Q Street
-- Gregg Chadwick
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Every image is the first frame of a movie.
--Wim Wenders
In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been.
--John Berger
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My studio has become a room full of real and imagined film stills echoing the countless hours I have spent in darkened rooms engulfed by massive yet fleeting images of beauty. As an art student in Los Angeles and New York I would run from a strident world of theory and dogma into a realm where beauty still seemed to matter. In the chiaroscuro of Coppola I found echoes of Carravaggio. In the haunting poetry of Wim Wenders I discovered traces of Rilke and Beckmann. In Kurosawa I could almost taste Hiroshige’s Japan. Film for me was painting brought to life. Film gave me the desire to depict the world in flux.
Whenever I get the chance I hang around film locations like a pesky paparazzi collecting images of art in process. I am attracted to the spaces between takes. There is an attentiveness to the moment on a movie set just before the cameras roll that is like the tension in my brush before painting the first stroke on a freshly stretched canvas.
In my paintings sometimes new actors appear, the cast changes or the location appears illusive. Hidden beneath the final image is a series of takes or alternate scenes, which upon close examination can be seen as transparent ghosts. There are movies buried in the paint.
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--Gregg Chadwick, May 2002
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