Speed of Life

By Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick Bookseller's Night oil on linen 2019      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 fak...

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...