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Where to Find my Paintings
Manifesta Maastricht, The Netherlands
Look Gallery, Los Angeles
Lisa Coscino Gallery
Santa Monica Art Studios

Peter Clothier's new review of my work captures the soul and spirit of my art.
Enjoy
Gregg

Monks
by Peter Clothier

Gregg Chadwick has recently been doing paintings of Buddhist monks in saffron robes, often striding forward into a shimmer of light. The series originated in an experience which the paintings themselves reveal only secretly: Gregg was returning home from a trip to Thailand in September, 2001 and, while waiting for a connecting flight in Bangkok airport, found himself watching a television monitor with the disbelief and horror he shared with the rest of the world as the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Earlier in the day, he had been wandering the streets of Chiang Mai and was enchanted by the sight of some monks on a morning pilgrimage. "The almost incandescent light," he writes, "and the blur of movement seemed to create paintings for me. I just needed to pay attention... For me, these monks are spiritual pilgrims that lead us away from the destruction and waste of violence, racism, and hatred."

The resulting paintings have a remarkable serenity. The figures of the monks lack focus. They exist in an aura of light rather than on some earthly plane. They move through space like transient beings, absorbed in their own silent, meditative isolation. In this way, they seem to project some of the real values of their Buddhist faith: the inevitable passage of time that is at the root of so much human suffering, the illusory quality of what we take to be the real world and, most importantly, the promise of an escape from suffering into enlightenment.

There is an other-worldly quality to these paintings, a sense of liberation from the bonds of gravity that define our physical existence. They celebrate the dedication of the monks they portray and convey some of the quiet joy that freedom from earthly needs invests in them. And yet, too, there is an elegiac tone, a kind of nostalgia for a manifestation of the purely spiritual that most of us can never hope to attain. The paintings are truly captivating in that they invite us irresistibly into their spaces and hold the attention there in their swirl of light and color, suggesting inexhaustible depths of experience for the eye to explore.

I think I have spoken elsewhere in The Buddha Diaries about the "One Hour/One Painting" series I offered in a number of gallery and museum contexts a while ago. The idea was to bring together a small group of people to sit with me in front of a single painting for a whole hour, alternating closed-eye meditation with open-eye contemplation in order to experience the painting as we rarely do, in our habitual rush to grab an eyeful and move on to the next. I left Gregg's studio thinking what a treat it would be to offer a session with one of these paintings that so invite precisely that kind of slow and attentive interaction; and whose effect is to wonderfully elevate the human spirit. It is, after all, as Gregg suggests, a matter of paying attention.


Please read the full review here on Peter's site:
Monks by Peter Clothier

Peter Clothier has a long and distinguished career as an art writer, novelist and poet. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Artscene, ARTNews and other publications. Peter writes a daily weblog,The Buddha Diaries, and is a contributing blogger to The Huffington Post. He also hosts a monthly podcast entitled "The Art of Outrage," on ArtScene Visual Radio."

Peter Clothier's latest book is Persist.



The Space of Memory

As I look out my window this morning to a clear blue sky, I am encouraged to believe that we live in luminous times. My current paintings are informed by the challenges of our era but most importantly are spurred on by the hope of each new day.

Just months before his death, I saw the painter RB Kitaj after a UCLA sponsored presentation he gave at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Kitaj saw a card gripped in my hand of my painting, A Walk with Ganesh, and he started our brief conversation saying, “Is that for me? I would like to have that.” I handed him the card and watched him examine the image of the painting in his hands, and then my face as we talked. Moved by our discussion, I went home and painted Kitaj as he appeared that evening; white beard, roaring voice, stern focus, like a prophet calling figurative artists, in particular, to “paint their worlds.”

My world today is a fusion of the present moment, tempered by the memory of the past, and thrust into the future by the motion of time. Travels since childhood have taken me from the U.S. to Asia to Australia to Europe and back, again and again. These wanderings provide a series of spaces that appear within my paintings.

My painting process is grounded in traditional materials. I start with primed linen canvas made in Belgium, as it has been done for centuries. For each painting I grind some of my pigments into linseed oil to make oil colors. As I use these methods, I am physically engaged in the now, pulling moments from our flux of time and space. The figures in my paintings express what it means to be alive in the mixing and crossing of the 21st century, here in the U.S. and across the globe.

After I finished my Master’s Degree in Fine Art at NYU, I moved for a time to London to seek out the spaces of RB Kitaj’s paintings and the light of JMW Turner. In a small studio at the Royal College of Art I painted in a space in which Kitaj also had painted. The window beside my easel opened to a vast Turnerian sky. Past, present and future fused into the now. Inspiration was made current by the very space in which I stood in that moment, with such awareness and clarity. Today in my studio in Santa Monica, as I press into the future, that moment echoes and beckons and urges me on.

Gregg Chadwick
December 2008

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