Speed of Life

Blue Velvet (David Lynch) 30"x24" oil on linen 2025 by Gregg Chadwick My oil on linen painting "Blue Velvet (David Lynch" is an homage to a visionary director and his artistic vision. Lynch thought of Los Angeles as a place of hidden mysteries and breathtaking light. Lynch said: “What I really like about {Los Angeles} if you drive around – especially at night – you can get a little gust of wind of the great days of the silver screen. All there in, like, living memory... it was an incredible place to be at the beginning of cinema.” In my artwork, David Lynch stands beneath the Aero Theater marquee in Santa Monica, California which is emblazoned with the words - "David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Sold Out." Just days after his death, the American Cinematheque held a special screening in his honor. I walked up to the Aero to honor the memory of David Lynch. As I arrived the sun was setting across the Pacific and an elegiac glow lit up the theater on Montana Aven...

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

Gregg Chadwick Il Poeta di Milano (The Poet of Milan) 24"x18" oil on linen 2012

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.

Gregg Chadwick Neon Dreams 40"x40" oil on linen 2012

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...

by Gregg Chadwick 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?

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'...

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 ...

Gregg Chadwick Setsuko's Room 30"x40" oil on canvas 2011

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 i...

Gregg Chadwick The Persistence of Being 36"x24" oil on linen 2010

Gregg Chadwick Murmurs 36"x48" oil on linen 2010

Gregg Chadwick Book of Twilight (Crepusculario ) 16"x16" oil on linen 2010

Gregg Chadwick Maruyama Twilight 40"x72" oil on linen 2010

Tokyo Lolita , originally uploaded by GreggChadwick . Gregg Chadwick 24"x18" oil on linen 2010

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.