Speed of Life

Gregg Chadwick "The Chinese Sky" 48" x 48" oil and silver leaf on linen 2005 Between Moment and Memory New Paintings by Gregg Chadwick at the Julie Nester Gallery, Park City, Utah January 6-29, 2006 Artist's Talk: Friday, January 6, 6:00pm "What is the Place of Beauty in the 21st Century" Reception for the Artist: Friday, January 27, 4:00-7:00 pm (During the Sundance Film Festival) “A poet or a painter must commit to a life of deep attention and even reverence for the multitude of meaning around us. An artist friend of mine, Gregg Chadwick, calls this 'pulling the moment,' a way of looking deeper into experiences that inspire him.” -Phil Cousineau, Once and Future Myths Strike a hard rock edge with a piece of carbon steel and a spark will spread onto dry tinder and burst into flames. In the same way, when artistic cultures strike against each other, new fires can erupt. To build on these experiences, careful attention and reverence must be f...

The Art Institute of Chicago, December 2005 Happy Holidays with Great Thanks and Hope for Peace in the New Year -Gregg Chadwick

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready." -Gwendolyn Brooks

Stephen Foss "I Forget You Every Day" enamel on canvas 60x60 image courtesy Sense Fine Art An art gallery's van containing paintings by the artist Stephen Foss was stolen in San Francisco on November 23rd. Steve Rubenstein reports in the San Francisco Chronicle today that the alleged thieves tried to sell the stolen paintings to the Sense Gallery in Menlo Park. The bungling bandits did not realize that the Sense Gallery owned the van from which the paintings were stolen. The suspects arranged to meet the gallery owner who then contacted the police. A dozen sheriff's deputies laid in wait, and stormed the gallery when the suspects brought in the stolen Stephen Foss paintings. Two of the suspects were arrested in the gallery. A third took off running and was caught after being bitten by a deputy's police dog. Sheriff's Sgt. Jerry Quinlan said that he didn't think that the crew was trying to extort the Sense Gallery to pay for its own stolen artworks- ...

LACMA Garage Demolition There was a last minute effort led by Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge to save the murals by Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee that graced the LACMA garage, but it seems to have come up short. Yesterday, workers were hammering away at the structure with heavy machinery sending cement chips into the air. Tom LaBonge echoed Tyler Green's point that the main issue was one of value. We have lost not just artworks but visual clues to our time. In fifteen years curators and artlovers will look back, aghast, at our rush towards some sort of progress. After watching the destruction of the garage for a while, I walked over to the Page Museum at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles. The museum holds an immense collection of fossils of extinct Ice Age plants and animals. I wandered the exhibits and gazed at reconstructed skeletons that attempt to piece together Los Angeles as it was between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago when saber-toothed ca...

Still from Counting Crows' "Mr. Jones" Anna Conti has a great compilation of songs about art and artists - Anna Conti's Art Songs I suggested that she add a couple : Originally from the Bay Area- Counting Crows' "Mr. Jones" ("Grey is my favorite color...If I knew Picasso I would buy myself a grey guitar and play.") from the album "August and Everything After." I used to drive around SF in my old car playing a demo tape from a band called the Himalayans. One day I found myself in a record store on Market Street singing along to a song playing over the store's sound system. I sang till I realized that it was the Himalayans. I babbled something about knowing the band to the clerk at the register. He nodded in a Hi-Fidelity sort of way and informed me that the band was now known as Counting Crows and that T-Bone Burnett had produced the album. David Bowie's "Joe the Lion" from "Heroes" is written about perform...

"To say these pictures required a kind of monkish devotion to draw is in part to reiterate his inherited Dutch Reform ideas about nature and the revelation of God. Nature was virtually supernatural to him. There is no better proof that he wasn't the mad hatter of movie legend than these painstaking tributes to sublime countryside - as Robert Hughes once put it about van Gogh's paintings, "if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis." -Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Van Gogh's drawings have a quality of vision that astounds. Each area in the Zouave is drawn with a different series of marks from Van Gogh's reed pens. It is as if each part is presented in a different artistic language: the stippled face, the vertically marked wall, the crosshatched hat. Seeing With the Brush, Esalen "The Painted Word" , December 2005 Last weekend at Esalen, Phil Cousineau and I presented our thoughts ...

John Lennon & Yoko Ono photographed by Allan Tannenbaum two weeks before John's death on December 8th, 1980. "So we got something when we had John Lennon, and we lost something when his voice was killed. We lost somebody as fucked up as us, who worked his whole life to overcome himself, and, in doing so, his creativity would help us overcome the madness of our times -- at least for a while. Through it all, he told us to keep faith, to keep courage, to defy our hurt, our fear, to find love and hope and to fight for meaning." - Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone John Lennon & Yoko Ono photographed by Allan Tannenbaum two weeks before John's death John Lennon in conversation with Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner is now available as a free podcast: John Lennon Podcast on iTunes John Lennon Podcast via Rolling Stone 25 years on - NY Times

Here's where we stand with LACMA and the McGee/Kilgallen murals: Demolition has begun on a part of the parking structure, but efforts are still underway to try and save some of the murals. More details to follow as info develops. Barry McGee LACMA Garage Margaret Kilgallen LACMA Garage Barry McGee LACMA Garage

Gregg Chadwick Siddhartha 8"x6" oil on linen 2005 This weekend is the 1st Anniversary of the Santa Monica Studios. We are holding a free reception which is open to the public. My studio- #15 will be open. I will be at Esalen this weekend leading a workshop on Creativity with Phil Cousineau - The Painted Word: A Conversation between Word & Image - Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick at Esalen, Big Sur But don't worry, Evelyn Gonzalez Figueroa will be studio sitting to answer your questions. Many of the paintings on view in my studio will be part of my next solo exhibition- "Between Moment and Memory" which will be held at the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival. The historic 22,000 square foot hangar at 3026 Airport Avenue at the Santa Monica Airport will be open on Saturday, December 3rd from 6 to 9 pm. More than 30 artists will open their studios for the event which continues on Sunday, December 4th from 1 to 5 p...

A scribe was asked, "What is pleasure?" He answered, "Parchment, papers, shiny ink, and a cleft reed pen." A card bearing this quotation sits in a glass case among precious manuscripts and instruments of writing at the McGill Library in Montreal. Magnificent Octopus reports on this fascinating exhibit: Scribes, Scholars & Conservators .

Barry McGee (detail of a mural currently in the LACMA garage) Mayor Villaraigosa, I want to thank you for the bold steps that you have taken to create a Los Angeles for the 21st Century. Your vision and ideals are inspiring. Not long ago you attended the opening of Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi's film: "A Day Without a Mexican" . Your commitment to challenging (and humorous) art is evident. Last May - Sergio Arau, Yareli Arizmendi, and the film's cinematographer Alan Caudillo - attended the opening of my exhibition at the LACMA Art Rental and Sales Gallery. It was an evening of spirit, camaraderie and possibility. We pledged our support to you in the upcoming election and knew that if the time came for the art community to reach out for your help that you would listen. That time has come sooner than we thought. It has been reported that in a few days, on December 1st, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is slated to demolish its parking garage to make way for a ...

Eye Unidentified Artist 3/4" x 3/4" watercolor on ivory ca. 1900 Smithsonian American Art Museum Kriston Capps announces: "I'm excited to introduce Eye Level , the blog for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's one of just a few museums forging new ground with new media (and is host to the Smithsonian's first blog!). Today's the official launch and I hope you'll check in frequently. When the Smithsonian American Art Museum reopens its renovated historic main building in July 2006, it will be a showcase for American art that celebrates this nation's vision and creativity. SAAM's blog Eye Level is part of the museum's continuing effort to explore the stories central to the American experienceand to search for what connects Americans today. Using the museum's collection as a touchstone, the conversation at Eye Level will center on the ways in which the nation's art connects to its history and culture. The discussion will extend ...

Edwin W. Dickinson American, 1891 - 1978 The Cello Player, 1924 - 1926 oil on canvas 60" x 48 1/4" DeYoung Museum photo by Gregg Chadwick "Dickinson is not a name that carries instant recognition outside the circles of art historians and artists. He spanned (1891 - 1978) a period in American art history which jumped from academic Realism to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism and through all of these changes he retained his own style, pausing here and there to prove that he was thoroughly informed by all the new schools in the arts while continuing his mission as a representational artist. His studios were in New York and in Cape Cod and it is here that he observed and painted the world as he saw it. Some of his canvases took years to complete." -Grady Harp

by Gregg Chadwick Olmec Sculpture photo by Gregg Chadwick "In 1862 plantation workers in Huaypan, Veracruz, thought that they had found a large overturned iron kettle buried in the ground. Believing that it might hide a cache of gold, they dug -- and dug -- and dug, eventually revealing a colossal stone portrait head. This was the first Olmec sculpture to be discovered in Mexico. It would be nearly 70 years before a number of extraordinary objects of jade and stone were to be seen as stylistically related and of a culture which nobody had known. That culture was arbitrarily named "Olmec" for the peoples who, at the time of the Spanish conquest, had inhabited the region where the first head had been found." - Gillett G. Griffin, from the catalog eesay for "The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership" exhibited at The Art Museum, Princeton University in 1996. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have a new building to house the de Young museum and a n...

Lee Mullican "Space" 40" x 50" oil on canvas 1951 Los Angeles County Museum of Art "Mullican, like many other artists of his generation, was consumed with the question of how spirituality could be effectively represented in art. He had been stationed with the Army in Guam when atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, with thousands of other American soldiers in the Pacific, he was sent to occupy Japan immediately after. Faced with the unprecedented potential for nuclear annihilation, and soon given the emerging truth about the Holocaust in Europe, matters of life's sanctity were pressing in the years following the war. Creativity itself held profound intrinsic value — and in a measure unmatched in American culture before. History had brought the world to the brink. Artists, many of them returned from the battlefields, reasonably surmised that a reconsideration of prehistory might provide a platform from which to start over." - Christopher Kn...

Gregg Chadwick "Acadia" 48"x36" oil on linen 2005 Upcoming Workshop Weekend of December 2-4, 2005 The Painted Word: A Conversation between Word & Image at Esalen,Big Sur Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." — Simonides For thousands of years, one of the profound mysteries of the human adventure has been the creative impulse. The urge to make new things, to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is essential to what makes us human. While most creative people focus on one art form, there is a venerable tradition, from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Picasso and Akira Kurosawa, that teaches creativity as one vast continuum with no real distinction between drawing and writing. In this spirit, Gregg Chadwick and Phil Cousineau will use slideshows, film-clips, music, and discussion to explore the intimate relationship between words and images, as well as innovative writing, drawing and painting ex...

by Gregg Chadwick Lise Patt "Traumbagger" On Sunday, November 13, 2005, from 2-5 pm, a reception will be held at The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) at 1512 South Robertson Blvd in Los Angeles. This special open house will borrow from the Renaissance “Wunderkammer” tradition—every usable surface of the Institute will be covered with projects created during the organization’s 15 year history. Ole Worm's Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities) Frontispiece from the 1655 catalog : "Worm's Museum, or the History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, Domestic and Exotic, Which Are Stored in the Author's House in Copenhagen."* The Danish professor of medicine Ole Worm (1588-1654) believed that learning comes about through the observation of nature - "through empiricism and experiment" - and not just through the study of texts. Worm firmly believed that vision was the most trustworthy sense for investigations of our environment....

Wim Wenders's 2003 film The Land of Plenty will be opening on November 11th for an exclusive one-week run at the Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills, California. The film deals with themes that are common to Wenders's work: angst, alienation, and America—but in Land of Plenty these themes are explored through a uniquely spiritual and post 9-11 perspective. The film tells the story of Lana (Michelle Williams), who returns to the United States after years of living abroad with her American missionary father. Though she has returned to America with plans to continue her education, Lana instead sets out to find her only other living relative—her uncle Paul, her deceased mother’s brother. A Vietnam veteran, Paul is a reclusive vagabond with deep emotional war wounds. A tragic event witnessed by the two unites them in a common goal to rectify a wrong and takes them on a journey of healing, discovery, and kinship. The Hollywood Reporter says in a recent review of the film, ...

Jessey Dorr's "Off to the Oyster Beds," a painting found at a garage sale, led the buyer, Davis Dutton, on a several-year search for the painter. Photo courtesy of the Davis Dutton Collection Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderful piece by the Los Angeles bookseller* and author Davis Dutton on the search for the artist behind a haunting painting found gathering dust in a garage. This account is so well written that it calls out to become a book. It has much to say about art and life in California in the early part of the 20th Century: The Burnt Paintings Artist Jessey Dorr: Born into a wealthy Nob Hill family, she was a strong-willed woman who burned her paintings after a bad review. Photo by Imogen Cunningham As an artist I always wonder where my works will end up in fifty or a hundred years. Like most painters I know,(See Martin Bromirski at Anaba ), I have found a few treasures stacked against the walls in small shops. I once found an original Cezanne etc...

On Monday November 7th at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 7 pm, Phil Cousineau and Huston Smith will talk about their new book "A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom ". The book is cast as a series of dialogues in which the most widely read and beloved historian of religions in the world, Huston Smith, engages in conversations with American Indian leaders about their five hundred year long fight for religious freedom. These intimate, impassioned dialogues yield profound insights into one of the most striking cases of tragic irony in history: the country that prides itself on religious freedom has resolutely denied those same rights to its own indigenous people. Phil Cousineau and Huston Smith With remarkable erudition and curiosity, Smith and Cousineau, respectfully engage ten American Indian leaders: Vine Deloria, Jr. (Lakota), Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), Frank Dayish, Jr. (Navajo), Charlot...

Stewart Lupton and Betsy Wright "I'm coming into my own," Stewart Lupton says. "Every painter or poet has this period - the good ones always reinvent themselves. There's always this little epoch where you step into your own skin and leave what T.S. Eliot called 'the anxiety of influence' behind." Gregory Korn, a talented writer and artist, passed on word of The Childballads recently, and the lone song available on the band's website haunts me: Childballads: "Cheekbones (White Chocolate Tea)" . This song was in my dreams last night and I woke up singing it this morning. Of course the name, Stewart Lupton, sounds familiar. Recently in the New York Post , Maureen Callahan wrote: "IT'S rare that someone gets another shot at becoming the next big thing - especially when people aren't quite sure whether you're still alive. In the late 1990s, Stewart Lupton was poised to be the biggest rock star to emerge from the burgeonin...

Arcade Fire on Pancake Mountain Filmmaker Scott Stuckey created Pancake Mountain , the Washington, D.C., cable-access show on which alt-rockers like Ted Leo, Shonen Knife, Weird War, Fiery Furnaces and Arcade Fire play before an energetic and very young audience. "Bands started hearing about it and called us," Scott Stuckey says. "So many parents write us," says Stuckey, "and they're like, 'Wow, this is something I really like watching with my kids.'" Rufus and Henry Rollins In addition to live performances by bands, Pancake Mountain features interviews between the show's puppet host Rufus Leaking and musicians — including Henry Rollins and George Clinton. The program is currently available on cable in DC and New York, but you can buy the episodes on DVD from the Pancake Mountain website. While created with children in mind, the show appeals to kids of all ages. My favorite clips include Shonen Knife performing "Twist Barbie" and...

Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the force's combined press center, described the number as an "artificial mark on the wall." "I ask that when you report on the events, take a moment to think about the effects on the families and those serving in Iraq," Boylan said in an e-mail. "The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall"

I voraciously gather images to use for reference in my artwork. I especially like to collect photographs of artworks that move me in some way. I spend hours in the studio looking at these images of paintings and sculptures and then jotting down my thoughts and ideas. A year ago, on my birthday, I was traveling in Maine and shot a few photos along the way. Modern Kicks' entry on the Neil Welliver exhibition, currently at the Portland Museum, brought back memories of that journey. On that gray day in Portland, two works in the collection stood out. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) Sharpshooter, 1863 oil on canvas 12 1/4 x 16 1/2" Portland Museum of Art, Maine USMC Sniper Team, 2004 Photo by: Gunnery Sgt. Keith A. Milks Winslow Homer's "Sharpshooter" is as relevant as the front page of today's New York Times.* Alexander Eliot in "Three Hundred Years of American Painting" describes how Winslow Homer's "huntsman eyes saw the world his contempo...

Rosa Parks died today, October 24, 2005 at 92. On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks set the modern civil rights movement in motion when she refused to give up her seat on the the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. When the front of the bus filled up, the driver ordered Rosa Parks, a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store, to give up her seat for a white rider. She refused and was arrested. Rosa Parks's arrest for breaking Montgomery's segregation laws started a boycott of the city bus line that lasted over a year. This eventually led to the 1956 Supreme Court decision which ruled that segregation on public buses is illegal. Rosa Parks: "The famous U.P.I. photo (actually taken more than a year later, on Dec. 21, 1956, the day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated) is a study of calm strength. She is looking out the bus window, her hands resting in the folds of her checked dress, while a white man si...