Speed of Life

As John Cage said, “Our lives are changing to the point where people may have their own lives rather than lives that society has given them second-hand.” Art is in the forefront of changes in society, and artists are the best people we can ask about ways to take hold of our own lives by thinking creatively. -Kathan Brown Kathan Brown, the founder of San Francisco's Crown Point Press, has a new book out - "Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life" . The book is put together as a series of thirteen creative secrets gathered from working with contemporary artists as they created etchings at Crown Point. Wayne Thiebaud "Hill River" 2002 Color drypoint with direct gravure and spit bite aquatint 21-1/4 x 30-1/2" Wayne Thiebaud's corresponding creative secret is to cultivate sensuality. Richard Diebenkorn's is getting into the flow. Shazia Sikander's is to use every tool. Robert Bechtle's key is to know ...

Cover Image: Gregg Chadwick "Ossi di Sepia" monotype Bruce Boone's "My Walk With Bob" has been described by Dennis Cooper as a seminal and perfect work. Originally published in 1979, Ithuriel's Spear - a small press based in San Francisco - has brought out a new edition of this important book. "My Walk With Bob" contains a collection of short narratives by Bruce Boone and is regarded as a core text of the New Narrative movement emanating from Robert Glück's writing workshops in San Francisco. Robert Glück writes in the afterward of this edition that "the beginning of modernism is a man (Baudelaire) walking through a city. Bruce experiences his own version of the fragment in a walk with me through a part of San Francisco that reminds him of earlier eras both in his life and the life of our culture." The image "Ossi di Sepia" which graces the cover was steeped in my reading of modern poetry, especially Baudelaire and the Ital...

I have been thinking about Goya and Spanish painting while in the studio recently. Gregg Chadwick "Songs Of Almodóvar" 48"x36" oil on linen 2006 In Southern California, Spain is never far away. The lilting sound of Spanish is almost an aural fragrance in the air. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746 - 1828) "Woman with Clothes Blowing in the Wind" Carbon and Watercolor on Ivory 1824-25 "I've no more sight. No hand, no pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything - all I've got left is will." - Goya in a letter to a Spanish friend. 1825 There is a wonderful piece by Robert Hughes on Goya in the Guardian. I have quoted a few lines concerning Goya's late paintings on ivory: "He was short of money, and friends proposed that he should make himself some by doing a new issue of the Caprichos, but Goya refused to compromise himself by repetition. Instead he spoke of something entirely new in his work: miniatures on ivory. Not the licked, froze...

Gustav Klimt "Apple Tree I" 42 7/8" x 43 1/4" oil on canvas 1911 or 1912 Estate of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer Quite a week in Los Angeles. Michael Govan has taken up his post as the new director at LACMA and the recently repatriated Gustav Klimt paintings are now on display at LACMA as well. Gustave Courbet "Stream in the Forest" about 1862, oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston At the Getty tonight noted art historian Linda Nochlin will present a lecture: "How Landscape Means: Courbet and His Territory" in conjuction with the traveling exhibition - "Courbet and the Modern Landscape" -which is currently on view at the Getty through May 14, 2006. * Details on the Nochlin lecture And UCLA finished a remarkable run through the NCAA Basketball tourney on Monday night. The Bruins fell short in the title game but played with remarkable courage and showed incredible class throughout the tournament.

"A Walk with Ganesh" Gregg Chadwick, 72" x 84" oil on linen 2005 My brother, Kent Chadwick , is a Seattle writer and recently finished a poem inspired by the painting above: "A Walk with Ganesh" Obediently, I begin, but it is a curious way to experiment with no design and venture out in thought alone. It is my father who has traveled to where elephants wander, to where they’re worked and tended. It is my brother who has breathed the red dust of Bangalore, who was told by a Bombay cab driver, “Ganesh was just in my car!” At home I know just what I read— that he broke off a bit of his tusk to take dictation, to copy down at divine speed the inspired, sculpted rush of Ved Vyasa’s verse creating the Mahabharata. Oh, to compose as swiftly as a god can write! Oh, to out sing one’s breath! Obediently, I begin a journey measured in mouse steps— a journey in...

" If the Princes of the world had to fight hand to hand, goodbye to war. But while there is someone in the world who can sacrifice thousands of victims how and when he pleases, Without risk to his person, enslaved humanity do not complain of his barbarity, for the blame is yours." -Giambattista Casti, "Gli animali parti" 1802 "Contemptuous of the Insults" Goya 1816-1820 From: "A Revolutionary Age: Drawing in Europe, 1770–1820" organized by the Getty as a companion exhibition to the traveling exhibition " Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile" "Sometimes the most determined of invaders, equipped with strong armies and copious intelligence about its enemy can make myopic blunders that later seem close to madness" Robert Hughes, from "Goya"- on Napoleon's invasion of Spain Three years into our debacle in Iraq it is helpful to turn to art and history for some perspective. Napoleon invaded and occupied Spain from 1808...

Gustav Klimt Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 138 x 138 cm oil and gold on canvas 1907 Altmann Collection, Los Angeles A legal arbitration panel in Austria recently decided that five Gustav Klimt paintings, stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family during World War II, should be returned to Maria Altmann who lives in Los Angeles- the legal heir to the looted collection. The two sides began mediation following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that Altmann could sue the Austrian government. It was announced today (thanks for the heads up Tyler ), that the five paintings will go on display from April 4 through June 30 at LACMA . Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times reports that "the exhibition was initiated by Stephanie Barron, LACMA's senior curator of modern art, in January after the Austrian arbitration court ordered its government to turn over the paintings to Altmann, ... Barron proposed the show in a letter to Altmann's attorney, Randol Schoenberg, who presented the ...