Speed of Life

  Gregg Chadwick Through Tibetan Eyes 72"x96" oil on linen 2006-2024 "In old Arabic poetry love, song, blood and travel appear as four basic desires of the human heart and the only effective means against our fear of death. Thus travel is elevated to the dignity of the elementary needs of humankind." - Czeslaw Milosz on the poetry of travel Movement, travel and pilgrimage are themes that often appear in my paintings. Travel can involve a physical relocation or it can exist in the realm of the senses. In 2006 I attended "A Gathering of Hearts Illuminating Compassion," an interfaith meeting in San Francisco. The Dalai Lama was the keynote speaker at the event. He entered the packed hall, briskly moved up the center aisle, but stopped briefly to greet an elderly Tibetan woman a few feet from where I was seated. Then the Dalai Lama suddenly spun around and, with a beatific smile, gazed deeply and directly into my eyes. I was transfixed. The moment was short, ...

  Gregg Chadwick New York Stories (Five Minutes to Midnight) 30"x 40" oil on linen  Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございます Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu In my painting "New York Stories" it’s five minutes to midnight. Waiting for 2022 to move into 2023 like the hands of a clock spinning into the next hour, figures move around the iconic Grand Central clock like foxes huddling beneath a tree in Andō Hiroshige's "New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji" It’s raining this New Year’s Eve in Santa Monica. I’m listening to a recording of a 10,000-member choir in Japan singing “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Enthusiasm for Beethoven is particularly strong in Japan. Every year in December, singers gather in a concert hall in Osaka to sing the final chorus from Beethoven's Ninth. Gregg Chadwick Passing View of Shohei Bridge  30"x24" oil on linen 1990 Again , my thoughts trace a circuit from this moment back to an earlier New Yea...

Loved this card from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Reminds me of the many holiday seasons that I have spent in Japan. Especially the year that I spent chasing Hiroshige in Tokyo.  

by Gregg Chadwick Happy New Year 2017! It’s raining this New Year’s Eve in Santa Monica. The haunting voice of Gil Scott-Heron singing  Winter In America  fills our living room. My thoughts trace a circuit from this moment back to an earlier New Year in Japan as 1989 rolled into 1990. I was in Tokyo following the spirit and artworks of Ando Hiroshige. That winter in Japan, I clutched a large volume by Henry D. Smith II and Amy G. Poster on Hiroshige’s  One Hundred Famous Views of Edo   and trekked on rail, foot and car across the historic core of what was Edo era Tokyo. Sponsored by the Nippon Seiyu-Kai's 30th Anniversary Award, I endeavored to create a series of new paintings inspired by Hiroshige’s woodcuts. Time, place, memory, mystery and lore all mixed in my artworks. Gregg Chadwick Passing View of Shohei Bridge  30"x24" oil on linen 1990  Today, on the Brooklyn museum’s Tumblr page, Alison Baldassano posted a phot...