Speed of Life

Thank you for this incredible journey. Let’s keep it going. God bless the United States of America!" — @POTUS "Thank you for this incredible journey. Let’s keep it going. God bless the United States of America!" — @POTUS https://t.co/pgv3aUXdle — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 28, 2016

Gregg Chadwick  ‏ @ greggchadwick     4s 4 seconds ago Beverly Hills, CA London Calling - So excited for this exhibit at @GettyMuseum Opens on July 26, 2016 http://www. getty.edu/art/exhibition s/london/   … #Kitaj #Freud #Auerbach Love the catalog - Thank you RB Kitaj School of L.A. (RB Kitaj - Westwood 3/08/07) Gregg Chadwick 40"x30" oil on linen 2007

by Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick Salish Sea 30"x24" oil on linen 2014  Two years ago on a technicolor blue day, I stood on the deck of the Wenatchee ferry cutting through the choppy sea from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. The vessel was named for the Wenatchi people who originally lived in the shadow of the Columbia and Wenatchee Rivers in Eastern Washington State. We are riding on a ship of memory. In the Yakama language,  w enatchi  means "river flowing from canyon." The Wenatchee River was home to a vibrant salmon run prior to the damming of the Columbia River which impeded the salmon's journey. Like the fish, the Wenatchi tribe was also blocked from its ancestral waterways as the US government rounded up the Native Americans in Washington State and collected them in reservations far from their native lands.  I often think about the rivers, lakes, towns and cities we have named after the original Americans. The absence of most of their cu...

by Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick Ponte di Castelvecchio (Verona) 48"x36" oil on linen 2016 Last year, perched above a Renaissance era bridge in Verona, Italy, I watched a light rainfall and a swollen river rush by. The smell of rain filled the air. Swifts darted across the milky sky.  Like gauze stretched across a stage set, the mix of rain, bus exhaust, and a distant sun breaking through the mist cloaked the moment in a spell of timelessness. I thought of the late Russian emigre writer Joseph Brodsky and his idea that water is the image of time. Often on trips to Europe, I will carry a battered copy of Brodsky's verse to help inspire my ramblings. Here in the Veneto, I am reminded of Brodsky's love of Italy and Venice in particular. I turn the pages of Brodsky's Watermark and find the passage I am looking for: "I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is. Perhaps this idea was even of my own manufacture, but n...

by Gregg Chadwick Under the Gun   Film Poster Reflected in Window at Premiere in Beverly Hills, CA May 3, 2016 photo by Gregg Chadwick Just spent a rich afternoon in my studio with Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery Director Melissa Pickford. Her father Rollin Pickford was an accomplished painter of the California scene and she is an accomplished curator and artist as well. We caught up on our lives, and talked about art, and memory, and time, and we also discussed the recent violent acts across the globe. Writer Anne Lamott on her Facebook page writes, "And then in recent weeks, Orlando, police shooting innocent people, and innocent police officers being shot, and now Nice.  How on Earth do we respond, when we are stunned and scared and overwhelmed, to the point of almost disbelieving?" This morning as I scan the reports trickling out from Istanbul about the failed coup in Turkey, a news alert scans across my computer screen informing me of a new shooting of p...