Speed of Life

Powerful # Ferguson Themed Cover for Sept 1 New Yorker @ NewYorker Issue

by Gregg Chadwick Holland  Cotter has a wonderful new piece in the New York Times entitled A Memory Museum .  Cotter writes,"  I’m also a curator of my memory, which carries traces of art encounters from over the years. A few of those encounters — with certain objects, books, buildings — have altered the atmosphere, changed how I see and joined a permanent collection that I regularly revisit." He then challenges us  to describe experiences with art that has changed our lives and to post them in the comment section in his article. I find this to be an enlightening question: Which works of art have changed the way you look at the world?  I answered Mr. Cotter with the following : The place of memory in the arts is so revealing. One of my first experiences with an artwork happened in Amsterdam when I was a six year old and the experience changed me forever. My father had finished his tour in Vietnam as a USMC JAG and we reunited as a family in Euro...

Please join me this Saturday, July 26, 2014 at the Sandra Lee Gallery in San Francisco as I gather with a small group to discuss my new series "Revenant" - each painting holds a mysterious story where past and present meet. The event runs from 3:30 to 6:00 pm. Also, if you haven't seen it yet, please check out the review by Jeffrey Carlson in Fine Art Connoisseur: "Gregg Chadwick's Revenant" ( link here) before my talk. More details below:

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...

Revenant New Paintings by Gregg Chadwick by Gregg Chadwick |

by Gregg Chadwick   Generosity of Eye: Art Transformed into Education from brad hall  (Full Film) Generosity of Eye: Art Transformed into Education is a must watch documentary by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall that documents William Louis-Dreyfus, Julia's father,  as he explains why he decided to sell his bountiful art collection to benefit the Harlem Children's Zone - an educational program in New York, created by Geoffrey Canada to break the cycle of generational poverty for the thousands of children and their families in the Harlem community.  Julia is often on screen with her father and their scenes together are rich with familial affection. As Julia interviews her father about the art that William has collected over the years and the artists who have created it, she is often overcome with emotion as she discovers the depth of her father's passion for art and for justice. Geoffrey Canada, William Louis-Dreyfus, and Julia Louis...

Today's Google doodle honors the groundbreaking environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose book  Silent Spring sounded one of the first alarms about the detrimental effect of pesticides on the eco-system. The natural world was my first love as a kid and reading Carson's work was instrumental in spurring me on to look deeply at and respect the complexities of our endangered environment. Carson's interest in conservation began with her early work as a marine biologist, which led to her award winning book, The Sea Around Us . Subsequently, nature writing provided a powerful vehicle for Carson to bring mainstream attention to the chemicals being dumped daily into our streams and rivers. Her work inspired global bans of the pesticide DDT  and helped foster the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. I encourage you to honor Rachel Carson's legacy by spending some time today on the Audubon Society's website , the US National Park Servic...