrete lip of the curb

and worked its way back under

the new growth spring brought

and is a part of that yard

still. Perhaps light falling

on distant houses becomes

those houses, hunching them

down at dusk like sheep

browsing on a far hillside,

or at daybreak gilds

the roofs until they groan

under the new weight, or

after rain lifts haloes

of steam from the rinsed,

white aluminum siding,

and those houses and all

they contain live that day

in the sight of heaven.


II


In the blue, winking light

of the International Institute

of Social Revolution

I fell asleep one afternoon

over a book of memoirs

of a Spanish priest who'd

served his own private faith

in a long forgotten war.

An Anarchist and a Catholic,

his remembrances moved

inexplicably from Castilian

to Catalan, a language I

couldn't follow. That dust,

fine and gray, peculiar

to libraries, slipped

between the glossy pages

and my sight, a slow darkness

calmed me, and I forgot

the agony of those men

I'd come to love, forgot

the battles lost and won,

forgot the final trek

over hopeless mountain roads,

defeat, surrender, the vows

to live on. I slept until

the lights came on and off.

A girl was prodding my arm,

for the place was closing.

A slender Indonesian girl

in sweater and American jeans,

her black hair falling

almost to my eyes, she told

me in perfect English

that I could come back,

and she swept up into a folder

the yellowing newspaper stories

and photos spilled out before

me on the desk, the little

chronicles of death themselves

curling and blurring

into death, and took away

the book still unfinished

of a man more confused

even than I, and switched off

the light, and left me alone.


III


In June of 1975 I wakened

one late afternoon in Amsterdam

in a dim corner of a library.

I had fallen asleep over a book

and was roused by a young girl

whose hand lay on my hand.

I turned my head up and stared

into her brown eyes, deep

and gleaming. She was crying.

For a second I was confused

and started to speak, to offer

some comfort or aid, but I

kept still, for she was crying

for me, for the knowledge

that I had wakened to a life

in which loss was final.

I closed my eyes a moment.

When I opened them she'd gone,

the place was dark. I went

out into the golden sunlight;

the cobbled streets gleamed

as after rain, the street cafes

crowded and alive. Not

far off the great bell

of the Westerkirk tolled

in the early evening. I thought

of my oldest son, who years

before had sailed from here

into an unknown life in Sweden,

a life which failed, of how

he'd gone alone to Copenhagen,

Bremen, where he'd loaded trains,

Hamburg, Munich, and finally

-- sick and weary -- he'd returned

to us. He slept in a corner

of the living room for days,

and woke gaunt and quiet,

still only seventeen, his face

in its own shadows. I thought

of my father on the run

from an older war, and wondered

had he passed through Amsterdam,

had he stood, as I did now,

gazing up at the pale sky,

distant and opaque, for the sign

that never comes. Had he drifted

in the same winds of doubt

and change to another continent,

another life, a family, some

years of peace, an early death.

I walked on by myself for miles

and still the light hung on

as though the day would

never end. The gray canals

darkened slowly, the sky

above the high, narrow houses

deepened into blue, and one

by one the stars began

their singular voyages.


  


Tuesday, September 27, 2022

A Walk With Obama

 by Gregg Chadwick



Gregg Chadwick
30"x22"gouache on monotype on paper 2022


When in high school, I would often visit the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. I felt at home in DC. We were in NOVA because my dad was stationed at Headquarters Marine Corps in Arlington, Virginia. 

During World War II, artist Richard Diebenkorn also served in the Marine Corps. From 1943 until 1945, he was stationed at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. During that time, Diebenkorn often visited the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. 

I went to art school at UCLA as an undergraduate, searching for the spirit of Diebenkorn who had taught there in the 1960s. I didn’t meet Diebenkorn at UCLA, but I did eventually move to San Francisco after graduate school at NYU — perhaps in an artistic search for clues left by the Bay Area Figurative movement that Diebenkorn helped engender. As his health failed, Diebenkorn painted less but continued to create etchings at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. One morning on a walk from my Market Street loft where I lived and painted in the 1990s, I spotted Richard Diebenkorn leaning up against a BART entrance watching the cable car turnaround across Market Street. He was captivated by the movement of the conductors as they spun the car around on a giant wooden turntable. I stopped, leaned up against a wall, and flipped through art writer Robert Hughes’ book “Nothing If Not Critical” until I reached his essay on Diebenkorn. I read slowly, pausing often to gaze up at Diebenkorn as he gazed at the forms moving across Powell Street. Eventually, I closed the book, walked over and thanked Richard Diebenkorn for his art and inspiration. He smiled and tears seemed to well up in his eyes, as he said “Thank you. I am glad that my work inspires you. Is your studio nearby?” 

I didn’t mention the USMC connection to Diebenkorn that day in 1992, but I remembered the Evening Parade at the Marine Corps Barracks in Washington DC. I remembered the rich light of dusk on the green lawns at the barracks. The same light that was also falling on the White House in my painting. Dusk and green. Obama and Diebenkorn.


Wednesday, August 03, 2022

David Hockney: Moving Focus / Retrospective at Kunstmuseum Luzern


Long time readers know that I am inspired by the life and work of David Hockney.
My thoughts on Hockney's 2005 exhibition at LA Louver can be found here
 I wrote then and still feel that Hockney, throughout his career, has been as interested in how we see as in what we see. Light, color and questions on space and time have come to the forefront in both physics (light has become the cornerstone of reality and space and time have become observer-dependent) and the art of David Hockney. This new retrospective of David Hockney's art at the Kunstmuseum Luzern looks like a must see. 

Sunday, October 03, 2021

The Painter of the World


Gregg Chadwick
12"x9"oil on panel 2021



At the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a few years ago, I watched the Korean Buddhist Nun artist Seol-min paint a gorgeous artwork of the Water Moon Avalokiteshvara, also known as Guanyin. Her canvas was laid flat on the floor and she painted on top of it as if she was bodysurfing a gentle wave with brushes in hand. The large hall where Seol-min painted was quiet. The gentle sound of her brushes created a kind of music that echoed off the marble walls. My oil on panel painting "The Painter of the World" is my latest artwork inspired by this experience with the artist Seol-min.

The Asian Art Museum has created a video of Seol-min at the museum. I am in the background, off camera, watching the events.
Video Below. Link at: https://education.asianart.org/resources/korean-buddhist-art/

Featured at Saatchi Art's The Other Art Fair Los Angeles at Barker Hangar from September 23-26, 2021.

Thanks again to everyone who enjoyed my paintings at @theotherartfair Many of the paintings are available for purchase on my @saatchiart page. Link at: https://www.saatchiart.com/greggchadwick


#theotherartfair #theotherartfairla #art #artshow #la #losangeles #laartshow #laart #collectart #artcollector #artfair #santamonica #buddhism #buddha #saffron #light #SanFrancisco #AsianArtMuseum #CityOfLove #Korea #KoreanArt

 

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Neruda's Path Through Silence


Gregg Chadwick
Still I Rise
40"x30" oil on linen 2017



"From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny."
--Pablo Neruda

Monday, November 20, 2017

Thoughts On the Exhibit "Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Part 1)

by Gregg Chadwick

Intimately viewing the drawings of Michelangelo helps pull the veil of fame off of this towering figure. In spite of the title of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to give humanity back to artistic gods is no easy feat. The Met has done it twice in fourteen years. First was the 2003 exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and now those of Michelangelo in 2017. Both exhibits have given a sense of hope and human possibility back to viewers in times of struggle and uncertainty.



In its exhibition, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer the Metropolitan Museum has created a temporary museum dedicated to the life, times, and art of Michelangelo. It includes 133 drawings and poems created by Michelangelo that link the artworks to ongoing projects by the artist and his workshop. One of Michelangelo's earliest paintings is included and a small group of his sculptures in marble fill out the show. Also included are drawings by Michelangelo's mentors and artworks by his students and mentees. In a central gallery, a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling hangs as a canopy above the gallery.




Process and practice 

Like his older contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo was able to create astonishing works of art out of the simplest means of chalk, ink and paper. In Renaissance era Florence, both Leonardo and Michelangelo learned from established artists. Leonardo was apprenticed to Verrocchio, and Michelangelo was attached to Ghirlandaio's artistic workshop. Complex painting projects such as the Tornabuoni chapel, that Ghirlandaio's workshop was engaged in from 1485-1490 while Michelangelo was there, began with quick idea sketches on paper that were then fleshed out with more involved studies. Apprentices would often pose for these studies. Perhaps the young Michelangelo inspired a figure somewhere on the walls of this chapel? Copying the master's work was also part of the training for young artists. Process and practice were the keys to the growth of a young artist in Renaissance Florence.

The Met's exhibition opens with a group of drawings by Ghirlandaio and then moves on to examples of Michelangelo's studies based on earlier Florentine artists. In many of the works, with quick strokes of the pen coupled with a dense cross-hatching to create shadow and form, Michelangelo sculpts a form out of the paper.


Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564) 
Study of a Kneeling Man in a Cloak Seen from the Rear
pen and brown ink 11 1/2" x 7 7/8"
Albertina, Vienna
(formerly in the collection of Peter Paul Rubens?)




Included with Michelangelo's early studies after the Italian masters is a richly pigmented fantasy based on an engraving by the 15th century German artist Martin Schongauer. ( I wrote about this painting in 2009 when the artwork was first exhibited at the Met as an  early work by Michelangelo - link here.)



Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564)
The Torment of Saint Anthony (after Schongauer)
c. 1487–88. Oil and tempera on panel, 18 1/2 x 13 1/4 in.







Martin Schongauer
St. Anthony
engraving printed on paper 15th-century - German 








Emulation and Personal Discovery

The young Michelangelo absorbed the influence of his predecessors into a rapidly developing personal style based on an exploration of the human form. Moving from a faux antique look such as the recently attributed sculpture The Young Archer to poetically observed life studies, Michelangelo like Leonardo before him learned that "accurate understanding derives from investigation and experience." 


Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564) 
 37" x 13 1/4" x 14" marble sculpture ca. 1490
Lent by the French State, Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs






In 1504, Michelangelo received a commission by the Republic of Florence for a grand mural of the Battle of Cascina in the Great Council Hall. At the same time Leonardo was working on his own mural for the grand space. Leonardo's chalk drawings for his battle scene are full of expressive movement and grand drama. After viewing Leonardo's powerful designs, Michelangelo, as evidenced in the Met's exhibit, went back to the well and drew a red chalk artwork inspired by the figures of Adam and Eve in Masaccio's fresco in the Brancacci Chapel. Curiously, in this chapel during his apprenticeship, Michelangelo was slugged viciously by a rival artist. His broken nose was never properly reset. Years later he went back to the scene  and reclaimed the space and Masaccio's art for his own use.



Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564) 
Study of Adam and Eve after Masaccio
1504  red chalk, 12 13/16" x 7 3/8 "
Musée du Louvre


More Like Flesh than Stone

Moving on from his inspiration, Michelangelo began a series of evocative drawings for the planned Battle of Cascina. Jonathan Jones in The Lost Battles writes that "time is included in Michelangelo's vision" in these studies. Jones continues - "There is a tragic power to these drawings. He portrays young men in their full strength and beauty and yet shades them with intimations of ruin."


Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) 
Study of the Torso of a Male Nude Seen from the Back
1504  black chalk with lead white gouache highlights on paper 7 11/16" x 10 5/8"
Albertina, Vienna
(formerly in the collection of Peter Paul Rubens?) 



These drawings are sumptuously beautiful, and set the stage for the rest of Michelangelo's artistic life. Michelangelo's touch is all over these works. The use of chalk in many of the drawings, rather than pen and ink, opens up a sensuous physicality that feels more like flesh than stone. Remarkably to me, in the Met's exhibit, a few of the drawings feature a model sporting a hipster worthy mustache who could have walked out of 21st century Brooklyn.
A map of desire seems to be drawn across the back of many of Michelangelo's figures. In the gallery I think of the poetry and art to come - Cavafy, Isherwood, Bachardy, Bacon, and Hockney.


Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) 
Study of the Torso of a Male Nude Seen from the Back
1504  black chalk with lead white gouache highlights on paper 7 11/16" x 10 5/8"
Albertina, Vienna
(formerly in the collection of Peter Paul Rubens?)

Coming up soon on Speed of Life - Part 2 on "Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

*All photos of exhibit and artwork by Gregg Chadwick 2017



Thursday, July 20, 2017

A Compassionate Lens: Art Through the Eyes of Gregg Chadwick



I enjoyed this chat with Stephanie Case. Recorded in my studio, it provides a hint of the theme of compassion that runs through my artwork.  - Thanks for listening.

Friday, July 07, 2017

Looking at Diebenkorn: Thoughts on Art, Memories, and the Marine Corps (Combat Town to Ocean Park)

by Gregg Chadwick




 July 
58.5" x 53.75" oil on canvas 1957
Private Collection

 "So distinctive are the pentimenti in Diebenkorn's art that each painting carries within itself the visible history of the artist's search."
- Arthur C. Danto

Outside my window, fireworks are streaking across the evening sky. A group of young adults are gathered down below. Lightly boisterous after a day in the sun, checking their phones for the next event. "Don't get too close", they say as they light a small firework in the park across the street. The group runs. The miniature explosive was a dud. Smiles and backslaps as they walk down the street. Further in the distance a dull thump echoes down the way as a firework lifts off - exploding at its apogee. In the rolling Santa Monica fog, the explosion is now a muted glow on the horizon.

When I was a kid, my family would drive to the local July 4th events. I remember when I was in High School watching the bicentennial festivities in 1976 from the Marine Corps headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. I gazed across the Potomac towards Washington DC at the French designed fireworks program and saw art in the skies.  Carter would be elected later that year and I felt a sense of hope in the future. My dad, a veteran of the Korean War and the Vietnam War never flinched at the explosions. But, years earlier when I played as a small kid with my toy soldiers strewn across the family room floor, I would often whistle an incoming shell sound that was inevitably followed with a "Knock it off!" barked from my Dad. It seemed like a game to me but it wasn't - I learned that many vets find memories of distress in the crackle of explosions and I now try to honor that.

I was only five in 1965 and the small gap in time between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War defined my early childhood. My physical playground was often found in the hills of the Marine Base in Southern California we called home. Camp Pendleton sprawled across the maps my parents carried in their Buick. Pendleton still acts as a physical barrier between the southward sprawl of Los Angeles as it bleeds into its cousin Orange County and the northward creep of San Diego.

As Marine Corps dependents, military brats, we had almost free run of the base in Camp Pendleton. Dressed in cast off, or surreptitiously borrowed, uniforms of khaki or forest green military duds accented by denim and Converse shoes, my older brother and I with a crew of neighborhood kids played soldier in our fathers’ training ground. On weekends, when our neighbors gathered outside to barbecue freshly hunted venison, we would scamper to Combat Town.




This urban battle training ground on Camp Pendleton was first constructed during the 1950’s as a simulated Korean town smacked down in the California chaparral.  As if on a set from the TV show Combat, we acted out the parts of valiant sergeants and dutiful privates in this dystopian war ground.  Blown out walls reeked of cordite and sweat. The older kids would leap from open second story windows, writhing from imagined wounds. Younger ones like me would gather the spent shells and dull green ammo boxes that littered Combat Town. I would store my plundered gear in the garage and then find the others finishing off the last bits of meat from the barbecue or sipping on coffee in the dry California night around Chosin Circle. On base, the Marine Corps would often name streets for battle sites from their history. Chosin Circle, where our house was located, was named for one of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War. I grew up with stories of the vaunted 1st Marine Division surrounded by ten Chinese divisions. Running low on ammunition, the Marines radioed to headquarters for resupply using the code word for mortar shells. The code word was Tootsie Rolls and that’s what they got parachuted to them in the freezing Korean Winter. Fueled on by not much more than grit and the airlifted candy, the Marines battled their way out of the trap. My dad liked to quote 1st Marine Division General Oliver Prince Smith who, when asked if his company was retreating, barked back: "Retreat? Hell, we are attacking in another direction."

 More than memories of the Corps hung around our house, hints of my future passions were also hidden on Chosin Circle. Ours was a house of secrets. Once when probing the deep recesses of our garage, I found combat camouflage paint sticks in a green Marine Corps issue locker. Stacked nearby, I also found oil paint by number kits that my brother and dad liked to play with. I drew jungle green and black stripes across my hand with the camo gear and sniffed the sweet vegetable smell of linseed oil in the small do it yourself tins of paint by number paint. Theater and art gave me their secrets that day and I held tight to them.


The Beatles travel to  Shea Stadium via helicopter 1965 

 There was music too. The younger kids in our neighborhood often sang in their childhood falsettos spirited renditions of the Beatles’ “I want to hold your hand.” After we moved back to Jersey and my dad was on base in Da Nang, The Beatles played Shea Stadium in August 1965. They flew from Manhattan on a helicopter skimming above the city to the roof of the World's Fair building in Queens. My dad in Vietnam was on helicopters too. But in his photos, there was always a gunner leaning against his weapon and scanning the horizon for threats out of an open door.



Commissioned a second lieutenant in June 1951, my dad was an infantry platoon commander in combat in Korea and, later, a reconnaissance platoon commander. After the Korean War, he and my mom were stationed at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After Paris, he returned to his alma mater Columbia, where he earned a law degree and then a master of laws degree at my future alma mater NYU. Following a brief stint in private practice outside of the military when my brother and I were born, my dad returned to the Corps just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. His unit was on full alert and geared up and would have been part of the first US forces to invade Cuba if the crisis had not passed. And then there was Vietnam. My dad - Major Chadwick- was a 3rd Marine Division lawyer. After my family left the base for New Jersey and my dad joined the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF) under the command of Major General Lewis W. Walt in Da Nang, Vietnam, Combat Town was transformed into a mock Vietnamese village. Reconnaissance and secrets are in his blood. And maybe I carried secrets too?

On this Fourth of July in 2017, I think of Santa Monica's best known artist - Richard Diebenkorn. Diebenkorn was/is a Marine. "Semper Fi!", I say. Diebenkorn's  artwork July created in 1957 is for me a quintessential American painting. LIFE magazine in their December 1, 1961 issue described the piece as a depiction of a silent fellow occupying a patriotic bench in a blaze of colors, creating a setting of "hot fields and sky." Tonight, we are a long way from the hope found in the early 1960's. That was an era of Camelot in the Oval Office. Yet, there is a hint of melancholy found in the shadows in Diebenkorn's painting. I am reminded of the paintings of Edward Hopper that Diebenkorn admired as a young artist.  Olivia Laing in The Guardian writes," Like Hopper, Diebenkorn was interested in evoking mood and emotion. Both men strongly felt the difficulty of painting, the troublesome and sometimes agonising passage from vision to completion. This is what Hopper described as 'decay': the inevitable, distressing gap between the luminous idea and its resolution on the canvas."


Richard Diebenkorn in his official United States Marine Corps portrait,
San Francisco, Calif., 1943
© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation




During World War II, Diebenkorn served in the Marine Corps from 1943 until 1945. While stationed at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Diebenkorn often visited the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. According to the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, "He internalized influences from Cézanne, Julio González, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko and Kurt Schwitters; certain key paintings, such as Matisse’s 1916 Studio, Quai St. Michel at the Phillips Collection were especially compelling for him." Matisse's Quai Saint-Michel creates an architecture of lines that seems to pre-figure Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings. The painterly scaffolding in Matisse's painting is transported to Santa Monica, California and put into the service of an American vision.


Henri Matisse, Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, 1916. Oil on canvas, 58 1/4 x 46 in.
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1940



Richard Diebenkorn
Ocean Park #79, 1975
Philadelphia Museum of Art



When I was in high school, I also would often visit the Phillips Collection. I felt at home in DC. In many ways I was much more comfortable going from my classes at the Corcoran School of Art to the Phillips in Dupont Circle than I was traversing the suburban steppes of Northern Virginia where I lived.  The wealth of art in the museums still enthralls me. I can imagine Diebenkorn almost giddy in the bounty of painting in front of him. I went to art school at UCLA as an undergraduate, searching for the spirit of Diebenkorn who had taught there in the 1960's. Renowned sculptor Elyn Zimmerman was a student that Diebenkorn took under his wing. Her thoughts about that time are rich in detail and bring back to life Diebenkorn's artistic affair with Matisse:

"A favorite topic was Henri Matisse. He had a large poster of Matisse’s View of Notre Dame positioned on the wall near the huge windows looking out toward the beach and Pacific Ocean a few blocks away. When I recall his studio I remember thinking that he would see the poster and the atmospheric light of the ocean at the same time.
We also looked at Matisse reproductions of French Window at Collioure, Goldfish and Palette, and The Piano Lesson, and Diebenkorn spoke about the difficulty of making a gray painting—how hard it is to make something meaningful and able to connect when one of the fundamental elements of painting—color—is not present or is reduced.
I’m afraid given my youth and inexperience at the time I didn’t get all the substance of what he was sharing, but what impressed me even then were his intensity, focus, and seriousness. Painting meant everything. Work meant everything."

I didn't meet Diebenkorn at UCLA, but I did eventually move to San Francisco after graduate school at NYU - perhaps in an artistic search for clues left by the Bay Area Figurative movement that Diebenkorn helped engender. My painting, October Off Ocean Park traveled with me all those years. It was painted in a series of starts, stops and absences. Major compositional elements were scraped down or painted over. I worked on the painting over a series of months then years. My artistic engagement with the work of Richard Diebenkorn helped me finish the piece. I knew I wanted to get the light of a Santa Monica evening into the work. But I wasn't quite sure how to pull it off. Then finally in 2004, I moved into a studio at the Santa Monica Airport - literally off Ocean Park Boulevard. I could walk out the door and see that evening light filtered through my memories of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series.



Gregg Chadwick
October Off Ocean Park 
72"x72" oil on linen 1982 - 2006
Private Collection, St. Louis, Missouri




Richard Diebenkorn
Ocean Park No.27 100" x 81" oil on canvas 1970


Arthur C. Danto, in Encounters and Reflections, writes at length on Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings:

"Ocean Park itself is a community in Santa Monica, where Diebenkorn traced a daily path between home and studio, but whether or not these works make the topical references to local landscape with which they are credited, they clearly are something more than abstractions with recurrent compositional motifs, cadences, pastel tonalities, scumbled fields and tapelike forms, and stunning juxtapositions of color swept on with masterful brushwork. Each of them, for example, displays the submerged record of its own realization, and so distinctive are the pentimenti in Diebenkorn's art that each painting carries within itself the visible history of the artist's search. The nearest parallel, perhaps, would be the great drawings of Rembrandt, in which certain crowded lines converge on the sought-after contour so that the drawing and its draw-ing are one, process and fulfillment inseparable. In my view, Diebenkorn's paintings are less about the bright skies and long horizons of Ocean Park than about the act of painting."

In Richard Diebenkorn's last years he moved back to Northern California from Santa Monica. Polar places of existence for many in the west. In Diebenkorn's work there is a difference in the light quality between the Ocean Park paintings created in Southern California and the more gestural and thicker pigmented works done in Northern California. It is too simplistic to ascribe these differences as solely about place. But I also find that my quality of vision differs as I view my paintings in these polar lights. Color seems to be more present, and perhaps more important, in my Southern California work. And space becomes expansive in my Southern California paintings as well. In San Francisco, the fog and the vertiginous landscape pull me close to the source.

As his health failed, Diebenkorn painted less but continued to create etchings at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. One morning on a walk from my Market Street loft where I lived and painted in the 1990's, with a book by Robert Hughes in hand, I spotted Richard Diebenkorn leaning up against a BART entrance watching the cable car turnaround across Market Street. He was captivated by the movement of the conductors as they spun the car around on a giant wooden turntable. I stopped, leaned up against a wall, and flipped through art writer Robert Hughes' book Nothing If Not Critical until I reached his essay on Diebenkorn. I read slowly, pausing often to gaze up at Diebenkorn as he gazed at the forms moving across Powell Street. Eventually, I closed the book, walked over and thanked Richard Diebenkorn for his art and inspiration. He smiled and tears seemed to well up in his eyes, as he said "Thank you. I am glad that my work inspires you. Is your studio nearby?" I nodded and tried to say something "about the interplay between figuration and abstraction in his work." Diebenkorn was frail at this point and seemed to know that he didn't have much longer to live. I didn't want to take him away from his moment alone in the morning light on Market Street. I thanked him again and moved on. Richard Diebenkorn died soon after in 1993.

I didn't mention the USMC connection to Diebenkorn that day in 1992, but I often thought about it. I wasn't sure how my early years rolling in the dust of Combat Town in Camp Pendleton would inform my art. It seems that most artists have a childhood memory that continually resurfaces in their artwork. I had found camouflage paint sticks and learned a lot about discipline and hard work. As Elyn Zimmerman remembered in her thoughts about Diebenkorn as a teacher - "intensity, focus, and hard work." I also remembered the Evening Parade at the Marine Corps Barracks in Washington DC.


Gregg Chadwick
Arlington
48"x36" oil on linen 2004
Collection: National Museum of the Marine Corps
 

In 2003, as a United States crafted coalition invaded Iraq, a new engagement with the Marine Corps and my art began. After September 11, 2001, I began a still continuing Buddhist inspired series of artworks. Saffron robed monks appeared to me out of my memories and flowed onto my canvases. The painting, Arlington, was inspired by the funeral of Chanawongse Kemaphoom 22, of Waterford, Connecticut. Chanawongse Kemaphoom was a United States Marine who was killed in action during operations on the outskirts of An Nasiriyah, Iraq on March 23, 2003. Chanawongse was assigned to 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Chanawongse Kemaphoom was a Thai-American Buddhist, so his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery included saffron robed Buddhist monks as well as US Marines in their dress blues.

The Arlington Cemetery site describes the ceremony:

"Seven monks swathed in saffron robes padded onto the moist grounds of Arlington National Cemetery yesterday, followed by six uniformed Marines in crisper pace bearing the coffin of a fallen comrade. Even in death, Kemaphoom Chanawongse, 22, straddled two worlds -- the Thailand he left when he was 9 and the America he ultimately gave his life for. The corporal died in Iraq March 23, 2003, in an ambush outside Nasiriyah. Friends and family called him "Ahn." His fellow Marines called him "Chuckles," for his sense of humor and love of laughter. Chanawongse's last letter home still brings a smile to his elder brother's face, albeit through tears. In a letter dated March 13 from Kuwait, where Chanawongse served with the 1st Marine Division, he joked about the art of playing baseball with a stick. He said his camp reminded him of the sitcom "M*A*S*H," although he preferred MAHTSF, for "Marines Are Here to Stay Forever."As he stroked his brother's coffin yesterday, Kemapasse Chanawongse spoke directly to him for what he said would be the last time: 'Ahn, I love you. I am proud of you.'"

My painting began as an image of a US Marine in Iraq silhouetted against a gunpowdered sky at dusk. That painting was subsequently worked into and eventually over-painted with the present image when the reports and images in the New York Times of Chanawongse Kemaphoom’s funeral brought back childhood memories of watching “taps” played at dusk. In honor of Ahn Chanawongse and my father, my painting Arlington is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia.





Caption from the December 1, 1961 issue of LIFE Magazine:
"A trio of bench sitters takes the sun beside a lily pond in Schenley Park. The silent fellow on the left occupies a patriotic bench devised by California Artist Richard Diebenkorn, who, with a blaze of colors, created a setting of hot fields and sky.
He entitled the picture July."
Photo by Ben Spiegel from the article Art Spectacle in Pittsburgh.


Diebenkorn's painting July was carried from the exhibition at the 1961 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture  (Now the Carnegie International) and photographed by Ben Spiegel for the article Art Spectacle in Pittsburgh published in LIFE  Magazine in December 1961. Even now as an observer 50+ years later, I fear for the painting. A gust of wind could blow the artwork into the pond. And furthermore, who in that Mad Men world decided that contemporary art was just a prop? 







Catalog from the 1961 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture  (Now the Carnegie International)