Showing posts with label oil painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil painting. Show all posts

Thursday, July 27, 2017

First Reveal: Ask the Dust (Sergio Arau)



First Reveal - I have been working on this large painting 4.5 feet by 7.5 feet for quite a while now. Great thanks to @SergioArau and @YareliArizmendi for their art and inspiration. In process - "Ask the Dust (Sergio Arau)" #literature #art🎨 #artistsoninstagram #losangeles

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The Venetian Night

La Notte
Gregg Chadwick
La Notte
14"x11" oil on linen 2012

La Notte, my latest painting, was begun shortly after I returned from my latest excursion to Venice, Italy. Venice, poised between sea and land, is a place where light, shade, color, and reflection merge and recombine in the city's watery environment. In this mirrored world, past and present seem to coexist. History’s shadows slide in and out of darkened alleys and slip along narrow canals.


The color and light found in the artworks of the Venetian painters Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Tiepolo, seen up close in the city of their creation, is always revelatory. These artist's artworks glow like light upon water. This effect of reflected, sparkling light bouncing off canals, is called gibigiane in Venetian dialect. The liquid nature of transparent oils glowing from within, as if light lived within the pigment, seems to fix this quixotic glow onto canvas.



Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Helen Frankenthaler 1928-2011

by Gregg Chadwick



Helen Frankenthaler
Mountains and Sea
7' 2 5/8" x 9' 9 1/4" oil on canvas 1952
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC



"Fashion and money, fame and power politics have played a part in all art worlds. You've just got to plug away.... I see a revival of the meaning of the word "quality"---a search for truth and beauty in lieu of stock certificates. People are most interested in what's real, what endures."
- Helen Frankenthaler (From a Conversation With Lee Rosenbaum)



Helen Frankenthaler's painting Mountains and Sea opened a painterly universe. She poured, dripped, and floated thinned oil paint directly onto an unprimed canvas, creating a stained surface in which the pigment spread into and throughout the canvas fibers. The painting is mesmerizing, like the open sea is mesmerizing. Color beckons almost like song. As viewers we take the role of Odysseus, some will remain tied to a mast - fighting the beauty and lyricism. Others, myself included, let Helen Frankenthaler's hand lead us into the unknown. 

She will be sorely missed. 










Helen Frankenthaler Painting
From a Series of Photographs by Ernst Haas Taken in 1969








Helen Frankenthaler Amidst Her Art in 1956
Photographer: Gordon Parks for LIFE Magazine






More at:
A Search for Truth and Beauty by Lee Rosenbaum

Helen Frankenthaler dies at 83; abstract painter

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Berlin in Rauch Licht (Berlin in Smoke Light)

by Gregg Chadwick

Berlin in Rauch Licht (Berlin in Smoke Light)
Gregg Chadwick
Berlin in Rauch Licht (Berlin in Smoke Light)
24"x18" oil on linen 2011
Private Collection Los Angeles

Berlin embodies the future and at the same time carries the scars of the past. While recently in Berlin my painting Rauch Licht (Berlin in Smoke Light) was inspired by the palpable sense of beauty and the smoke of time seemingly hovering in the air. A soundtrack of Bowie, Lou Reed and U2 almost audibly haunts this mysterious vision. Will light let us break free from this Berlin Noir?

Friday, December 02, 2011

A Painter of Spanish Life: Manet's Portrait of Madame Brunet

by Gregg Chadwick


Édouard Manet
Portrait of Madame Brunet
52 1/8" x 39 3/8" oil on canvas 1860-1863 (Reworked in 1867)
Recently Purchased by the Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Courtesy Getty Museum


In 1862 in Le Boulevard, a Parisian news sheet which was a sort of precursor to the L.A. Weekly or the Village Voice, the poet Baudelaire wrote a small article entitled Painters and Engravers. This was one of the few times that Baudelaire, who in his essay The Painter of Modern Life called for artists to search for subjects in the rancor and din of the urban street, wrote expressly about the art of his friend Édouard Manet. Baudelaire wrote,"M. Manet is the author of The Spanish Singer, which caused a great sensation in the last Salon. We will see in the next one a number of paintings by him imbued with the flavor of Spain, which leads one to believe that the genius of Spain has fled to France."

With the news that the Getty Museum has purchased Édouard Manet's Portrait of Madame Brunet, art viewers in Los Angeles will be able to answer for themselves: How did Spanish art influence Manet?


Francisco Goya after Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Ferdinand, Cardinal Infante of Spain and Archduke of Austria
etching and drypoint on paper 1778
Courtesy British Museum, London


The composition of Manet's Portrait of Madame Brunet seems to be modeled after Goya's etched version of Vélazquez's Portrait of Ferdinand, Cardinal Infante of Spain and Archduke of Austria. Madame Brunet holds her hands in a position similar to Ferdinand and her dark dress stands out against a light filled landscape in a manner that echoes Vélazquez. Further emphasizing the Spanish influence, the background of Manet's Portrait of Madame Brunet bears a striking resemblance to another Velazquez related work - Philip IV as a Hunter which had been acquired by the Louvre in 1862. At roughly the same time that Manet was painting Madame Brunet he was busy at work on an etching based on this very painting.



Édouard Manet
Portrait of Philip IV after the Workshop of Vélazquez
etching, aquatint, and drypoint on paper circa 1862


Even more striking than his compositional borrowings was Manet's use of oil paint. Manet applied the pigment thickly with spontaneous brushstrokes and flowing form that was inspired by the richness found in the paint-work of Vélazquez. In 1865, Manet visited Spain and reveled in the works of the Spanish masters at the Prado Museum (then known as the Real Museo de Pintura y Escultura).

From Madrid, Manet wrote to Baudelaire, "I've really come to know Vélazquez, and I tell you he is the greatest artist that has ever been." Open brushstrokes full of suggestion allow the viewer to enter imaginatively into Vélazquez's paintings and in a sense finish them. Manet applied this idea to subjects of modern life and created a new way of painting.




Édouard Manet
Portrait of Madame Brunet (Detail)
Courtesy Getty Museum



Édouard Manet
Victorine Meurent
16 7/8" x 17 1/4" oil on canvas circa 1862
Courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Scott Allan writes in the Getty Museum's blog The Iris, a rich description of Manet's technique in the Portrait of Madame Brunet:
"The signature elements of his original style are blazingly evident: in the brilliant summary execution of the mesmerizing gloves, the subtle wielding of a nuanced range of blacks in the dress, the sharp silhouetting of contours, and in the radical suppression of half-tones and shadows on the pale oval expanse of Mme. Brunet’s strongly lit face."

Perhaps because of the strength of the painting and the lack of nuanced delicacy, the art critic Théodore Duret recounted that, when Madame Brunet first viewed Manet's painting of her she "began crying and left the studio with her husband, never wanting to see the portrait again."

The soft atmosphere found in the painting of Vélazquez is missing. This suppression of delicate halftones coupled with sharp contours took a number of viewers of Manet's work in the 1860's aback. To many the paintings seemed flat, almost like playing-cards. What was Manet up to they wondered?

The immediacy of Manet's subject matter seemed to call for an immediacy of paint handling. Like a Zen clap, Manet's simplified tonal gradations from light to dark emphasized the force of light.

Other influential examples of flattened spacial compositions made their way to Paris. As Manet was reworking his rejected portrait, the 1867 Universal Exposition opened and the artworks, performers and cultural objects in the Japanese pavilion would inspire new directions in the arts.



Édouard Manet
Portrait of Émile Zola
57"x45" oil on canvas 1868


Manet painted a view of the exposition grounds and included a Japanese screen and a woodcut of a Sumo wrestler by the Japanese artist Kuniaki in the background of his Portrait of Emile Zola.  Hanging next to the Kuniaki print in Manet's witty portrait is an engraving after Vélazquez's painting of Bacchus as well as a reproduction of his own Olympia. In another cross-cultural engagement, less than one hundred and fifty years later Japanese artist Takashi Murakami would bring his own superflat paintings to Versailles.




Kawaii- Vacances, Summer Vacation in the Kingdom of the Golden and Untitled Carpet in the Salle des Gardes du Roi at the Chateau de Versailles by Takashi Murakami, via Artinfo




Édouard Manet's painting Portrait of Madame Brunet will go on view at the Getty Museum on December 13, 2011. After writing this piece, it dawned on me that my painting Tokyo Lolita could be a 21st century Ms. Brunet ...


Tokyo Lolita


Gregg Chadwick
Tokyo Lolita
24"x18" oil on linen 2010
Manifesta Maastricht Gallery, Maastricht, The Netherlands

More at:
A French Mona Lisa Comes to L.A.
Getty Acquires Moody Manet

Monday, July 18, 2011

Calvino's Elephant

Calvino's Elephant 30"x40" oil on linen 2011
Gregg Chadwick
Calvino's Elephant
30"x40" oil on linen 2011

"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.

Pliny the Elder identified the elephant as the animal spiritually “closest to man.” The phrase “Maximum est elephas proximumque humanis sensibus” opens Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, Book VIII.

In turn this inspired the brilliant Italian writer, Italo Calvino, in his introductory essay to Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. And I am again reading WS Merwin's recent book of poems - The Shadow of Sirius - and thinking deeply about the mystery of our place in the universe. I had a chance to chat briefly with WS Merwin after his wonderful reading at the Hammer Museum on October 29, 2009. We spoke of elephants and mystery and nature. Inspiring stuff.

More on WS Merwin:
WS Merwin Profile

More on the Hammer Museum:
Watch and Listen

More on elephants and why we must protect them:
Elephant Reflections - from UC Press
Photographs by Karl Ammann and Text by Dale Peterson

Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Rose of Time

The Rose of Time
Gregg Chadwick
76cm x 61cm oil on linen 2010
Currently on exhibit at Manifesta Maastricht, the Netherlands


A Bowl of Roses
by Rainer Maria Rilke


You saw angry ones flare, saw two boys
clump themselves together into a something
that was pure hate, thrashing in the dirt
like an animal set upon by bees;
actors, piled up exaggerators,
careening horses crashed to the ground,
their gaze thrown away, baring their teeth
as if the skull peeled itself out through the mouth.
But now you know how these things are forgotten:
for here before you stands a bowl full of roses,
which is unforgettable and filled up
with ultimate instances
of being and bowing down,
of offering themselves, of being unable to give, of standing there
almost as part of us: ultimates for us too.
Noiseless life, opening without end,
filling space without taking any away
from the space the other things in it diminish,
almost without an outline, like something omitted,
and pure inwardness, with so much curious softness,
shining into itself, right up to the rim:
is anything as known to us as this?
And this: that a feeling arises
because petals are being touched by petals?
And this: that one opens itself, like a lid,
and beneath lies nothing but eyelids,
all closed, as if tenfold sleep
had to dampen down an inner power to see.
And, above all, this: that through the petals
light has to pass. Slowly they filter out from a
thousand skies the drop of darkness
in whose fiery glow the jumbled bundle
of stamens becomes aroused and rears up.
And what activity, look, in the roses:
gestures with angles of deflection so small
one wouldn't see them if not for
infinite space where their rays can diverge.
See this white one, blissfully opened,
standing among its huge spreading petals
like a Venus standing in her shell;
and how this one, the blushing one, turns,
as if confused, toward the cooler one,
and how the cooler one, impassive, draws back,
and the cold one stands tightly wrapped in itself
among these opened ones, that shed everything.
And what they shed, how it can be
at once light and heavy. a cloak. a burden,
a wing, and a mask, it all depends,
and how they shed it: as before a lover.
Is there anything they can't be: wasn't this yellow one
that lies here hollow and open the rind
of a fruit of which the same yellow,
more intense, more orange-red, was the juice?
And this one, could opening have been too much for it,
because, exposed to air, its nameless pink
has picked up the bitter aftertaste of lilac?
And isn't this batiste one a dress, with
the chemise still inside it, still soft
and breath-warm, both flung off together
in morning shade at the bathing pool in the woods?
And this one here, opalescent porcelain,
fragile, a shallow china cup
filled with little lighted butterflies,
and this one, containing nothing but itself.
And aren't they all doing the same: only containing themselves,
if to contain oneself means: to transform the world outside
and wind and rain and patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and disguised fate
and darkness of earth at evening
all the way to the errancy, flight, and coming on of clouds
all the way to the vague influence of the distant stars
into a handful of inwardness.
Now it lies free of cares in the open roses.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. "A Bowl of Roses." Translated by Galway Kinell & Hannah Liebman. American Poetry Review 1999 28(3):61.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Friday, April 02, 2010

Tokyo Lolita


Tokyo Lolita, originally uploaded by GreggChadwick.

Gregg Chadwick
24"x18" oil on linen 2010

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Kyoto: March

Kyoto: March
Gregg Chadwick
Kyoto: March
(for Gary Snyder)
36"x48" oil on linen 2010

Kyoto: March

BY GARY SNYDER

A few light flakes of snow
Fall in the feeble sun;
Birds sing in the cold,
A warbler by the wall. The plum
Buds tight and chill soon bloom.
The moon begins first
Fourth, a faint slice west
At nightfall. Jupiter half-way
High at the end of night-
Meditation. The dove cry
Twangs like a bow.
At dawn Mt. Hiei dusted white
On top; in the clear air
Folds of all the gullied green
Hills around the town are sharp,
Breath stings. Beneath the roofs
Of frosty houses
Lovers part, from tangle warm
Of gentle bodies under quilt
And crack the icy water to the face
And wake and feed the children
And grandchildren that they love.