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 po...
