Sunday, December 24, 2017

Merry Christmas - I Don't Want to Fight Tonight




 This Christmas we have been given a soulful present from Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. This new single is a Jersey shore infused version of the late, great Joey Ramone's "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight).
Happy Holidays to all!

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Christmas in Memphis

by Gregg Chadwick

If you happen to be in Memphis this season, please stop by the L Ross Gallery for this year's Holiday Exhibition. My painting Memphis Train (Arcade Restaurant) is featured in the show. 


L Ross Gallery
Gallery Artists
Holiday Exhibition
December 1 - 30, 2017
5040 Sanderlin Ave, Suite 104, Memphis, TN

More at: L Ross Gallery Holiday Exhibition

Searching for a Mystery Train: radio nowhere and radio radio - bruce springsteen & elvis costello

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Season's Greetings!

Loved this card from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Reminds me of the many holiday seasons that I have spent in Japan.
Especially the year that I spent chasing Hiroshige in Tokyo.  

Friday, December 01, 2017

Woe to those who make unjust laws





Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Coldplay's Chris Martin & U2's Bono covering One For My Baby by Frank Sinatra on #Kimmel






Thank You Clark Hulings Fund



For the past year, I was honored to be a fellow in the Clark Hulings Fund Business Accelerator Program. With no financial cost to myself, I was able to dig deep and learn how to keep my art business thriving. I have recently learned that I was chosen to be an Executive Fellow at CHF for 2018. The Clark Hulings Fund is helping me learn how to take my Mystery Train Exhibition on tour. The Executive Fellows will receive the services of CHF to rewrite the fellow’s Investment Grade Proposal (IGP) for capitalization and underwriting to get it to the point CHF can pitch it to potential funders. Meanwhile CHF expects the fellow to continue executing on their project, and collaborating with CHF with monthly field reports and meetings, along with marketing assistance given to the fellow. Please join me for the journey ahead.


Link to my recent Clark Hulings Fund podcast with Daniel DiGriz.


Monday, November 20, 2017

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Los Angeles City Hall lit up tonight tonight in remembrance of the trans people who have lost their lives to hate and violence. You will never be forgotten. #TDOR


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



Sunday, November 19, 2017

Come Back, Barack - Chance the Rapper on Saturday Night Live






Wednesday, November 01, 2017

2018 ACA Enrollment Begins Today! Don't Miss Your Chance to Enroll In Health Insurance for 2018


Happy Nov 1! 2018 ACA enrollment has begun.


80% can find plans under $75/month. Go to http://www.healthcare.gov  .

Please spread the word.
November 1, 2017:
Enrollment for 2018 health insurance begins.
December 15, 2017:
Enrollment for 2018 health insurance ends.


Please share enrollment deadlines for health insurance.

Friday, October 20, 2017

A Needed Dose of Hope - Obama


Wednesday, October 18, 2017

You Are Invited to Gregg Chadwick's Studio 

Please Join Me This Upcoming Weekend
for the 13th Anniversary of the Santa Monica Art Studios 



Gregg Chadwick

City Lights (Chaplin's Night)
48”x36” oil on linen 2017

In my thirteen years creating at the Santa Monica Art Studios, 
I have opened my studio to visiting collectors, art writers, students, 
local groups, scholars, and international guests. Visitors to my studio
have included a bus load of Japanese nursing students from Tokyo, 
a group of academics from the University of Verona in Italy,
professional art conservators from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam 
and the Getty Museum, a group art meditation session led by noted 
art writer Peter Clothier, as well as numerous visits by Santa Monica
students interested in the arts and culture.
At the Santa Monica Art Studios, I am part of a community of artists - 
driven to create, share knowledge and experience, 
and help the community at large.

This week, I would be honored to have you join the long list of visitors
to my studio #15 at the Santa Monica Art Studios.

Hope to see you soon!

What: 13TH ANNIVERSARY OPEN STUDIOS
            (New Paintings by Gregg Chadwick in Studio #15)
Where: Studio #15, Santa Monica Art Studios, 
             3026 Airport Ave. SM 90405
When:  Opening Night - Saturday, October 21, 2017,
              6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

               Gregg Chadwick's Studio Will Also be Open:
               Thursday, October 19th 12-6 pm
                Friday, October 20th 12-3 pm
                Sunday, October 22 12-5 pm 
Website: www.greggchadwick.com
Link to my recent Clark Hulings Fund podcast with Daniel DiGriz.


Gregg Chadwick

Jazz City (Newark Bay)
48”x96” oil on linen 2017
Find Out More