Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick While glancing at the schedule for this week’s National Critics Conference (May 25-28, 2005) at the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles, I came across the description for Elizabeth Zimmer's "Kamikaze Writing Workshop." Obviously the word "kamikaze" has shifted in tone and meaning since it first entered the American vocabulary during the last years of WWII. I doubt that Zimmer’s criticism class will make a fiery plunge into the conference hall as a final project. But I was reminded of the important work being done in the fields of aesthetics and history by Emiko Ohnuki – Tierney at the University of Wisconsin. Cherry blossom send off. Kamikaze means "divine wind" in Japanese, and originally referred to a miraculous typhoon that saved Japan from a Mongolian invasion force in the 13th century. The Japanese Navy used this term to describe their suicide attack planes. In America, the word "kamikaze" describes actions that are...

Painting in the studio today... Gregg Chadwick Silk Road 48"x38" 2005 Private Collection

by Gregg Chadwick Modern Kicks reports today on the 2005 DeCordova Museum's Annual Exhibition. The report from Modern Kicks: " those of you who haven't already been hearing a lot about Lalla Essaydi, expect to do so." Encouraged by Modern Kicks prompting I add my thoughts about Lalla Essaydi: The Boston based photographer Lalla Essaydi grew up in Morocco. Her childhood experiences in a remote family residence inspired a return visit two decades later in which Lalla began a series of images that she recently described to T. Trent Gegax in Newsweek's International Edition as her reinterpretation of "the Arab female. We're always seen as the woman who's oppressed, when we're actually negotiating every day." Essaydi creates and then photographs henna scripted tableaux of women in draped interiors. Essaydi's henna calligraphy runs across figures, skin, floors and walls. The arabic words comprise, as reported by Gegax, "Essaydi...

by Gregg Chadwick A new mayor has been elected in Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa - the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since the city's pioneer days. L.A.'s last Latino mayor, Cristobal Aguilar, left office in 1872, when Los Angeles was a frontier town of barely 6,000 people. Villaraigosa's win exemplifies the growing clout of Latinos in California, after decades of population growth that failed to lead to a rise in political power. This is a positive step that bodes well for the future of the city and the state of California. But there is still much to be done. As Bruce Springsteen said at his latest concert in L.A. - "The American government's border policy is a disgrace." Across the Border in Ensenada, Mexico photo by Gregg Chadwick On her blog today, Megan McMillan thinks of Wim Wenders' film, "The End of Violence", after overhearing the gardener's working at her apartment complex. Megan McMillan's description of t...

by Gregg Chadwick In response to Tyler Green's response to the Guardian: Diego Velazquez' "Juan de Pareja" is my favorite painting in America. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez Juan de Pareja oil on canvas 1650 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York photo by Gregg Chadwick This is one the paintings that made me want to become a painter. Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park #54" is my favorite painting by an American. Richard Diebenkorn "Ocean Park 54" 100" x 81" oil on canvas 1972 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art See: Diebenkorn and Kitaj Off Ocean Park R.B. Kitaj's "If Not, Not" is my favorite painting by a living American artist. R.B. Kitaj "If Not, Not" 60" x 60" oil on canvas 1975-76 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Video Art in Tom Bradley International Airport - CA Deadline: May 23, 2005. The City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department seeks to establish a pre-qualified pool of up to twenty (20) Video artists/artist teams to be considered for the upcoming Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT) projects at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Artists who have experience working with multiple screen projections and are capable of occupying an entire space on a grand scale are being sought. The artists should address the context of the airport and the City of Los Angeles and help create an impressive moving visual art environment. This is an exciting opportunity for Video Artists to collaborate with a team and generate work that will enhance a dynamic space and engage millions of visitors each year. The artwork will be exhibited on a video wall and/or a linear “film strip”. The video wall is comprised of 20 40”LCD screens and covers an area approximately 25 feet wide and 10 feet high. Th...

From Gerald Nicosia in the San Francisco Chronicle " Phil Cousineau has long been a powerful presence in the San Francisco literary scene, but he is best known as a filmmaker and writer who has carried on and reinterpreted the work of Joseph Campbell, especially regarding the omnipresent influence of myth in modern life. Phil Cousineau photo by Gregg Chadwick Last year he also had a best- seller with "The Way Things Are," a collaboration with the religious philosopher Huston Smith. All this while Cousineau has been publishing -- in very limited editions -- collections of his own poetry, whose influence has been noted by a great many other major poets of his generation, including Antler and Jane Hirshfield. But his latest collection, The Blue Museum (Sisyphus Press; 152 pages; $12 paperback; P.O. Box 330098, San Francisco, CA 94133), comprising poems selected from his entire life's work, is a book readers will be unlikely to forget.  l to r: Gregg...

by Gregg Chadwick There is a cinematic light to the skies in Los Angeles at dusk and a Disney-like quality to the shopping arcades and restaurants. Encounter at LAX photo by Gregg Chadwick The level of energy is similar to New York but it is spread out horizontally and tends to dissipate along the edges as the city leaks into Orange County. Prompted by Megan and Murray's recent newcomer's thoughts on L.A. and my current exhibit at the LACMA Art Rental and Sales Gallery, I have begun to think about Los Angeles as a muse as well as a subject. What siren calls does this city sing? Ed Ruscha "LACMA On Fire" At my opening at LACMA last Friday, more than one person came up to me and asked if I was in the business -referring to film and television. As an artist in L.A. you must not forget your place on the periphery. But in that benign neglect, there is freedom for a visual artist. There is a sense of possibility even. And chance. Gregg Chadwick...

by Gregg Chadwick Artists create communities. And artists that share representation by the same gallery form a family. Dysfunctional maybe. But still a family. As a family of artists and with deep sadness those of us who exhibit at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco mourn the passing of Tom Fowler. Again, we are reminded how fragile life is. " More influential than current art trends is the religious or spiritual tradition of writing repetitive phrases as a form of meditation. Zen Buddhist scroll writings and Hebrew holographic writings are examples of this. Another motivation is the tradition of penitence. Saying a hundred Hail Mary's, or having to write mistakes over and over on a blackboard, is something we are all familiar with." - Tom Fowler Tom Fowler  "Why" There will be a memorial service for Tom Fowler at The Melting Point Gallery on Sunday, May 15, at 2:00 PM. The Melting Point is located at 1340 Bryant Street in San Francisco...

Carol Vogel at the New York Times reports: "Lawrence Graff, the London jeweler, successfully outbid five other contenders for "Liz," one of Andy Warhol's series of 13 paintings of Ms. Taylor, this one against a deep-red background. The 1963 painting was being sold by Irving Blum, the Los Angeles art dealer who had owned it for 40 years."

"Gregg Chadwick paints scenes from the life of Asia that reminds us of the monastic life of pilgrimage which has been all but lost in the West." -Ratnagarbha and Thomas Jones from "Urthona: Journal of Buddhism and the Arts" Issue 20 Gregg Chadwick The Crossing 48"x72" oil on linen 2004  Thanks to Anna Conti for her recent comments on my work and site. Enjoyed her tour of the downtown San Francisco galleries. And Tyler Green is pondering the state of art in LA while reading about the Tate in London. Provacative ideas. Also a must read is Megan McMillan's account of skipping out of high school to sit in the cool chill of Church's iceburgs.

by Gregg Chadwick This weekend in San Francisco (May 2005) an important and powerful film series by the British Director Adam Curtis was screened. Jeanne Carstensen from the San Francisco Chronicle explains,"The Power of Nightmares," Curtis' three-part series, broadcast on BBC last fall... asks hard questions about the scope of the global war on terror, such as whether al Qaeda is really as vast and powerful a network of international terrorism as we've been led to believe. But "Nightmares" also digs much deeper, into the roots of neoconservatism and radical Islamism, two conservative movements that have significantly helped shape geopolitical events since the end of World War II. As we near the four-year mark of a war that has no definable end, "Nightmares" asks viewers to consider the idea, and its implications, that politicians and citizens alike are now living in a society driven by fear above all else." Jeanne Carstensen continue...

by Gregg Chadwick HEAD Magazine , an online publication from the United Kingdom, is featuring a group of my paintings in their latest issue in a visual article entitled: "Remembered Like a Dream" . cover photo by Dominik Weyerke The staff at HEAD magazine describes the intent of their efforts: "HEAD Magazine is an online publication designed to showcase the creative talents of established and emerging visual artists from all over the world. HEAD Magazine was founded in 2003 by Steve Kraitt and Nicolene Hannan, and provides an editorial and advertising-free platform for exhibiting the work of photographers, artists, illustrators and designers. From the outset, the central ethos and conceptual objective of HEAD Magazine has been to provide artists with a global platform of the "purest" form. It was the primary intention of Steven and Nicolene to create a publication that concerned itself entirely and exclusively with the presentation of visual art, ...

by Gregg Chadwick April 26 The Basque city of Guernica was firebombed by the Condor Legion of the Nazi Luftwaffe sixty-eight years ago today prompting Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica". The fascist states of Germany and Italy had provided men and military aid to the forces under Franco who were trying to wrest control of Spain from the democratically elected government. Picasso "Study for Guernica" graphite on paper 1937 "A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it." - Pablo Picasso News of the firebombing of Guernica reached Paris on April 27th in a broadcast by Radio Bilbao. Within that week, Picasso abandoned his initial ideas for a painting destined for the Spanish Pavilion at the soon to open World's Fair. On May 1st he began a series of gr...

by Gregg Chadwick Bruce Springsteen's latest album will be released on April 26th, 2005. But the title track, "Devils and Dust" is already available. Like the compelling story in the newspaper that you find well after the hype of the front page, the characters in this new song are riveting yet invisible to the general public. The music is stripped down, at times hardscrabble and barren like the physical and emotional landscapes that these characters roam. As a painter, when I listen to Springsteen's hard fought melodies and stark vocals, I see images. And many times I see images painted by Edward Hopper. Edward Hopper Gas Museum of Modern Art, New York Hopper's figures share with Springsteen's characters a very American way of being. Not always pretty- but always present. Both Hopper's paintings and Springsteen's songs are lit by a sort of American light that exists not to create atmosphere, but to light objects. This same light is ...

by Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick "Poem of the River" 36"x29" oil on linen 2005 Julie Weiss, who designed the costumes for the films Frida, American Beauty and Twelve Monkeys, recently stepped into my studio to view my new paintings. She was struck by the garments of remembrance that ran across the wall: saffron robed monks, a trio of women in kimonos, a boy in blue running across an open beach. Julie Weiss said, “ The paintings all together are like a ribbon across time and experience. We are following these monks on their journey. We see with their eyes as they pass by storefronts and streets. We are with them in fate, chance and accident.” This ribbon began a few years ago in Thailand during a journey with my father. He was acting as a visiting lawyer involved in issues of justice and human rights. I would scurry out at dawn to wander the alleys of Chiang Mai and would catch the monks on their small morning pilgrimages. The morning of my last day wa...

Miranda July, recently involved with the Learning to Love You More project which made stops along the West Coast as part of the Baja to Vancouver exhibition and was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, has a new film and a new blog . Miranda July, The Swan Tool "I loved Miranda July's piquantly original first feature film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know", about a fragile, quirky,and imperfect human connection. It was probably my favorite among the American Dramas I saw at Sundance, and I loved it like a poem or perhaps like a piece of performance art for which Miranda July is known; it is also poem-size, the kind of exotic delicacy likely to bloom only in festival soil." - Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

by Gregg Chadwick California's actor governor knows all about film screenings. After his latest off the cuff and out of control quip: "Close the borders. Close the borders in California, and all across Mexico and the United States. Because I think it is just unfair to have all of those people coming across, and to have the borders open the way it is. We in California have to still finish the border. That is the key thing -- to have borders and to keep the law, enforce the law.", Schwarzenegger told hundreds of newspaper publishers at the Newspaper Association of America convention at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Arnold needs to arrange a private screening of Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi's film - "A Day Without A Mexican". In an interview with Bija Gutoff on the Apple Final Cut Pro site Sergio explains the genesis of the film: “I was waiting for my car to be washed, and this guy handed me a tip,” says Sergio Arau. “In a restaurant someone...

by Gregg Chadwick Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany Is Elected 265th Pope, Taking Benedict XVI as Name The newly elected pope is a divisive figure and an acknowledged opponent of a contemporary, pluralistic and modern culture. In a world beset with war, over-population, environmental degradation, religious strife, AIDS, prejudice and racism, we need a religious leader who embraces humanity in all its colors, genders, orientations and talents. Instead we are presented with a man who is according to Rose Marie Berger of Sojourner's Magazine, "dogmatic, and rule-bound. Inclusive language makes him queasy. Liberation theology and women's ordination give him hives." The new pope sees pluralist modernity as heresy and homosexuality as a moral and psychological disorder. As Cardinal, Ratzinger predicted that Buddhism would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church’s main enemy this century. "Art itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme...

by Gregg Chadwick "I was really changed by my experiences in Afghanistan. It is a luxury for people to say war is bad when they are in San Francisco. You need to make friends with people in the U.S. government in order to get a change in policy. You can't say something is bad unless you come in with ways to fix it." -Marla Ruzicka Marla Ruzicka and Matt Gonzalez at Laila Carlsen's show, San Francisco City Hall photo by Gregg Chadwick The war in Iraq is a senseless accumulation of deaths. Marla Ruzicka, the founder and tireless leader of CIVIC (The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict) and Faiz Ali Salim, (CIVIC's Iraq Country Director) were just two of the most recent casualties. But for the San Francisco art community these deaths struck home. Marla was good friends with Matt Gonzalez and frequented the art openings in Matt's office at City Hall when she was in town drumming up support for her campaign to account for the civilian deaths...

by Gregg Chadwick The Los Angeles Times reports on the controversy over the gift of a sculpture by the figurative artist Robert Graham to the city of Venice, California. Diane Haithman in the LA Times reports,"The Los Angeles City Council approved the yet-to-be completed artwork, a gift to the city from the artist and Venice donor Roy Doumani, last June. But earlier this month a handful of Venice residents filed appeals with the city to block the sculpture's placement in Windward Circle, a traffic circle ringed with funky eateries, wacky gift shops and chic boutiques." Robert Graham's work, like that of the Bay Area sculptor Stephen de Staebler and Rodin before him, plays on the history of classical sculpture and its fragmentation over time. The proposed sculpture for Venice is an elevated stainless steel female torso. The work would focus on the core of the body minus extremities. This emphasis helps to exclude a reading of the sculpture as a portrait of an indi...

J.T. Kirkland on his site: thinking about art has a call out for artists to interview other artists. Formulate five interview questions that you would like another artist to answer. Send them on to J.T. He will then provide you with five questions from another artist that you will answer and return. JT will post the interviews periodically.

Peter Schjeldahl was also at SFMOMA last Thursday evening - Anna Conti who graciously provided a link to my entries on Neil Welliver and Peter Schjeldahl provides a detailed account of Thursday's lecture: Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA

by Gregg Chadwick Neil Welliver, who died this week, painted the Maine landscape with rigorous vision and an all-over technique inspired by abstract expressionism that gave his work a Thoreau-like spirit of both the pragmatic and the numinous. He settled on a daringly simple method of painting. Starting from the top of his large, usually square paintings, Welliver would finish a corner, then a horizontal strip and work his way down the surface of the work until he painted his way out in the last corner. There is a freshness of seeing and paint in these works that bring to life both the crisp light of Maine and the inner workings of Neil's richly intelligent and humorous mind. Neil Welliver, Vickie 48"x48" oil on canvas 1970 "Courbet looked very hard and had a method. Bierstadt did not look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he goes along. I think I relate much more to de Kooning because I look very hard and then I make it up as I...

by Gregg Chadwick Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA photo by Gregg Chadwick Peter Schjeldahl , currently the art critic for the New Yorker, held a roundtable discussion with Neal Benezra, director SFMOMA, and Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture SFMOMA, yesterday at the Wattis Theater in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His enthusiasm for art and artists was palpable. And his wit was in rare form. During the question and answer session following the discussion it was announced by an artist in the back rows of the Wattis Theater that painting was dead. Peter chuckled and then asked,” What kind of art do you do?" The artist responded that she was involved in art that utilized new technologies. Peter laughed again and blurted out, "Well, there you go, trying to kill off the competition." He neither dismissed the woman nor her art but instead pointed out the careerism hiding behind many art labels and preferences. When I asked about the place of beauty...

From: Japan Society Gallery, Spring 2005 Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture Curated by Takashi Murakami April 8 - July 24, 2005 Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture explores the culture of postwar Japan through its arts and popular visual media, from the perspective of one of Japan's most celebrated artists. Focusing on the phenomenally influential subcultures of otaku (roughly translated as "pop cult fanaticism") and its relationships to Japan's artistic vanguard, Takashi Murakami explores the historical influences that shape Japanese contemporary art and its distinct graphic idioms. The exhibition's title, Little Boy, refers to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, clearly locating the birth of these new cultural forms in the trauma and generational aftershock. In Murakami's perspective, a resonant figure for Japan's contemporary condition is that of the "little boy"--both the nickname fo...

by Gregg Chadwick Thomas L. Friedman's new book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century'' , argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the first in a series of important events that have ushered in the 21st Century. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing dissolution of the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe allowed us to see the world, maybe for the first time, as one whole fabric. Moby April 1, 2005 photo by Gregg Chadwick "It was a result of events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000 ...The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space.’ The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,' the Nobel Prize-winning economist...

In the current issue of "Science News", Barbara Berrie and Louisa Matthew, from the conservation department at the National Gallery of Art, report on new discoveries in the paint formulation of sixteenth century Venetian paintings. It seems that ground glass was added to the powdered pigments upon grinding in linseed oil to increase transparency and to speed the drying time of the paint. Microscopic traces of glass were found in samples of Lorenzo Lotto's pigments viewed by Berrie "using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectrometry, among other sophisticated analytical techniques" "Upon closer examination, Berrie found high-quality silica in a form routinely used by Venetian glassmakers. During the Renaissance, they obtained it from quartzite pebbles along the Ticino River in northern Italy. They would then grind the quartzite into a fine powder." Lorenzo Lotto detail: Allegory of Virtue and Vice, 1505, National Gallery of ...