Delightful Santa Monica restaurant Upper West is counting down the days ‘til its next featured artist celebration next weekend when the art on its walls is changed for the next few months.
The restaurant located at 3321 Pico Blvd., in conjunction with LAartparty.com, will host an opening reception in its dining room that’s free and open to the public for artist Gregg Chadwick’s exhibit “Cinema of Time” on Sunday, July 12 from 4 pm to 7 pm.
Upper West features the works of different artists throughout the year; the pieces can be purchased at the end of the exhibition.
Chadwick creates his artwork in an old airplane hangar in Santa Monica.
The recurring sound of airplane take-offs and landings from the active airport runaway outside his studio reminds him of his own history of travel.
Chadwick has exhibited his artworks in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally.
He earned a Bachelor’s Degree at UCLA and a Master’s Degree at NYU, both in Fine Art. He has had notable solo exhibitions at the Manifesta Maastricht Gallery (Maastricht, The Netherlands), Space AD 2000 (Tokyo, Japan), the Lisa Coscino Gallery (Pacific Grove), and the Sandra Lee Gallery (San Francisco) among others.
He has participated in nearly 100 group exhibitions including the LOOK Gallery (Los Angeles), the Arena 1 Gallery (Santa Monica), the di Rosa Preserve Gallery (Napa), and the Arts Club of Washington (Washington DC).
Chadwick’s art is notably included in the collections of the Adobe Corporation, the Gilpin Museum, the Graciela Hotel – Burbank, the Harbor Court Hotel – San Francisco; the Kimpton Group’s headquarters in San Francisco, the National Museum of the Marine Corps, Nordstrom Company Headquarters, the W Hotel Hollywood, and Winona State University.
Chadwick is frequently invited to lecture on the arts; from 2011-14 he spoke at UCLA, Monterey Peninsula College, the Esalen Institute, the World Views forum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and at Categorically Not, a monthly forum that considers the arts and science.
For more information on Upper West or to RSVP, call 310.586.1111 or visit www.theupperwest.com.
How many pieces will you have on display for this new exhibition?
Chadwick: I will be exhibiting around 14 oil paintings at Upper West that range from the largest at 6.5 feet by 6.5 feet to the smallest at 14”x11”.
What is your inspiration for these works?
The exhibition is entitled “Cinema of Time” and reflects the ephemeral nature of our lives as well as the aspirations we carry in our cinema dreams.
The large scale faces in the show echo the giant close-ups of starlets and leading men on the silver screen while the more intimate paintings seem to reflect our more current immersion into personal tablets and cell phones.
For me paintings are like films and seem to speak a global, visual language.
Often, bits of ghostly, fragmented memories pop up with the hint of a remembered song, color, or aroma. I relish these revenant moments and use them as access points into my current paintings. Ghost trains roll down long abandoned tracks. Lost buildings reappear. Shadows of former selves are reflected in this mirrored world. The crackle of distant radio transmissions seems to blend with the staccato of binary code. Apparitions of friends, family, fellow artists, and passersby find their way, sometimes unbidden but welcomed, into the works.
Over what time period were they created?
The paintings were created in the last four years from 2011 to 2015.
What is your process for creating these pieces from start to finish?
My paintings begin with a remembered or observed moment that is sketched then spread loosely onto the surface of the painting with fluid oil colors. Layers of transparent paint overlap and merge with earlier painting sessions to create a sense of shifting time.
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. Figures appear and then often vanish into the mix of memory and moment. Themes may shift during the painting process and locations may change much as our thoughts can move quickly from one memory to another. In this fashion each painting is an accumulation of time.
Anything else you would like to mention?
Jeffrey Carlson has written two pieces for “Fine Art Connoisseur” on my artwork “Gregg Chadwick and Painting Time” and “Gregg Chadwick’s ‘Revenant’”. I’m currently represented by the Sandra Lee Gallery in San Francisco.
In November 2015, I will be speaking at The Representational Art Conference TRAC 2015 in Ventura, California.
My website is at www.greggchadwick.com.
