Good Morning Rabih Alameddine

 by Gregg Chadwick

Good morning
Happy weekend pic.twitter.com/bU6Kc42wGO

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine) July 29, 2017

Rabih Alameddine is a San Francisco based author whose most recent novel, The Angel of History,  is a masterful act of remembering. The scourge of AIDS ravaged the queer community in the 1980's. Alameddine honors the lost in his book that echoes Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical, elegiac work The Master and Margarita. For those who have been asking me lately for book suggestions, these are both must reads.

Along with his literary work, Alameddine is a master at social media, especially twitter. If you are on twitter, follow Rabih Alameddine now. His feed is full of surprises, especially his engaging threads of artworks. Have a Happy Weekend!

Good morning, Velázquez pic.twitter.com/31wBaLrOrP

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine) July 29, 2017

Saturday Morning at Gregg Chadwick's Studio 

"Bookseller's Night" by Gregg Chadwick in the latest issue of The Santa Ana River Review

Honored to have my painting "Bookseller's Night" in the latest issue of The Santa Ana River Review. A wonderful art and literary magazine out of UC Riverside.

Link Here: http://sarreview.ucr.edu/booksellers-night/

The Bookmobile

Do yourself a favor & watch this beautiful video from #Storycorps on how libraries save lives. http://bit.ly/2dyAkrJ  #LibrariesTransform

Hop On Pop

by Gregg Chadwick

Dad (General Robert J. Chadwick USMC)
circa 1978
photo courtesy USMC

Peter Clothier asked me a while ago to contribute to his series of Boyhood Memories which he is posting on his new blog site -http://www.boyhoodmoments.com/2016/09/hop-on-pop.html and eventually working into a book.  I finally finished my story and it has prompted me to continue writing about my life as an artist. 

Growing up as the kid of a USMC officer during the Vietnam era inspired me in unique ways. Please have a read and let me know what you think. Also spend some time on Peter's site. Masami Teraoka 's piece is timeless and magical and Michael Provart 's writing is funny and poignant. Peter Clothier also adds his own childhood memories into the mix. Every story Peter has received is rich in memory. 

Peter introduces my story with the following: "HOP ON POP
Here's another "absent father" piece, this one with the added leitmotif, perhaps, of a creative vocation discovered as a child! The Dad in question is caught in the black and white photograph, below. Gregg Chadwick is today a Santa Monica-based painter whose work is widely exhibited and acclaimed. His blog is titled Speed of Life. His boyhood memory skirts subtly around the pain of separation, deflecting it first, jokingly, onto a prank played on his mother with his toys; then on a treasured book, a parting gift from Dad. But by the end, we're left in no doubt that the pain is there..."

HOP ON POP

By Gregg Chadwick

As a kid, I liked to build private worlds out of drawings that I would cut up and paste into scenes with soft plastic bugs pulled hot from my Creepy Crawlers molds. I would squirt the Plastigoop from a small bottle into the empty molds and heat them up on my Thingmaker. Once, late at night, I cut out a darkly drawn semicircle, taped it to the kitchen floorboard in our rented carriage house, and placed dark rodent Creepy Crawlers around my invented mouse hole. As a last surprise, I hid one in my mom’s coffee cup. My brother and I would get a great laugh, because my mom hates rodents of all shapes and sizes.

I woke to the baconesque smell of Tastystrips and the caramel espresso smell of Mom’s percolating coffee. She was at the stove pulling strips from the pan and lining them up on a golden, grease filled sheet of paper towel. Her coffee mug sat nearby. My brother was already at the table reading a cereal box before turning to my mom to chat about a birthday trip to the Revolutionary War encampment up at Jockey Hollow with his friend Casey Jones. Yep, the same name as the famous railroader. Our portable transistor radio was on; it should have been playing "Cannonball Express" in honor of that other Casey. I sneaked a quick glance to be sure that my mouse hole was still there with its attendant rubbery rodents. OK, the plan was still in action. I walked over to the stove and looked into my mom’s cup. I gulped as I saw myself reflected in the dark liquid.

“How’s the coffee Mom?” That sounded wrong. Was I in a Folgers commercial or something?

“Fine dear. Careful of the hot stove. Don’t burn yourself.”

I sat down without a word and quietly ate my breakfast, glancing at the line of dark Crawlers on the floor.

A honk outside interrupted the quiet and my brother jumped up to run out the door. My mom called after him, “Don’t forget your jacket.”

“It’s June Mom,” my brother said.

“So it is," said my mom as she marked off another day on the calendar.

“One day at a time,” she told me. “That’s how we get on until your Dad comes home.”

I didn’t mention the Crawlers on the floor and especially not the one in her coffee cup. She never mentioned them either. I did make some Crawlers that day for my Dad, though, and Mom and I placed them carefully in an envelope and addressed it to his Fleet Post Office address in Vietnam.

My dad didn’t really need any more bugs in the jungle. But I kept sending them anyway. They were small packages of memories. And I wanted to thank him for the going away gift he had given me before he went to war in 1965. We were in the car. I remember ripping the paper off that package like it was the wrapper on a popsicle on a hot summer day.

It was a book! I could begin to make out the title as I shredded the wrapping. "'Op on Op” peeked out at me through a hole in the paper. “I can read it all by myself Beginner Books," it said.

I tossed the decorative wrap onto the car floor and held up my prize with its aqua, white, orange, and yellow cover. “Hop on Pop” by Dr. Seuss. I laughed at the two small bears jumping on the daddy bear’s tummy. “We like to hop. We like to hop on top of pop.”

“Thank you! Thank You!” I said, in between pages.

Mission accomplished. My dad and mom smiled as we made our way back to my grandmother’s house. But I was sad, too. I knew even then that a good little Marine didn’t cry, and that my brother and I would need to be tough for Mom.  I put the book down, held my tears back and looked out the window. As if in a movie, the scenes scrolled by. Even though I had been born here, it seemed a new landscape for me. 

We would have to run our recons without Dad for quite a while. 

Full Story at: http://www.boyhoodmoments.com/2016/09/hop-on-pop.html 

The Painted Word

The Painted Word

Gregg Chadwick
36"x48" oil on linen 2013

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”
- Emily Dickinson

Slow Looking With Peter Clothier

by Gregg Chadwick

Peter Clothier Leads A One Hour/ One Painting Session
photo by Joanne Warfield

Peter Clothier's important new book Slow Looking: The Art of Looking at Art guides the reader seamlessly through the history, process, and ideas behind his One Hour/One Painting sessions.  Clothier's development of One Hour/One Painting  began with the realization that along with most museum or gallery visitors, he increasingly spent more time looking at the information label on the wall than at the artwork itself. To combat this habit, Peter began to spend an hour silently and inquisitively gazing at one work of art. Much influenced in recent years by Buddhist thought and practice, Clothier combined elements of meditation and contemplation in these sessions and found more profound and rewarding experiences.  

In a One Hour/One Painting session, Peter Clothier invites small groups of participants to sit in front of a single artwork for a full hour in a gallery, museum, or studio environment.

Clothier recently hosted One Hour/ One Painting sessions during the Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art and at the LA Louver Gallery. Peter, also, held a session (see video below) in my Santa Monica Airport studio. Clothier began as he usually does with a brief introduction describing the hour to take place and then gently guided the participants by explaining the principles of closed-eye breath meditation,  how to relax and refresh the eyes, and provided encouragement to rid the mind of expectations and pre-judgments. For me and most of the participants that evening, the hour moved quickly as Peter led us through alternate closed and open-eyed moments. As Clothier explained, "this was individual work without initial discussion or interaction and allowed each participant to experience the artwork as fully as possible, without interruption." At the end of the hour, however, Peter invited responses and a rich discussion of the experience followed. 

Peter Clothier's Slow Looking: The Art of Looking at Art is written in clear, supportive language that illuminates art and meditation.  Clothier seeks to achieve a harmony of mind, heart, and body in his life and writing and Slow Looking provides rich examples for us to learn from and follow. In the book, we are encouraged to seek a pure visual experience with art through a beneficial process of contemplation, stillness, and serenity. Slow Looking also provides access to an audio and a video demonstration of a One Hour/One Painting session that invites readers to try it out for themselves.  Highly recommended!

Video Demonstration

Made along with participants at Gregg Chadwick's studio in Santa Monica, this video was filmed live by David Lowther.  It provides a full length example of Peter Clothier's One Hour/One Painting sessions and demonstrates the techniques involved in this guided meditation and contemplation.

Past venues & subjects for Peter Clothier's  One Hour/One Painting events :

1. Pasadena Museum of California Art—“The Matterhorn from Zermatt,” Edgar Payne

2. LA Louver—“ Echo Home,” Joe Goode

3. Laguna Art Museum—“Spring Day,” Clarence Hinkle

4. Lora Schlesinger Gallery—“I’ve Been Dating Recently,” Michael Beck

5. William Turner Gallery—“Sun Biscuit,” Ned Evans

6. Gregg Chadwick Studio—“ A Balance of Shadows,” Gregg Chadwick

7. LACMA—“Montauk Highway,” by DeKooning

8. MOCA—“Untitled,” Mark Rothko

9. The Getty—“Christ Entering Brussels,” James Ensor

10. OCMA—“Untitled Works,” Richard Diebenkorn

11. Hammer Museum—“Dr. Pozzi at Home,” John Singer Sargent; “Trees in the Garden,” Van Gogh

About Peter Clothier:

Peter Clothier has a long and distinguished career as an an internationally-known art writer, novelist and poet and describes himself as "an aspiring Buddhist who looks at art, books, and the vicissitudes of life." Clothier enjoys a world-wide following for his blog, The Buddha Diaries and is a contributing blogger in The Huffington Post. He lives and works in Southern California. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Artscene, ARTNews and other publications. He also hosts a monthly podcast entitled "The Art of Outrage," on ArtScene Visual Radio.

Peter Clothier's latest books are Persist, Mind Work, and Slow Looking.

More:

What Can Be Seen by Deborah Barlow

Peter Clothier's "The Buddha Diaries"

Peter Clothier's Website