Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick Under the El 30"x20" oil on linen 2012 Chicago is a city of pulse and rhythm.  The city itself is a song. It clangs and roars by day and whispers laments at night.  Standing under the El on a hot August day, listening to the hum of traffic echoing off of steel, concrete and flesh inspired my first painting of 2012. Chicago seemed to soak up the light last summer, lending the streets a shimmering presence much like the wet Parisian boulevards in Gustave Caillebotte's  Paris Street, Rainy Day.  Caillebotte's masterpiece hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago , just blocks from the El.  Standing in front of the painting last summer, after coming in from the heat, I felt my heart beating -providing an audible rhythm to Caillebotte's figures stilled in the silent air. Gustave Caillebotte Paris Street, Rainy Day (Detail) 83.5"x108.75" oil on canvas 1876-77 The Art Institute of Chicago photo b...

Spreadsheets can save him by Kent Chadwick Where’s the pattern? What ratio will show he’s getting better, that he’ll breathe again on his own? The ventilator pushes puffs of warm air through our son’s trachea every time his brain asks for oxygen, into his second set of lungs, damaged too soon by pneumonia, scarred and stiffened. The machine ka-shooshing eighteen or more times a minute to make Luke breathe when he needs, and it graphs his breath, reads his volumes, scoring the resistance—centimeters of water pressure—ready to alarm and warn of dangers, displaying seven variables in LED orange with each breath, repeatedly—and I stare. My hope has fallen to this new machine, that maybe, maybe its gentler aid can coax Luke’s lungs into recovery. What numbers, what ratios show progress?, something the doctors no longer expect. Is it peak pressures to tidal volumes? 89 to 760 Or his diaphragm’s nerve activity to the ventilator’s support level? 62, 70 to 1.5 What is significant? What is just ...

Gregg Chadwick 29"x69" oil on screen (detail)