By
Gregg Chadwick
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Gregg Chadwick
oil on linen 2019
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I
lift three brushes wet with paint. Each brush holds its own hue- ultramarine
blue, glowing amber, and a cool black. Airborne Toxic Event’s “Sometime AroundMidnight” plays on headphones tethered to my iPhone. The room spins like the
song. I almost dance as each brush moves across the linen. Wet paint slurred
into wet paint. I search for the light in the dark in a painterly chase through
the night.
I
paint in a refurbished airplane hangar, the night glowing darkly through the
skylights above me. Alone in a vast space, my thoughts travel back to years of
painting at night: from a loft in SoHo during New York’s “Bright Lights Big
City” years, to a small makeshift space in Tokyo, to a studio in a reconfigured
office building on a block of San Francisco’s Market Street that Edward Hopper
would have appreciated, to now in a building at an airfield where a fake town
was suspended over sensitive areas of the field during WWII to mislead a
possible aerial attack.
Like camouflage draped across an
airfield, night changes the way we see. Distance is obscured. Color shifts. We
see blue tinged black and white under the stars. At
night, humans and most vertebrate animals are colorblind because the most
sensitive light receptors in our eyes, called rods, detect only black and
white. But geckos are different. Painting in what was a military airbase,
especially as my mind drifts in the quiet of the night, I often think of the
pet gecko my father had in his quarters while stationed in Okinawa. As I
struggle to truly see, I wonder what colors my dad’s gecko saw. Geckos evolved
from creatures that were active only during daylight, so they did not have rods
for night vision. Over time through evolutionary adaptation as geckos shifted
to nighttime activity the color receptors in their eyes became more sensitive
and enabled full hued night vision.
Gregg Chadwick
In the Ginza Rain
oil on linen 1987
Over
the years, perhaps with geckos in mind, I have honed my ability to see subtle
nuances of color both during the day and at night. I collect moments in my
memory by standing still and taking in the sensations of an evocative evening
or a cool dawn. I often begin a painting with the intention of capturing one of
these remembered moments and its particular atmosphere of color and light.
Before I paint, I lay my colors out on the palette in a range from light to
dark and warm to cool. As I mix my paints, I think about light. I want an
interior light that emerges from the painting. Painting night reveals the
contrast between light and shadow in my artwork and emphasizes the luminosity
within the painting.
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Gregg Chadwick
oil on linen 2014
My oil on linen work The Azure Hour
combines a certain sense of beach light and air with the dreams and memories of
the urban night. On evenings in Southern California when the cool ocean breezes
bring a blue fog into the night, it sometimes seems that anything is possible.
The painting took over a year of work to finish. It progressed in a series of
layers, scumbles, and deletions that created an evocation of the complex
nightscape in my mind. I find it necessary at times to paint at night under
subtle illumination to see if the effect that I am reaching for has begun to
take hold. When the light is too bright it is difficult to see the range of
tones from dark to light in a painting. The darkness itself helps create the
light. One cannot exist without the other.
Gregg Chadwick
Occupy
oil on linen 2013
Recently,
I stood outside in a clearing of a Monterey, California forest near the coast in
the middle of the night with my brother and René Boitelle, senior paintings conservator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Unlike the skies in Los
Angeles, we were able to see the stars in the night sky and of course thought
of Vincent Van Gogh’s painterly evocations of the glittering night. Van Gogh
was able to capture the night in his paintings with his skillful use of
midnight blue and starry yellow. Gazing at a Van Gogh painting of a star filled
sky, it seems as if he knew that the lights he saw in the dark night had
traveled from the deepest reaches of time. According to physicists, as we gaze
at the stars, in essence we are looking back towards the beginning of time.
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| René Boitelle, senior paintings conservator at the Van Gogh Museum photo courtesy René Boitelle |
Later
that week, I stood with René and another conservator, Devi Ormond, before a Van
Gogh painting of a weaver; the painting was laid out like a patient on a table
in the Getty Museum’s conservation lab. The work seemed so fragile, yet at the
same time sturdy and timeless hearkening back to an era of firelight,
candlelight, and moonlight. Soon after Van Gogh painted his weavers, the advent
of electricity would completely alter the character of the night. . Perhaps in
every painting of the night there is a hint of this loss, echoing the shadowed
forms in the artwork. I am reminded of the nights many years ago when, before
painting, I would put Miles Davis on the record player. I would drop the needle
on the first track and listen to the hiss and crackle as ‘Round Midnight began to play– the music always muted, blurred as
if it emerged from a smoke filled room.
Gregg Chadwick
After Puccini
oil on canvas 2013
Early
in my career, as an exhibition of my paintings closed at a gallery in Osaka,
Japan, a fellow artist turned to me and somewhat derisively asked, “So what’s
next? Will you travel from city to city painting their nights?” I didn’t come
up with a quick rejoinder then. But I know what I would say now, “You can’t
paint the day without the night.”
This Essay, Night Painting, by Gregg Chadwick is included in Burning the MidnightOil: Illuminating Words for the Long Night's Journey Into Day, edited by
Phil Cousineau.
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