Changes/ David Bowie 41" x 25.5" pastel on paper 2017
by Gregg Chadwick
75th Anniversary of his birth - David Bowie was born on this day in 1947.
His decades of groundbreaking music and his shape shifting persona, inspired so many of us little aliens in suburbia to fight against conformity and become our true selves.
My artwork looks back on Bowie when he released his haunting song "Where Are We Now?", which is as much a painting in soft greys as it is a song. A quiet rhythm of drums and synth warp and weft with minor key piano chords and Bowie's plaintive, elegiac voice.
Set in a Berlin of memory and dream, Bowie's voice and lyrics question the themes of human bondage, release, freedom, doubt, ageing, and death. Bowie lived in West Berlin between 1976 and 1979 in the Schöneberg district in a house with Iggy Pop while Brian Eno and Tony Visconti were helping record Bowie's Berlin trilogy of albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger in the now legendary Hansa Studios. Years later, Bowie looks back in "Where Are We Now?" and echoes his words about Low, "Berlin has the strange ability to make you write only the important things. Anything else you don't mention."
The political and the personal merge in my pastel painting of Bowie. We are left with existential questions and are reminded that bodies age, marriages end, friendships dissolve and memories fade. But Bowie's quietly defiant voice does not give in to any dying of the light.
Pictured: Changes/ David Bowie 41" x 25.5" pastel on paper 2017
#Art #DavidBowie #HappyBirthday #InMemory #Portrait #ContemporaryArt #Music #Inspiration #RIP #Pastel @saatchiart @theotherartfair
