We Are All The Hold Steady

by Gregg Chadwick

Review: The Gospel of The Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels 

by Michael Hann and The Hold Steady 

Craig Finn and The Hold Steady

The Hold Steady, described by many as the world’s best bar band outside of E Street, releases a new book on July 25, 2023 that delves deeply into the stories behind the band and its loyal fans. The physical book is gorgeous. The story of the band and their passionate fans blazes across the volume from the first page to the last. Over two hundred expertly composed photographs capture The Hold Steady on stage and off with a proper smattering of confetti strewn floors.  

The history of The Hold Steady is told through interviews with the band members and those who were there behind the scenes. From their Midwest roots to their adopted Brooklyn home, the members of The Hold Steady open up about the struggles and triumphs of creating, performing, and promoting their music. Lead singer and lyricist Craig Finn opens the book with a heartfelt introduction. “The Hold Steady didn’t change my life, it is my life.”, Craig writes. And then says, “And if you’ve read this far, it’s likely yours too. Our songs are mainly fiction, but they try to be very honest at the same time. So, at the end of each show, we say and scream and shout all together a benediction: “We Are All The Hold Steady!” 

The Hold Steady

In The Gospel of The Hold Steady, we hear from the members of the group as they describe the birth of the band. The Hold Steady’s origin story is built on the ashes of Craig Finn’s earlier band Lifter Puller and the Minneapolis, Minnesota indie music scene. After Lifter Puller broke up, Craig moved to New York. Bassist Galen Polivka, whose old band had played with Craig’s band in Minneapolis, had also moved to New York and sowed some early seeds for The Hold Steady by exclaiming to Craig at a club in NYC that “If you want to start something musically, I’m in, and I’d love to play bass for you.” Drummer Judd Counsell joined the early phase of The Hold Steady along with guitarist Tad Kubler. Craig writes that the music they had in common was Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, and Zeppelin. Craig explains that “Being Midwestern was something that made us unique.”  After gigging in Brooklyn and NYC, The Hold Steady was ready to record their first album Almost Killed Me and keyboardist, writer, and university lecturer Franz Nicolay joined the band. Their inaugural album was released in March 2004 and the word began to spread. Drummer Bobby Drake flew out from Minnesota to replace Judd Counsell on the upcoming tour. The Hold Steady brought their mix of beautiful loser Midwest tales, infused with Brooklyn Indie, and garnished with Classic Rock riffs to the “not so wholesome heartland” of America.  

The voices of the fans – The Unified Scene – are also found in the book. The last chapter gathers a collection of personal stories from fans that describe what The Hold Steady means to them. 

Rob Sheffield writes that “Every fan has their own stories, their own songs, the favorites we cling to like patron saints.”

Craig writes in The Gospel of The Hold Steady, “that a rock band is in a race against time.” We  join Craig and the band on their existential quest as they struggle to find meaning and joy through their insightful lyrics and raucous music. The Gospel of The Hold Steady is the perfect companion volume for this quest. 

Highly Recommended!

The Hold Steady is Craig Finn, Tad Kubler, Galen Polivka, Bobby Drake, Franz Nicolay, and Steve Selvidge. Since forming in Brooklyn in 2003, they have released eight studio albums. Their debut album, The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, was named one of the 100 best albums of the century by Rolling Stone.

Michael Hann is a writer and editor based in London who contributes to the Guardian, the Economist, and Uncut. He also wrote Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. 

Poolside

Gregg Chadwick

Poolside

20"x16"oil on linen 2022

    Private Collection, Oxford, Connecticut

Pleased that my painting "Poolside" has been sold by @saatchiart and successfully delivered to its new home near New Haven, Connecticut. It arrived in the midst of a record cold spell and hopefully brought warm memories of Spring and Summer along.
Legs dangling in an aquamarine pool, drink in hand, and a book open to the right page. What is she reading? Perhaps because he was born on this day in 1946, French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard's book "Happiness: "A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill" which explores how to develop happiness as a skill that includes acceptance of pain and struggle through a process of understanding, meditation, and breath.

Or perhaps her book is a collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry?
"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me."

Note - if you are in town for the @friezeofficial Art Fair at the Santa Monica Airport, I will have my studio open @18thstreetarts at the Airport during fair hours. Please stop by and say Hello.

#art #SantaMonica #Frieze #Books #Hope #Beauty #ContemporaryArt #greggchadwick

Sea of Words

 

Gregg Chadwick

Sea of Words

ink, and gouache on a monotype substrate on paper

30"x22".  2018

I have always loved books. My studio is full of monographs on artists that I admire and scientific discoveries that I find fascinating. But the library is where I first learned to cherish the written word. As a kid I would spend hours in the shelves looking for just the right books. I would venture home with a stack of volumes on art, art making, and animals. "Sea of Words" - my ink and gouache painting over a monotype substrate is an homage to my memories of neighborhood libraries and the joy of learning.

The library depicted in my artwork is the Montana Avenue Library in Santa Monica, California. Designed by architect Weldon Fulton, the Montana Branch opened to great acclaim on March 1, 1960.

Direct Link at https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Sea-of-Words/25560/8921199/view

#art #contemporaryart #books #library #SantaMonica #adventure

Thoughts on Michelangelo in Our Time of Crisis

by Gregg Chadwick

Frequent readers know that I enjoy the wit and erudition of Tyler Green. His Modern Art Notes Podcast is always worth a listen. The latest episode, embedded above, features art historian William E. Wallace and curator Julian Brooks.

Wallace discusses his latest book - “Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece.” Wallace's new book is available on Bookshop. 

 Tyler writes :"The book offers a rich and lively biographical examination of the last two decades of Michelangelo’s life, a period when he became the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other buildings, even as he continued to sculpt and draw." 

Michelangelo

The Florentine Pietà

 1547-55

Wallace's discussion of Michelangelo's late Pietàs is exceptionally interesting. These are two of my favorite sculptural works by Michelangelo because of their incomplete nature. 

Michelangelo 
Two Views of the Rondanini Pietà 
1564
Castello Sforzesco, Milano
photos by Gregg Chadwick

I have spent hours in the company of Michelangelo's two late pietàs in Florence and Milan. 

There is an intently spiritual nature to these sculptures. The marble seems to flicker like candlelight. Form seems to melt with time. My painting La Vita Trasparente (The Transparent Life) was inspired by my visits to the Castello Sforzesco which houses Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà. Watching a couple stroll through the garden along the castle wall reminded me of the hope that new love brings. Life flickers with light and hope in these moments. Now, as the Covid-19 crisis rages through Northern Italy and the world, I am brought back to the time that I painted La Vita Trasparente. I think of my friends in Milan, Verona, and Trento. Many are health care workers on the front lines of the pandemic. Today, it seems that the curve may be breaking in Italy. I hope this is a positive shift. I send my thoughts to all of you caught up in this struggle. Take care my friends. 

Gregg Chadwick
La Vita Trasparente (The Transparent Life) 
48"x38" oil on linen 2014
Private Collection, New York

In the second half of this podcast Tyler Green chats with Julian Brooks who co-curated with Emily J. Peters, the exhibition “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master” at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Brooks explains to us how Michelangelo used his drawings. Brooks discusses Michelangelo's studies for his unfinished and now lost Battle of Cascina, with detail and excitement. I wrote about Michelangelo's drawings after viewing the monumental 2017 exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My thoughts then - 

These drawings are sumptuously beautiful, and set the stage for the rest of Michelangelo's artistic life. Michelangelo's touch is all over these works. The use of chalk in many of the drawings, rather than pen and ink, opens up a sensuous physicality that feels more like flesh than stone.

A map of desire seems to be drawn across the back of many of Michelangelo's figures. In the gallery I think of the poetry and art to come - Cavafy, Isherwood, Bachardy, Bacon, and Hockney.

Sadly, the Getty is temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is scheduled to be at the Getty through June 7. The catalog is available on Bookshop. 

Night Painting

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 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

The Azure Hour

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.