Speed of Life

Mark Rothko Untitled (Seagram Mural), 1959 Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Copyright © 1997 Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Sometimes a painting will seem to carry the weight of the moment solely by means of color or form. Mark Rothko wanted his paintings to convey the depth of myth and the struggles of humanity. Richard Lacayo at Time also had an urge to turn to Rothko after the shootings at VirginiaTech. Lacayo only recently learned how to "see" Rothko and has discovered what Rothko was up to: " I understood that all those hovering fog banks of color weren’t gateways to anything, they were emblems of thwarted longing. Rothko was trying to invoke the power of myth, even the power of God, all the while knowing that he could summon those things, but they might not come. Would not, more likely." VirginiaTech ~ Rothko VirginiaTech ~ In Memoriam ~ Lacayo

We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devestated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to tho...

Jackie Robinson during his collegiate years in Los Angeles "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." -Jackie Robinson Today marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson was the first African-American baseball player to compete in the major leagues when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Across the United States, players from each major league baseball team will wear tributes to Jackie Robinson. Every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers will wear Jackie Robinson’s No. 42 today. Bill Pennington of the New York Times explains that the movement to honor Jackie's memory began with a suggestion from the Cincinnati Red's Ken Griffey Jr. - "Sixty years after Jackie Robinson shook the baseball establishment and broke the sport’s color barrier, an unforeseen grassroots movement by today’s players has suddenly shaped the way Major League Baseball will commemorate the anniversary....

Eakins’ “Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand” (1874), sold to Alice Walton’s Arkansas museum. The painting is destined for the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas. Carol Vogel in the New York Times is reporting that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has been at it again in their attempt to sell an Eakins to Crystal Bridges. This time it is Thomas Eakin's portrait of Benjamin Howard Rand. "Less than four months after Philadelphians thwarted its bid to buy “The Gross Clinic,” an 1875 masterpiece by Thomas Eakins, an Arkansas museum founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has quietly purchased another much-loved Eakins painting from the Philadelphia medical school that sold the first." Michael Kimmelman describes the painting: "A tour de force from 1874 -Benjamin Howard Rand- a chemistry professor whom Eakins knew as a teacher from his school days. He sits, reading and distractedly stroking a c...

"Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach." --Sol LeWitt, 1969 Sol LeWitt's retrospective, which ran from February 19, 2000 - May 21, 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was a revelation. The timing of the exhibition was deeply personal for me. It was the end of one phase of my life, an introduction to a new path, and ultimately a springboard -both personally and artistically- to a new world. Sol LeWitt's life work as laid out in SFMOMA's exhibition was intellectually stimulating and ravishingly beautiful. This was an artist who was deeply serious, yet who had no fear of beauty. Sol LeWitt "Cube-Circle 4" wall drawing from Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings & Photographs at the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco which ran from Sep 9 - Oct 30, 2004 "I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto." --Sol LeWitt, 1980's "Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connec...

I am re-reading Lawrence Weschler's volume of essays: "Vermeer in Bosnia." Weschler's piece on the light of L.A. resonates: The architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light explains: "Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -the object- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach ... and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in, splashing its feet. At this moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here - the air, the atmosphere, the light - that makes everything shimmer. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world - the diaphonous soup- which in turn, grounds a magic-meditative sense of presence." Icons From Sinai

Update: RB Kitaj Exits R.B. Kitaj at Hammer Museum RB Kitaj presented a lecture on his art at the Hammer Museum on Thursday, March 8, 2007 R.B. Kitaj Los Angeles no. 20 1990-2003 Collection of the National Gallery of Australia "Don't listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives." -RB Kitaj We are fortunate to have Kitaj back in Los Angeles. Much like Alex and Jane Eliot, Kitaj should be declared a living national treasure. Almost thirty years ago Kitaj curated an exhibition, for the Arts Council of Great Britain, entitled The Human Clay. Let me be the first to propose a new exhibition incorporating Kitaj's School of London with our new - School of L.A. The School of London - School of L. A. connection is a natural one with Kitaj and Hockney working here and inspiring a whole new generation of artists. In the ca...

Three esteemed Mexican film directors are up for Oscars at tonight's Academy Awards: Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro "Hollywood often makes socks," Cuaron said. "I work with the studios when they decide they want to make a film and not socks." Guillermo del Toro In Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," up for six Oscars including best foreign-language film, fascist soldiers in post civil-war Spain torture rebels as an eyeless, child-devouring demon lurks nearby in a mysterious underworld. Alfonso Cuaron and his daughter Bu Writer-director Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of the P.D. James novel, "Children of Men," is set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic England. Cuaron directed the third Harry Potter film as well as "Y tu mamá también". Cuaron's take on Harry Potter brought an eerie depth and a sense of real danger. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film ...

Installation View: Rothko at MOCA The recent exhibition of Mark Rothko's work by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art at their Pacific Design Center satellite space was both profound and encouraging. The paintings, many originally from the Panza Collection outside Milan, were crisply installed in the high ceilinged space and gently lit. In one of the essays collected in the posthumous volume "The Artist's Reality", Mark Rothko expressed his hope that a democratically educated populace "through increased facilities for the seeing and practice and discussion of art, will actively and genuinely be moved by the creations of their contemporaries." I think that Rothko would appreciate the crowd that gathered to reflect upon his paintings. A group that took time to step away from an increasingly murky politcal reality to contemplate something deeper, richer and more lasting. Rothko wrote that "society profits most not when art at its highest applauds its...

Thomas Eakins, (1844-1916) The Cello Player, 1896 Formerly the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1897 Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has the scoop on the deaccession of Thomas Eakin's "The Cello Player" to help fund the accession of the "Gross Clinic": "Proceeds from the deaccessioning will be applied toward PAFA's co-purchase of Eakins' The Gross Clinic, which PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are co-purchasing from Thomas Jefferson University."

At the Sundance Film Festival “Grace Is Gone,” by first-time director James Strouse and featuring John Cusack, has won the the dramatic audience award and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award. John Cusack stars as a former soldier - Stanley- home from the front caring for his two daughters while his wife continues to serve in war-torn Iraq. Early in the film, Stanley is delivered the news that his wife has been killed in Iraq. Rather than tell his daughters of their mother's death, Stanley attempts to flee the reality of absence by taking his children on a road-trip. James Rocchi , from Cinematical, describes the film as a needed look at contemporary reality: "There's a certain play of light in Grace is Gone, and carefully composed moments as well as a swiftly-captured realism that still looks wonderful. Grace is Gone has the look of life, and the glow of art. The film is as affecting -- and as ultimately human -- as one might hope, and it still brings home the ugly real fa...

Senator Barack Obama speaks in remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr. -Photo by Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press Speaking today at the annual Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship breakfast in Chicago, Barack Obama evoked the memory and the social activism of Martin Luther King, Jr.: ''As I recall, Dr. King wasn't hanging out in Manhattan, Dr. King wasn't hanging out in Beverly Hills." Introducing Obama, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told a crowd at the annual King scholarship breakfast, ''it's a long, nonstop line between the march in Selma in 1965 and the inauguration in Washington in 2009.''

This upcoming weekend Phil and I will be presenting the second in a series of exploratory workshops at the Esalen Institute. Gregg Chadwick "Immersed in Silence" 60"x48" oil on linen 2006 Upcoming Workshop at Esalen,Big Sur Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick DEC 22-24, 2006 AT ESALEN INSTITUTE "Genius is the power for lighting your own fire." -- Emerson For thousands, one of the profound mysteries of human adventure has been the creative impulse. The irrepressible urge to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is an essential part of what makes us human. But while creativity is as natural as breathing, it is also notoriously elusive, challenging, and riddled with ordeals--like any grand adventure. This workshop will use a three-stage model of the Creative Journey -- Inspiration, Process, Realization-- to explore what it means to harness our imagination and tend our creative fires over the course of a lifetime. To explore this possibility, the course wi...

Ruth Bernhard "In the Box" gelatin silver print 1962 "My aim is to transform the complexities of the figure into harmonies of simplified forms revealing the innate reality, the life force, the spirit, the inherent symbolism and the underlying remarkable structure – to isolate and give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity." -Ruth Bernhard The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the photographer Ruth Bernhard died yesterday in San Francisco. Ruth Bernhard was a vital presence in the Bay Area art world. I remember running into her at a gallery opening south of Market a few years ago. Her eyes were like open lenses. She seemed to embody Christopher Isherwood's phrase - "I am a Camera." In "Goodbye to Berlin" (published in 1939), Isherwood writes: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all t...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is making an effort to keep Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia. Please note that everyone who supports this cause can help by making a donation to a fund specifically set up to purchase the painting: Save "The Gross Clinic" Your donations will contribute to the $68 million needed and will send a powerful message that the American public wants to stop the plundering of America's libraries and collections. More at: Save "The Gross Clinic" Keep "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia

Barack Obama I have been reading Barack Obama's new book, "The Audacity of Hope" on this Thanksgiving. Obama's astute words on Abraham Lincoln brought to mind the ongoing need for healing, thanks and humility in the United States. On October 3, 1863 as the Civil War raged, President Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday in November: "I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise... for deliverances and blessings, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, and commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation a...

Thomas Eakins "Gross Clinic" 96"x78" oil on canvas 1875 -image courtesy Thomas Jefferson University The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton and under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas, is trying to pry away another important painting from its longstanding home. Carol Vogel in the New York Times reports that Thomas Jefferson University - a medical school in Philadelphia - has decided to sell the work which was purchased for $200 by University alumni in 1878. The proposed sale price is $68 million and the painting would be shared between the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the not yet completed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Crystal Bridges' recent plunder of Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits" from the New York Public Library set a poor precedent. Asher B. Durand "Kindred Spirits" 44"x36" oil on canvas 1849 formerly in the collection of the New York Publi...

Gregg Chadwick "Ghost of New Orleans" 48"X36" oil on linen 2006 We were in my studio Saturday night mourning the loss of our country to Karl Rove, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Enough is enough. Vote tomorrow and vote for a House and Senate of the future. Thomas L. Friedman said it well in the New York Times: "Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country. And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though...

Gregg Chadwick "The Angel of History" 28.5" x 73" sumi and oil on screen 2006 "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward." - Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," IX More at:  https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-The-Angel-of-History/25560/4677196/view

Darren Waterston Interior (Green), 2001 The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (SJICA) has moved into its own building just down the block on South First Street from its former site. Recently, SJICA's director Cathy Kimball , gave me a tour of the former warehouse. SJICA is in the model of a European Kunsthaus, a space dedicated to museum worthy exhibitions but without a permanent collection of its own. Gregg Chadwick Buddha of the Future (In Memory of Uri Grossman), 2006 The current exhibition, art destined for SJICA's 26th Annual Fall Auction, provides an overview of contemporary art practice in the Bay Area and beyond. Including works by Darren Waterston, Binh Danh, Judy Dater, Naomie Kremer, Gustavo Ramos Rivera, Robin McCloskey, Gregg Chadwick, Bruce Conner, Kim Frohsin, Manuel Neri, Hung Liu, Michael Kenna, Jamie Brunson, Kyoko Fischer, Enrique Chagoya and others - the exhibit is visually and intellectually astute. The group show opened on October 6th and runs until...

photo by Lance Cpl. Brandon L.Roach USMC The Medical Consequences Of The Iraq War: Health Challenges Beyond The Battlefield A Symposium To Present The Issues Behind the Headlines WHAT: Physicians for Social Responsibility, along with UCLA Extension and UCLA, School of Public Health, will hold a one-day symposium on the medical consequences of the war in Iraq. WHY: Health effects of the war have been grossly underreported. According to public health studies, three years of war has resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 Iraqi civilians. To date, 2,685 American soldiers have been killed with 19,945 soldiers wounded. US and Iraqi war soldiers are being diagnosed with mental disease in shockingly high numbers – portending an avalanche in veteran mental health needs in the coming years. Ten authoritative physicians and social scientists will present their findings and testimonies, including: Dahlia Wasfi, MD The War ...

From September 27th to October 1st at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, the newly returned paintings "The Scream" and "Madonna" will be exhibited before restoration. Both paintings will be laid out flat in glass display cases like aenesthesized patients bearing scars from their saga of theft and return. More at: Munch Museum

Tai, a 38 year old Indian elephant gets painted for Banksy's exhibition in Los Angeles (Photo by Marissa Roth for The New York Times) Banksy, the mischievous, witty and at times sophomoric intervention artist, has picked a thirty-eight year old Indian elephant named Tai to intervene upon. At his current and very brief Los Angeles exhibition, it opened on Thursday and closes on Sunday, Banksy has created a literal depiction of the metaphor – “There is an elephant in the room and nobody talks about it.” It seems that moving from public spaces to private elephants has created a justified uproar in Los Angeles: "I think it sends a very wrong message that abusing animals is not only OK, it's an art form," said Ed Boks, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services, to the Los Angeles Times. "We find it no longer acceptable to dye baby chicks at Easter, but it's OK to dye an elephant?" It seems only fitting that the anonymous Banksy out his identity in a ti...