Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick My father in law Ralph Heilemann is in hospice care at home with my sister in law in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As Dad Heilemann gets ready to move on to another form, space, or place — I wanted to post this highly fictionalized tale of his US Navy days that I wrote for his 90th Birthday. Fair winds and following seas, shipmate. We have the watch. MarySue Heilemann with her dad Ralph Heilemann — August 2021 Mission Classified. Possibly originating from the harbor of Yokosuka, near Yokohama just outside of Tokyo, in post World War II Japan on Christmas Eve. Official Mission Logs Redacted by order of Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) General MacArthur, Acting Headquarters, Dai Ichi Life Insurance Building, Tokyo. The United States occupation was in full swing and Ralph Heilemann was there. As an electrician onboard a United States Navy cruiser on a hush-hush mission to map the entirety of the Japanese coastline, Seaman Heilemann was deep into the electronic guts...

By Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick Bookseller's Night oil on linen 2019      I lift three brushes wet with paint. Each brush holds its own hue- ultramarine blue, glowing amber, and a cool black. Airborne Toxic Event’s “Sometime AroundMidnight” plays on headphones tethered to my iPhone. The room spins like the song. I almost dance as each brush moves across the linen. Wet paint slurred into wet paint. I search for the light in the dark in a painterly chase through the night. I paint in a refurbished airplane hangar, the night glowing darkly through the skylights above me. Alone in a vast space, my thoughts travel back to years of painting at night: from a loft in SoHo during New York’s “Bright Lights Big City” years, to a small makeshift space in Tokyo, to a studio in a reconfigured office building on a block of San Francisco’s Market Street that Edward Hopper would have appreciated, to now in a building at an airfield where a fak...

“Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible?”  Alexander Eliot I received the sad news yesterday that my dear friend, art writer and mythologist, Alex Eliot passed away. Born April 28, 1919, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Alex would have turned 97 this week.  Alex was the art editor at Time Magazine from 1945 until 1960. During those years Alex crafted numerous articles about the modern art scene.  Alex always held us spellbound with tales of meeting the major artists of the period.  Alex especially loved to tell the story of meeting Salvador Dali in New York and that Dali became a close friend because Jane Winslow,  Eliot’s wife,   had lived in Catalonia and spoke Dali’s native Catalan fluently.  For his 90th birthday, Alex's talented daughter, the writer Winslow Eliot, asked me to craft an appreciation of Alex. I have revamped this essay a bit to reflect on his pass...