Between Moment and Memory at the Julie Nester Gallery

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 focused on the moment even as the world rushes by. One of my major goals as a painter is to hold onto the light in these moments with rich, fluid and layered applications of color.

The paintings that make up the exhibition, Between Moment and Memory, are sparked by the life of a son of a Marine Corps officer and the subsequent artistic pilgrimage that has led from New Jersey to Paris, Los Angeles, Venice, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo and Chiang Mai. My current artwork is a synthesis of these travels and experiences and seems to evoke dreams of the moments that sparked their inspiration. These new paintings ask the question: What is the place of beauty in the 21st Century?



Julie Nester Gallery
Winter Hours: Tuesday - Friday 10 - 5, Sat. & Sun. 11- 4
Anytime by appointment
435.649.7855

“Best of the Beehive 05” “Best Gallery in Utah”

Happy Holidays from Chicago

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

Art Theft Doesn't Pay

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- "It was just bad luck on their part.''

But not a bad publicity moment for Stephen Foss or his galleries. Will aborted art theft now become a career move for artists?

Stephen Foss is also represented by the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, Utah. My next solo show opens on January 6th, 2006 at the Julie Nester Gallery. My paintings are traveling in secret and, in case there are any would be art thieves out there, are protected by snarling art dogs.

LACMA Garage Goes Down: Fragments and Memory

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 cats and mammoths roamed the Los Angeles Basin.

It is a shame that LACMA did not have as much foresight as the Page Museum. They could not hold on to the McGee and Kilgallen murals for the future.

Instead we are left with fragments and memory.

I want to thank Filmmaker Alan Caudillo, Councilmember Tom LaBonge, Tyler Green, the Architectural Resources Group, and MVH for their efforts in this cause.

Anna Conti's Art Songs

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 performance artist Chris Burden. One of my art school friends at UCLA got arrested for pointing a bbgun gun at Chris during an in class performance. That was years ago. Was not surprised to see a similar action happen years later. Well covered in the art blogs.

Chris Burden
"747" January 5, 1973

Lyrics to Joe the Lion-

============
Joe the lion
Went to the bar
A couple of drinks on the house an' he said
"Tell you who you are if you nail me to my car"
Boy
Thanks for hesitating
This is the kiss off
Boy
Thanks for hesitating
You'll never know the real story
Just a couple of dreams
You get up and sleep
You can buy god it's Monday
Slither down the greasy pipe
So far so good no one saw you
Hobble over any freeway
You will be like your dreams tonight
You get up and sleep
You get up and sleep
Joe the lion
Made of iron
Joe the lion
Went to the bar
A couple of drinks on the house an' he was
A fortune teller he said
"Nail me to my car and I'll tell you who you are"
Joe the lion, yeah yeah
Went to the bar, yeah yeah
A couple of dreams and he was
A fortune teller he said
"Nail me to my car tell you who you are"
You get up and sleep
The wind blows on your check
The day laughs in your face
Guess you'll buy a gun
You'll buy it secondhand
You'll get up and sleep
Joe the lion made of iron

-David Bowie

Drawing with Van Gogh

"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 on the creative process. Writing and drawing begin with a dark mark on a blank sheet. This urge to create marks can be seen as one partial definition of humanity. Like the cave dwellers in the Dordogne in unrecorded time, we have an urge to leave our mark on the wall.

Bulls Head, Lascaux

By connecting deep attention with a simplicity of means, true vision emerges.

The exhibition of Van Gogh's drawings continues at the Metropolitan Museum in New York until December 31st, 2005.

Van Gogh Podcast narrated by Kevin Bacon

The Day the Music Died

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

Update on LACMA Garage Murals

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