Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Through Tibetan Eyes

 


Gregg Chadwick
72"x96" oil on linen 2006-2024

"In old Arabic poetry love, song, blood and travel appear as four basic desires of the human heart and the only effective means against our fear of death. Thus travel is elevated to the dignity of the elementary needs of humankind." - Czeslaw Milosz on the poetry of travel


Movement, travel and pilgrimage are themes that often appear in my paintings. Travel can involve a physical relocation or it can exist in the realm of the senses. In 2006 I attended "A Gathering of Hearts Illuminating Compassion," an interfaith meeting in San Francisco. The Dalai Lama was the keynote speaker at the event. He entered the packed hall, briskly moved up the center aisle, but stopped briefly to greet an elderly Tibetan woman a few feet from where I was seated. Then the Dalai Lama suddenly spun around and, with a beatific smile, gazed deeply and directly into my eyes.

I was transfixed. The moment was short, but to me it felt as if all time collapsed within that point. For that moment, it seemed as if the Dalai Lama yearned to see with my eyes as I, in turn, learned to see through his. I have been working on this painting ever since to put my experience of that moment of empathy and connection down on canvas.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Happy New Year! On to 2023

 


Gregg Chadwick
30"x 40" oil on linen 

Happy New Year!
明けましておめでとうございます
Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu


In my painting "New York Stories" it’s five minutes to midnight. Waiting for 2022 to move into 2023 like the hands of a clock spinning into the next hour, figures move around the iconic Grand Central clock like foxes huddling beneath a tree in Andō Hiroshige's "New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji"

It’s raining this New Year’s Eve in Santa Monica. I’m listening to a recording of a 10,000-member choir in Japan singing “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Enthusiasm for Beethoven is particularly strong in Japan. Every year in December, singers gather in a concert hall in Osaka to sing the final chorus from Beethoven's Ninth.



Gregg Chadwick
Passing View of Shohei Bridge 
30"x24" oil on linen 1990



Again, my thoughts trace a circuit from this moment back to an earlier New Year in Japan as 1989 rolled into 1990. I was in Tokyo following the spirit and artworks of Ando Hiroshige. That winter in Japan, I clutched a large volume by Henry D. Smith II and Amy G. Poster on Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and trekked on rail, foot and car across the historic core of what was Edo era Tokyo. Sponsored by the Nippon Seiyu-Kai's 30th Anniversary Award, I endeavored to create a series of new paintings inspired by Hiroshige’s woodcuts. Time, place, memory, mystery and lore all mixed in my artworks.


Utagawa Hiroshige (Ando) (Japanese, 1797-1858)
 New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Oji
( No. 118 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo)
 9th month of 1857  Woodblock print
 Brooklyn Museum


Today @nortonsimon posted a photo of one of the most mysterious images from Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Alison Baldassano from the Brooklyn Museum wrote about this artwork, "People aren’t the only beings who gather together for special celebrations on the night before a new year dawns. In this woodblock print by Hiroshige, foxes come together on New Year’s Eve to receive directions for the upcoming year and emit ghostly flames, the size of which helps predict the next year’s crop…. And, as the foxes could say in the morning, 明けましておめでとうございます (akemashite omedetou gozaimasu) or #HappyNewYear!"


#art #NewYear #NYC #japan

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Art for Someone You Love

 


Gregg Chadwick
Promenade
7"x5" oil on panel 2021
Private Collection, Austin, Texas

Honored that my painting, Promenade, is included in the new Art for Someone You Love collection on Saatchi Art curated by Erin Remington (Assistant Curator at Saatchi Art). Erin writes,"Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight––art history is full of extraordinary and remarkable love stories. Discover a new work in this collection of artworks inspired by passion, love, and all things romance."



Collectors With Their New Painting at The Other Art Fair, Barker Hangar 2018
Gregg Chadwick 
Love In a Blue Time
7"x5" oil on panel
Private Collection, Los Angeles, California

I enjoy painting couples. I continue to create a series of artworks depicting partners caught in moments of intimacy.



Gregg Chadwick
The Runners
5"x5" oil on panel 2018
Private Collection, Los Angeles

With Valentine's Day coming up I would like to remind you that commissions are available for me to paint you and your loved one. Please contact me at greggchadwick@icloud.com for details. I like to make my small 7"x5"oil on wood panel paintings easily available so they are affordably priced. 


Gregg Chadwick
Timeless
7"x5" oil on panel 2019
Private Collection, Virginia


Monday, April 15, 2019

The Water Carrier's Dream


Gregg Chadwick
The Water Carrier's Dream
oil on linen 2017


The Water Carrier's Dream is part of an ongoing, globally inspired series of paintings that considers our place as humans in the larger natural world. The elephant is both a symbol of resilient strength and also, because of the ivory trade, has become a symbol of the possible extinction of numerous animal species. Water as well is a symbol of life. The bucket the woman carries is part of an effort to make clean water safer and more accessible from local, community owned water facilities in Tanzania. The train entering from the distance brings the painting into the present day.

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Night Painting





By Gregg Chadwick


Gregg Chadwick
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 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.




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.


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.  

Friday, December 21, 2018

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Neruda's Path Through Silence


Gregg Chadwick
Still I Rise
40"x30" oil on linen 2017



"From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny."
--Pablo Neruda

Sunday, March 25, 2018

A Tour Through My Studio from Artsy Los Angeles


Enjoy a tour through my studio courtesy the amazing Artsy Los Angeles. Thanks to everyone who came out yesterday for the Santa Monica Airport Artwalk! Great chatting with Ruskin theater director John Ruskin and so many more. And for all of you who attended Saatchi Art's The Other Art Fair and visited my studio yesterday, major props to you! If you missed both events and would like to spend some time with my art, please email me at greggchadwick@gmail.com and let's set up a visit.


Even my brushes get love in my studio at the 12th Annual Santa Monica Airport Artwalk 

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Points of Departure at the Arena 1 Gallery in Santa Monica

by Gregg Chadwick

 Points of Departure 
(An exhibition curated by Maurizzio Hector Pineda) 


 

Gregg Chadwick

Flor De Asfalto (for Sergio Arau) 
50”x80” oil on linen 2018
(Installation View)
"These studio artists offer a visual mediation of time, site, and process. In this time of maelstrom and uncertainty, Points of Departure offers a visual respite for viewers to depart from the daily noise of contemporary life." - Maurizzio Hector Pineda, Curator

My painting Flor De Asfalto (for Sergio Arau) is featured in the Arena 1 exhibitionPoints of Departure. With his music, words and images, Sergio Arau has inspired me to create a series of paintings that feature him as the main character in my painted movies. Rock Star, actor, director, screenwriter, and artist Sergio Arau has often performed while wearing gear honoring Mexico's most famous wrestling star El Santo (The Man In the Silver Mask). Known as lucha libre, Mexican wrestlers such as El Santo are defenders of the poor and vulnerable. By taking on the persona of the Luchador (wrestler), Josh Kun writes in Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, Sergio Arau and his bands have mixed "the traditional with the contemporary, the rural with the urban, the American with the Mexican, the charro with the rockero."
My painting Flor De Asfalto (for Sergio Arau) carries Sergio Arau into a Los Angeles seemingly pulled from the lyrics of his songs or gathered from scenes of his films that were left on the cutting room floor.

Gracias Sergio!
On the Curator: Maurizzio Hector Pineda is an emerging curator from EL Salvador who currently lives and works in Southern California. His most recent curatorial post was at the Torrance Art Museum as an assistant curator. During his tenure at the Museum he co-curated The Gildless Age, 2016 and developed the 2017 SUR: Biennial with a focus on Cuban contemporary art for the TAM. 

What:   Points of Departure
Where: Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica Art Studios, 3026 Airport Ave. SM 90405 
When:  Opening Night - Thursday, January 25, 2017, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
                with a performance by Doni Silver Simons at 7:30 pm
               Thursday, January 25 12-6 pm
                Friday, January 26 12-6 pm
                Saturday, January 27 12-6 pm
                Sunday, January 28 12-6 pm  
Website: www.greggchadwick.com


Cost: This exhibition is free 

MORE ART HERE is located across the street from and concurrent with Art Los Angeles Contemporary and just a short shuttle ride away from the stART Up Fair LA in Venice.

Complimentary Shuttle between MORE ART HERE and stART Up Fair at The Kinney Hotel and will be available hourly. The shuttle stops will be located on the west side of 3026 Airport Avenue and The Kinney Hotel, Venice.