P-22 - Hollywood Nights

 

Gregg Chadwick

P-22, Hollywood Nights

30"x22" gouache and monotype on paper 2023

In Hollywood even Mountain Lions become stars. The wild cougar dubbed P-22 by the Park Service roamed Griffith Park for 12 years. After a few scrapes with dogs and humans in December 2022, NPS biologists captured P-22 in the Los Feliz area and transported him to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park for a thorough health evaluation. Results showed P-22 had several severe injuries, such as significant trauma to his head, right eye, and internal organs from a suspected vehicle strike, as well as multiple chronic health illnesses, including irreversible kidney disease, chronic weight loss, an extensive parasitic skin infection over his entire body, and localized arthritis. Due to his poor condition, CDFW made the extremely difficult decision to euthanize P-22 on the morning of Dec. 17, 2022.

My gouache and monotype on paper artwork "P-22" was inspired by numerous images of the mountain lion including Steve Winter's photos as well as the big cat paintings of Delacroix and Géricault.

My Apple algorithm keeps featuring Bob Seger's ode to L.A. - "Hollywood Nights."
I listened to the song as I painted "P-22."
As if in Seger's song and my painting, P-22 slinks across the Hollywood Hills looking down on the lights of L.A.

See this artwork and more at our upcoming evening Open Studio Art at the Airport event on May 13, 2023 from 5-9 PM.

#LosAngeles #ArtOfRecovery #ArtAtTheAirport #CityOfSantaMonica #SantaMonicaArtsCommunity #SantaMonicaArtScene #BuyArtFromArtists #SupportLocalArtists #SantaMonicaArtCollective #SantaMonicaCulturalAffairs #artistssupportingartists 

Redwoods Shouldn't Be So Tall. Here's Why They Are

From PBS Terra:

"Beyond its iconic height, the Redwood Forest is sacred to the Yurok Tribe and a scientific frontier for the study of vast biodiversity that exists nowhere else on Earth. This episode of Untold Earth explores the varied relationship between The Redwoods, their forest ecosystems, and the humans who live and work among them. Asking, at every turn, what makes these trees epically singular in nature?

Untold Earth explores the seeming impossibilities behind our planet’s strangest, most unique natural wonders. From fragile, untouched ecosystems to familiar but unexplained occurrences in our own backyard, this series chases insight into natural phenomena through the voices that know them best. 

Untold Earth is produced in partnership with Atlas Obscura and Nature."

Subscribe to PBS Terra so you never miss an episode! https://bit.ly/3mOfd77 And keep up with Untold Earth and PBS Terra on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PBSDigitalSt... Twitter: https://twitter.com/pbsds Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pbsds

Rachel Carson's Powerful Legacy

Today's Google doodle honors the groundbreaking environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring sounded one of the first alarms about the detrimental effect of pesticides on the eco-system. The natural world was my first love as a kid and reading Carson's work was instrumental in spurring me on to look deeply at and respect the complexities of our endangered environment.

Carson's interest in conservation began with her early work as a marine biologist, which led to her award winning book, The Sea Around Us. Subsequently, nature writing provided a powerful vehicle for Carson to bring mainstream attention to the chemicals being dumped daily into our streams and rivers. Her work inspired global bans of the pesticide DDT  and helped foster the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

I encourage you to honor Rachel Carson's legacy by spending some time today on the Audubon Society's website, the US National Park Service's site, or your local nature conservancies information boards. All of these sites provide important information on how you can get involved and help preserve our natural world for future generations.

Killing elephants for kicks on NBC Sports Network?

by Gregg Chadwick

Gregg Chadwick
Calvino's Elephant
30"x40" oil on linen 2011
Private Collection, Arcata, California

"In fact, the elephant recognizes the language of his homeland, obeys orders, remembers what he learns, knows the passion of love and the ambition of glory, practices virtues “rare even among men,” such as probity, prudence and equity, and has a religious veneration for the sun, the moon, and the stars."

From “Man, the sky and the elephant” pp. 315-330 of The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1986.



An Open Letter to the Chief Executive Officer of NBCUniversal 

Dear Stephen Burke,

As Chief Executive Officer of NBCUniversal you oversee the vast and important array of news, sports and entertainment networks that make NBCUniversal a leader in global media. In many ways the world looks to you and NBCUniversal for not just entertainment but inspiration. With this in mind, it comes as a visceral shock to me that in a recent episode of Under Wild Skies, a man with a weapon shot pointblank and brutally killed an African elephant on television on your NBC Sports Network. In agonizing detail your film crew documented the suffering animal's futile attempts to run free and its unfortunate demise at the hands of a human with a gun. Do the values of NBC really fall in line with this type of programming? The tracking, hunting, and killing of an endangered species does not fall under anyone's rational definition of entertainment or sport. In almost every country across the globe killing an elephant is illegal and would guarantee a lengthy prison sentence. With this in mind I request that NBC cancel Under Wild Skies and help protect threatened wildlife around the world by supporting responsible wildlife conservation in your programming.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this vital matter.

Sincerely,

Gregg Chadwick

Sign a petition calling for an end to Under Wild Skies at the link below.

Gregg Chadwick‏@greggchadwick

Killing elephants for kicks? @NBC please stop airing episodes of #NRA sponsored show promoting violence towards #animals. https://www.causes.com/nbc-cancel-under-wild-skies?ctm=issues-animals … …

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Notes on the Painting: A Balance of Shadows

We were not meant to survive. We were meant to live.

- W.S. Merwin

Gregg Chadwick

A Balance of Shadows

72”x96” oil on linen

A Balance of Shadows was begun in 2004 as a visual poem reflecting the tensions of our era. Today, May 24, 2012, I laid a thin transparent layer of lapis lazuli across a section of the sky. Sourced in Afghanistan, this precious stone, when ground into pigment, creates a radiant blue that has been considered auspicious in both east and west. The word depicted in Japanese script in the upper left section of the painting is satori.  The word satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment or "understanding". In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to the experience of kensho. Kensho when used in Zen traditions refers to "seeing into one's true nature." Ken means "seeing," sho means "nature" or "essence." Satori and kensho are commonly translated as enlightenment, a word that is also used to translate bodhi, prajna and buddhahood.

A series of interactions between this painting and viewers worldwide has taken place on the web. Poets, writers and artists from Brazil, to Hong Kong, to Greece, to the Netherlands have interacted with the painting in online dialogues. I have traveled widely in my quest to understand the international connections between east and west. These global interactions inflect my understanding of the painting and help me understand my need to create this work.

Throughout my life I have been compelled to create artworks that depict a world caught between color and elegy, between memory and dream. Inspired by the Buddhist practices of people across the globe, I have created images referencing Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Burma, The United States, India and China. These artworks seem to depict a world in which humanity struggles not just to survive, but to live. My paintings bring out questions.  What does it mean to honor the space between seeing and being? What is the place of beauty in the modern world? Where is the space for contemplation in contemporary life?

In reference to my paintings of monks inspired by Eastern Philosophy, the art writer Peter Clothier has said:

“They exist in an aura of light rather than on some earthly plane. They move through space like transient beings, absorbed in their own silent, meditative isolation. In this way, they seem to project some of the real values of their Buddhist faith: the inevitable passage of time that is at the root of so much human suffering, the illusory quality of what we take to be the real world and, most importantly, the promise of an escape from suffering into enlightenment.”

- Gregg Chadwick, May 2012

Bach in a Japanese Forest Played on a Gravity Marimba

 Deep in the tranquility of a Japanese woodland, the movement of a wooden ball plays Bach on a gravity marimba. The ball gently rolls down an elevated wooden incline striking a series of wooden bars each  tuned to play a single note of the 10th movement of Bach’s Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147, commonly known in English as, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. A rare example of an advertisement that evokes wonder. Enjoy!




Hat tip to Makezine.