Showing posts with label paintings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paintings. Show all posts

Thursday, June 05, 2014

Revenant: New Paintings by Gregg Chadwick




Revenant 

 New Paintings by Gregg Chadwick

  In folk mythology, a revenant is a being or force that returns from another level of existence to haunt the living. The paintings in my new series, Revenant, carry the ghosts of their former selves. Each work goes through an open-ended series of painting sessions. Surfaces are scraped down, over painted, and layered with transparent pigments.  Opaque swaths of color are brushed into the wet surface, leaving remnants of past figures and locations, while memories and future visions surge to the surface and overwrite the image. 
  
  Current science is discovering that our earliest memories of childhood may be pushed out or overwritten like computer code by the growth of neurons during our early years, which could help explain the mysterious memory lapses, what Freud called “infantile amnesia”, in our childhood memories. Often, for me, bits of these ghostly, fragmented memories pop up with the hint of a remembered song, color, or aroma.

Two ghosts, two memories, haunt me from my childhood. One is the sweet image of my grandfather, Arthur Desch, high up in the cab on his train on the Jersey Central Line. A second haunting image is a Pennsylvania tandem pulling Senator Robert Kennedy's casket from his memorial in Boston to Arlington Cemetery in 1968.




I relish these revenant moments and use them as access points into my current paintings. Ghost trains roll down long abandoned tracks. Lost buildings reappear.  Shadows of former selves are reflected in this mirrored world. The crackle of distant radio transmissions seems to blend with the staccato of binary code. Apparitions of friends, family, fellow artists, and passersby find their way, sometimes unbidden but welcomed, into the works. For me, these revenant figures and places bring possibility to life and lend an eerie comfort to our fleeting world. 

                        
  - Gregg Chadwick, Santa Monica, California
                              
      May 2014




Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Tomorrow and Thursday in Nor Cal: The Painted Word Book Tour


I am honored to announce the publication of my latest collaboration with the author Phil Cousineau:
 The Painted Word
Sixty-three of my artworks are included in this new volume. 


Book Tour Dates - All Are Welcome & All Events are Free. I will bring a group of the artworks included in the book to each event listed below:

In Northern California:

51 Tamal Vista Blvd | Corte Madera, California
Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 7:00 PM (Art by Gregg Chadwick Courtesy The Sandra Lee Gallery, San Francisco)


NEW BOOK:  The Painted Word By Phil Cousineau and Gregg Chadwick

"When Phil Cousineau and Gregg Chadwick join creative forces it is an important event. This historic collaboration shines with fresh insights into both language and art."
— Alexander Eliot, author of 300 Years of American Painting and The Global Myths

Notes on the Artwork In The Painted Word
When I was young, the form of words—the way they looked— intrigued me and I often wondered what it would be like to look at a word and not be able to read or understand it. In essence, I wondered about the indecipherable mystery behind the word. The artworks I have created for The Painted Word take that sense of mystery into the world of paint and image.

Each creation began with that wonderful, slippery stuff that never wants to be tamed or pinned down: paint. Specifically, I use oil paint for its historical resonance and also because of its liquid origins in the oil pressed from flax. From this plant comes both linseed oil, which is mixed with dry powdered pigments to create oil paint, and linen, which traditionally has been used as the surface that oils are painted upon. Whenever I unroll a new bolt of linen in my studio a rich fragrance reminis- cent of a newly cut field fills the room.

I find that freshly stretched paintings waiting for their first touch of color invite the mystery of life and creation. The word stories written by Phil Cousineau opened up a similar sense of wonder. Like the words, each tube of paint also brought its history into the room. Color names are words steeped in myth and meaning. Lapis Lazuli evokes dangerous treks along the Silk Road into Afghanistan that brought this exquisite blue stone into the workshops of Renaissance artists. The pigment was so expensive and so important it was often reserved for coloring the heavens and Mary’s garments. A separate clause in the artist’s contract would dictate how much the client would pay for the Lapis Lazuli in addition to the amount paid for the artist’s services. Other colors weren’t so dear but were still rich in lore. Burnt Sienna is a warm brown earth pigment that was dug up in the fields surrounding Siena, Italy. Cinnabar, a brilliant red originally found in minerals veined with mercury, also made its way along the Silk Road from its source in China. I used all three of these colors in many of the paintings in The Painted Word.

Gregg Chadwick

(From The Painted Word, available in September 2012. 
Published in the United States by Viva Editions, an imprint of Cleis Press, Inc., 2246 Sixth Street, Berkeley, California 94710.)



"If The Painted Word were a club act, I'd sit there drinking in Cousineau's revelations, tales and mythologies until they kicked me out of the joint. Reading this brew of etymology, history, lore, and pop connections, with lambent illustrations by Gregg Chadwick, is just as intoxicating. A Cousineau riff on a (passionately selected) word is like Mark Twain meets Coleridge meets Casey Stengel meets---well, everyone who's fun and informative, whether the riff is on autologophagist (someone who eats his/her words) or jack, which, believe me, the world-traveled Cousineau knows when it comes to language. "

—Arthur Plotnik, author of The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts Into Words



Monday, July 09, 2012

Now Represented by the Sandra Lee Gallery!

I am honored to announce that my artwork is now represented in San Francisco and the Bay Area by the 


Sandra Lee Gallery
251 Post Street, Suite 310
San Francisco, CA 94108
tel: 415.291.8000
art@sandraleegallery.com



Four of my latest paintings are hanging in the gallery, including my most recent artwork - West Village Reader (see below). Please stop in to view the art and say hello to Sandra Lee.




West Village Reader

Gregg Chadwick
West Village Reader
14"x11" oil on linen 2012