White Noise
-- Gregg Chadwick
60" x 60" oil on linen 2002
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An afternoon light gleams through jars of powdered color lined up against my window. The pigments seem to ignite and remind me of molten glass in Murano. I take a jar, spoon out a bit of the dry powder onto a sheet of glass and drip linseed oil onto the glowing mound. The color darkens as the pigment soaks up the oil. I think again of the Venetian glass furnaces and how molten glass as it loses its fire cools then hardens and darkens into color. I add more oil and with a muller work the dry powder and the viscous oil together into a rich paste. The fresh color is pure and glows with its own light yet carries weight and body.
On the wall is a fresh canvas white and virginal. I can paint with the color of fire or water. Of earth or air. In a time of loss I choose fire and spread a burning cinnabar across the entire surface. The painting emits its own glow into the room. I dip a Japanese brush into oil and azure then run the flowing paint across the surface catching a ghost of an image. I grab a new brush for each mark and color. I hold up a paint-encrusted slide to the light. It lets me into a world as clean and bright as the day I shot the image. That day in Bangkok the world shifted. The summer hours slide by as the image builds. I take a sip of green tea and step back to view the painting as the daylight fails. A young monk crosses the canvas in a world caught between color and elegy, between memory and dream.
--Gregg Chadwick, September 2002
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