Opening at Santa Monica Art Studios, Santa Monica Airport- photo by Gerardo Horischnik, originally uploaded by greggchadwick.
thank you to all who braved the huge crowd at saturday's grand opening. i was touched by the enthusiasm for and interest in my work. if you have questions about a particular painting or monotype please e-mail me or leave a comment on this entry.
if you would like to view the work again in a calmer fashion please stop by on thursday, october 14th. i will be in the studio from 12pm to 6pm and of course the los angeles art fair will be opening that evening across the street in the barker hangar. if those times do not work please feel free to set up an appointment .
i hope you had a chance to view the other artist's work at the santa monica art studios facility. i just call it the hangar. it really brings back my childhood to paint with the roar of jet engines reverberating from the nearby runway. that roar sounds like possibility to me- as artists, musicians, writers, viewers and thinkers we have the ability and the call to create in a culture of destruction. thanks again for supporting my efforts.
i recently sent the following description of "une passante" off to an early discoverer of the work-
czeslaw milosz' poetry has been a deep inspiration for me. his ability to search for meaning or metaphysics even after the horrors in Poland during the 20th century has always been a source of strength for me artistically and spiritually.
when i found out about his recent death i wanted to paint an image pulled from life like a sort of painted poem- a moment that if one is not truly aware will go unseen
title: une passante (in french a female passerby)
this poem by milosz feels to me like the painting:
AN HONEST DESCRIPTION OF
MYSELF WITH A GLASS OF WHISKEY
AT AN AIRPORT, LET US SAY,
IN MINNEAPOLIS
- Czeslaw Milosz
My ears catch less and less of conversations, and my eyes have weakened, though they are still insatiable.
I see their legs in miniskirts, slacks, wavy fabrics.
Peep at each one separately, at their buttocks and thighs, lulled by the imaginings of porn.
Old lecher, it's time for you to the grave, not to the games and amusements of youth.
But I do what I have always done: compose scenes of this earth under orders from the erotic imagination.
It's not that I desire these creatures precisely; I desire everything, and they are like a sign of ecstatic union.
It's not my fault that we are made so, half from disinterested contemplation, half from appetite.
If I should accede one day to Heaven, it must be there as it is here, except that I will be rid of my dull senses and my heavy bones.
Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the proportions of human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at dawn, all of it incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things.