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...

"Rue Mosnier with Flags" Édouard Manet 25 3/4 x 31 3/4 in. oil on canvas 1878 Getty Museum, Los Angeles photo by Gregg Chadwick Édouard Manet's "Rue Mosnier" was painted two years before July 14th was declared the French national holiday in 1880. The holiday is known as the Fête Nationale in France and commemorates the Fête de la Fédération of 1790, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris by an angry mob on 14 July 1789, sparking the revolution that rid France of its monarchy. Manet painted the scene as if he is looking down from his second story studio onto the flag decked street below. Manet's brush is fluid and the color scintillating but the weary amputee on crutches, perhaps a war veteran from the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, is the figure with which we enter the painting. In essence we as viewers enter the scene carrying a ladder just behind the man on crutches bearing the "costs and sacrific...