Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick Author Gabriel Urza’s family has roots in Spain’s Basque region. His new novel “All That Followed” http://amzn.to/2eyXpMY shows us the faces of civil wars — the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's, the Basque separatist movement, and the small wars that families and couples often find themselves fighting. Urza recounts a fictional tale based on real events that explores the kidnapping and killing of a young politician by even younger separatists in the late 1990s. Urza limns a town where everyone knows where bullet holes were left by Franco’s murderous thugs decades before. Ghosts of the murdered seem to arrive in the slanted rain —  txirimiri in Basque. In a Rashomon like retelling of the politician’s murder, three disparate voices speak in alternating chapters: Joni, an aging American expat teacher. Mariana, the victim’s young wife. And Iker, a student activist turned abductor. Joni and Mariana’s pain and loss are balanced with Iker’s hunger for ...

by Gregg Chadwick Peter Clothier's scurrilously witty new novel "The Pilgrim's Staff" explores lust, lecherousness, and love through the voices of two men from two disparate centuries. David Soames, a contemporary figurative painter living as an ex-pat in Los Angeles, receives a curious package in the mail from an English cousin. Wrapped in layers of tape and memory is the two hundred year-old journal of an English gentleman, who begins his tale with the words,"I am no Rake!" "Rake" is a wonderfully antiquated word that refers to a man caught in the snares of immorality, particularly concerning the charms of the opposite sex.  William Hogarth A Rakes's Progress:3 The Rake at the Rose Tavern 62.5x75.2  cm oil  on canvas 1734 Collection Sir John Soane's Museum , London Writing this on the 10th of November, in a coincidence worthy of Clothier's novel, I am reminded that the 18th century English painter Wi...

Paul Georges The Studio 120”x79 1/2” oil on canvas 1965 The Whitney Museum Collection, New York Courtesy Paul Georges Estate Michael Stein's new novel "The Rape of the Muse" ponders the worth of art and the place of beauty in our contemporary society. Stein's re-imagining of painter Paul Georges' trial for libel in 1980 updates the events to the 21st century and fleshes out the characters with a post September 11th ennui. When Georges' trial took place in 1980, the Neo-Expressionist boom in art was just beginning. Emotional, brightly colored paintings using the figure as a theme filled galleries in New York and Europe. In that time Paul Georges’ artwork was included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But still, Georges was an outsider looking in on an art world that often considered narrative painting to be atavistic at best - reactionary at worst. Paul Georges ...