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