The Painted Word

Defending the Muse: Michael Stein and Paul Georges

2011-09-25T00:14:00.001-07:00

Paul Georges
The Studio
120”x79 1/2” oil on canvas 1965
The Whitney Museum Collection, New York
Courtesy Paul Georges Estate

Michael Stein's new novel "The Rape of the Muse" ponders the worth of art and the place of beauty in our contemporary society. Stein's re-imagining of painter Paul Georges' trial for libel in 1980 updates the events to the 21st century and fleshes out the characters with a post September 11th ennui. When Georges' trial took place in 1980, the Neo-Expressionist boom in art was just beginning. Emotional, brightly colored paintings using the figure as a theme filled galleries in New York and Europe. In that time Paul Georges’ artwork was included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But still, Georges was an outsider looking in on an art world that often considered narrative painting to be atavistic at best - reactionary at worst.

Paul Georges
The Mugging of the Muse
80”x103” oil on canvas 1972-1974
Courtesy Paul Georges Estate

Michael Stein adeptly weaves elements of Paul Georges' life into the story of his fictive painter - Harris Montrose. Montrose cares deeply about the gift and responsibility of art. This humble esteem for the muse that stokes his creative fire leads to a showdown with an artistic colleague over a limned image. Are we all fair game for artistic interpretation? Is anything really private anymore? Is the language of painting relevant to our time?

Stein brings in a young artist, already marked by the reigning critics as one to watch, who is psychologically blocked from the creative process. This young artist, Rand Taber, becomes Montrose's studio assistant. As if in a scene from Martin Scorsese's segment in the film "New York Stories", Taber learns life lessons from his mentor Montrose. In this sense, Michael Stein seems to hold up the elder painter as a pugnacious model of validity. Harris Montrose paints like his life depends on it. The muse needs to be honored. And if anyone gets in the way they should heed the warnings. The muse shall be avenged.

It is refreshing to read a work in which art is considered deeply as much more than a commodity or a means to privilege. Michael Stein’s “The Rape of the Muse” is gutsy – almost an aesthetic bar fight of a novel. It is heartening to feel Paul Georges’ passion seep into Stein’s writing. Art is not just style. At its best, art considers life and then makes something new. Michael Stein’s “The Rape of the Muse” digs into the life and work of the forceful painter Paul Georges and conjures up a story for our moment.

Highly recommended.

Michael Stein

More at:
Life and Art of Paul Georges
Michael Stein's Website

Theater of Memory: New Exhibit Opens October 4, 2011 at the Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery

2011-09-16T13:21:00.001-07:00

Gregg Chadwick
Theater of Memory
48"x48" oil on canvas 2011

Theater of Memory
New Paintings by Gregg Chadwick

Curated by Melissa Pickford

Monterey Peninsula College of Art Gallery

Opening on October 4, 2011
Runs until November 4, 2011

One could say we all create paintings as we distill meaning from the rush of life. Experiences, moments, thoughts, actions, memories, and dreams mix together and overlap in our minds and hearts bringing patterns and understanding in our everyday life. My paintings in the exhibit, Theater of Memory at the Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery, echo this cognitive-emotional process. My artworks evolve through a series of painting sessions in which colors and images overlap, merge, and flow.

At times, my paintings begin close to home with remembered dreams of family members. In the title painting, Theater of Memory, my much loved late nephew Luke Chadwick appeared unbidden, but at the perfect moment. His faint smile recalled a day many years before, when I began a painting in his Seattle bedroom. As Luke watched me mix my paints on an improvised palette, he exclaimed with the intuitive vision of a child that the color I had mixed would not do. “Don’t fear color”, he said in so many words, as he pointed to a rich ultramarine glistening on my palette.

In honor of Luke and my father, Robert Chadwick, I purchased a tube of genuine lapis lazuli from the London color maker Michael Harding. This true ultramarine, ground into a crystalline powder and mixed with linseed oil on a stone mill, is the color blue found in Renaissance skies. Transparent layers of this lapis mark each of my paintings in this exhibit. Sourced in Afghanistan, lapis lazuli, reflects the historical tides of trade, conquest and conflict that ebb and flow across this region and the globe.

More at:
Gregg Chadwick's Theater of Memory

Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery

980 Fremont Street Monterey, CA 93940-4799

Melissa Pickford, Curator
More info at: mpickford@mpcgallery.com
831 646-3060

Receptions for the artist:
Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011 from 12:30 – 2 pm
&
Saturday, Oct. 8, 2011 from 4 – 6 pm

Gallery Hours: Tues-Fri 11am - 4pm or by appointment
Admission: Free
Parking: 4 quarters

Catalog Available:

Theater of Memory: Paintings by Gregg Chadwick by Gregg Chadwick | Make Your Own Book

Please Note:
Also in the gallery under the tandem title Humanitas: Paintings by Cynthia Grilli.

Finding Beauty in Our Art & Lives: Upcoming Workshop With Gregg Chadwick & Phil Cousineau at Esalen in Big Sur (Weekend of September 30-October 2, 2011)

2011-09-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

Gregg Chadwick
Beauty and Sadness ( 美しさと哀しみと)

Often cocooned in our metal boxes as we speed through our days, modern life can seem barren and uncreative. How do we find joy in our lives? Where is that creative spark found?

Join Gregg Chadwick and Phil Cousineau as we explore the nature of beauty in our art and being.
Coming up at Esalen during the weekend of September 30 through October 2nd 2011, we will venture into the realms of artistic creation and personal discovery with exercises in visual art and discussions around the mythic importance of beauty. I hope you can join us at Esalen as we use the arts to get back to life.

For info and reservations:
Who Stole the Arms of the Venus de Milo? The Myth of Beauty from Aphrodite to Ansel Adams
Feel free to email me directly with questions or ideas at speedoflife@mac.com .

December 3-5, 2010 at Esalen: Gregg Chadwick and Phil Cousineau on Stoking the Creative Fires

2010-11-14T09:06:00.001-08:00

Gregg Chadwick
Jordaan Window
25cmx25cm oil on wood 2010

Coming up on December 3-5, 2010, I am honored to lead a workshop on creativity with writer Phil Cousineau entitled Stoking the Creative Fires: Nine Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination

Phil Cousineau's book "Stoking the Creative Fires" is an impassioned volume on creativity that combines myth, story and personal pilgrimages in a primer on the creative life. My painting "Fire Dream" graces the cover.
We will use this book as a stepping off point for the upcoming workshop on creativity. It will be a rich journey through myth and art at Esalen. Sign up here: Reserve this workshop
We hope to see you there!

The Esalen Institute is a non-profit organization founded in 1962 by Stanford alums Michael Murphy and Richard Price as an alternative educational center devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called the "human potential." This world of unrealized human capacities that lies beyond the imagination has brought to Esalen a steady influx of philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers.

Phil Cousineau at Esalen

Allan Hunt Badiner explains the history of Esalen:
"Esalen takes its name from the Native American tribe, the Esselen, that once lived there. Sitting on a former ceremonial ground, the Esalen property was the site of frequent cross-tribal peace gatherings. Esselen cosmology described Big Sur as a “weaving” center for human culture and drew representatives from tribes, near and far. Today, Esalen draws 10,000 people a year from around the world to participate in a wildly diverse menu of workshops. It brought former Russian President Boris Yeltsin to the West, popularized Rolfing and Gestalt, and nurtured books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Esalen created a context for understanding psychedelics, established the healing power of massage, and championed wisdom of the body. Visitors often mention that the land itself and spectacular coastline setting feels almost sacred." Allan's words are not surprising, given the retreat’s lineage of powerful teachers such as Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Fritz Perls, Allen Ginsberg, Ida Rolf, Joan Baez, Boris Yeltsin, Philip Glass, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller and countless others who have visited and taught at Esalen in an effort to discuss, debate and develop revolutionary ideas, transformative practices, and innovative art forms.

More at:
Phil Cousineau
Gregg Chadwick
Stoking the Creative Fires
"Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion" by Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen at the Edge. From Zen and hot tubs to glasnost, the famed Big Sur retreat has changed our minds, bodies, and ways of looking at the world.
- by past workshop participant Allan Hunt Badiner

Esalen Glow

2008-08-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

Sunset at the Esalen Institute

This past week I was honored to lead a workshop on creativity with writer Phil Cousineau and writer/musician RB Morris.
The Esalen Institute is a non-profit organization founded in 1962 by Stanford alums Michael Murphy and Richard Price as an alternative educational center devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called the "human potential." This world of unrealized human capacities that lies beyond the imagination has brought to Esalen a steady influx of philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers.

Late afternoon at Esalen in Big Sur. Taken during a workshop on creativity by Phil Cousineau, RB Morris, and Gregg Chadwick.

Recently Phil Cousineau's new book "Stoking the Creative Fires" has hit the shelves. It is an impassioned volume on creativity that combines myth, story and personal pilgrimages in a primer on the creative life. My painting "Fire Dream" graces the cover.
We used this book as a stepping off point for the workshop. I am hoping in the future to have time for a more thorough journey through myth and art at Esalen. Stay tuned.

Workshop participant Natasha.

More at:
Phil Cousineau
RB Morris
"Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion" by Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen at the Edge. From Zen and hot tubs to glasnost, the famed Big Sur retreat has changed our minds, bodies, and ways of looking at the world.
- by workshop participant Allan Hunt Badiner

Phil Cousineau and Gregg Chadwick On Creativity

2006-12-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

This upcoming weekend Phil and I will be presenting the second in a series of exploratory workshops at the Esalen Institute.

Gregg Chadwick
"Immersed in Silence"
60"x48" oil on linen 2006

Upcoming Workshop at Esalen,Big Sur

Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick

DEC 22-24, 2006 AT ESALEN INSTITUTE

"Genius is the power for lighting your own fire." -- Emerson

For thousands, one of the profound mysteries of human adventure has been the creative impulse. The irrepressible urge to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is an essential part of what makes us human. But while creativity is as natural as breathing, it is also notoriously elusive, challenging, and riddled with ordeals--like any grand adventure.

This workshop will use a three-stage model of the Creative Journey -- Inspiration, Process, Realization-- to explore what it means to harness our imagination and tend our creative fires over the course of a lifetime. To explore this possibility, the course will use innovative exercises to encourage fresh ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling. These include listening for the color of music while drawing, sketching word colors while working on a poem; using photographs, movies and music to help break through creative block.

The leaders will also share the secrets which have allowed them to break their own creative blocks, such as Phil's sketching to help rekindle his powers of observation, and Gregg's use of writing and reading poetry and working with music to help him constellate new work.

There will be slideshows, film-clips, music, and discussion to help crystalize where students are on their own unique journey -- and what they need to make their vision a realilty.

This passion - filled workshop will appeal to artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, as well as teachers, parents, psychologists, and business leaders -- all who are fascinated with the creative adventure.

For reservations and more info see: Cousineau and Chadwick

Address: Esalen Institute 55000 Highway 1, Big Sur, CA 93920-9616
Esalen's Fax: 831-667-2724
Reservations:
831-667-3005

Calling All Angels: Suzanne Pullen tells her story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

2006-03-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

Suzanne Pullen at Esalen

Our Esalen friend Suzanne Pullen tells her story of stillbirth in the San Francisco Chronicle: Calling All Angels
An absolute must read.

podcast:
Suzanne's Story

Read the whole story at: Calling All Angels

Thoughts On the Last Day of an Exhibition: Drawings From Leonardo to Titian at the Getty

2006-02-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

Jacopo Bassano
"Christ Driving the Money Changers From the Temple"
17 3/16" x 21 3/8" black and colored chalks on blue paper circa 1570
Getty Collection

Jacobo Bassano's "Christ Driving the Money Changers From the Temple" is a remarkable drawing. Rich, swirling masses of colored chalks are rubbed and shaded onto a colored sheet of paper defining a light filled atmosphere as much as a biblical scene. The freedom of execution in this preliminary study seems to speak directly to the Venetian love for complex coloristic effects.

Jacopo Bassano learned much from Titian. Titian's oil paintings are richly layered with unique pigments from around the world that were readily available because of the Venetian Republic's long maritime reach. With access to these powders, which would be ground with linseed oil to form paint, Venetian artists such as Titian and Giorgione were able to lay out singular colored atmospheres. In essence Titian at his finest was thinking in color.

In this drawing Bassano is applying Titian's painting technique to chalk on paper. Rich oranges, saffrons and ruddy browns define the interior of the Temple and evoke an impression of crowded warmth. Pearly greys mark the architecture and frame the cool blue patch that recedes into an image of distant sky. Blurred, shadowy figures rush from the warmth into this singular blue.

Intended as a study for a religious work, the drawing is not entirely abstract. Within its swirling color fields, what Huston Smith has termed "a universal grammar of religion", speaks to us across the centuries. The story of Jesus in the Temple is not truly an indictment of usury but instead a call for a new world in which animal sacrifices would no longer be needed:

"Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the Temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the Temple, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables."
(John 2:13-16)

In Bassano's drawing, ghostly figures flee from the warmth of their dated and violent practices of sacrifice into an open spiritual space that demands respect for life.

*The exhibition From Leonardo to Titian ends today at the Getty Museum.

The Dialogue

2005-12-09T11:42:00.000-08:00

Phil and I want to thank all of you for your hard work and willingness to dive into the thoughts and exercises that we presented in "The Painted Word". Please send on your ideas, writings, projects and images so we can continue the dialogue. -Gregg

Drawing with Van Gogh

2005-12-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

"To say these pictures required a kind of monkish devotion to draw is in part to reiterate his inherited Dutch Reform ideas about nature and the revelation of God. Nature was virtually supernatural to him. There is no better proof that he wasn't the mad hatter of movie legend than these painstaking tributes to sublime countryside - as Robert Hughes once put it about van Gogh's paintings, "if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis."
-Michael Kimmelman, New York Times

Van Gogh's drawings have a quality of vision that astounds. Each area in the Zouave is drawn with a different series of marks from Van Gogh's reed pens. It is as if each part is presented in a different artistic language: the stippled face, the vertically marked wall, the crosshatched hat.

Seeing With the Brush, Esalen "The Painted Word", December 2005

Last weekend at Esalen, Phil Cousineau and I presented our thoughts on the creative process. Writing and drawing begin with a dark mark on a blank sheet. This urge to create marks can be seen as one partial definition of humanity. Like the cave dwellers in the Dordogne in unrecorded time, we have an urge to leave our mark on the wall.

Bulls Head, Lascaux

By connecting deep attention with a simplicity of means, true vision emerges.

The exhibition of Van Gogh's drawings continues at the Metropolitan Museum in New York until December 31st, 2005.

Van Gogh Podcast narrated by Kevin Bacon

Esalen, Saturday Afternoon

2005-12-04T22:10:00.000-08:00

Mindfulness

2005-11-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

Gregg Chadwick
Siddhartha
8"x6" oil on linen 2005

David Ian Miller:
Let's begin with a basic question: What is mindfulness and why is it important?
Mindfulness is an innate human capacity to deliberately pay full attention to where we are, to our actual experience, and to learn from it.

Jack Kornfield:
Much of our day we spend on automatic pilot. People know the experience of driving somewhere, pulling up to the curb and all of a sudden realizing, "Wow, I was hardly aware I was even driving. How did I get here?" When we pay attention, it is gracious, which means that there is space for our joys and sorrows, our pain and losses, all to be held in a peaceful way.

David Ian Miller:
And the path toward mindfulness is meditation?

Jack Kornfield:
Meditation is one good way to learn mindfulness. There are many good ways. To be really good at something, you need to be mindful. A very good chef has to be mindful of the ingredients and the knife and the taste that's actually there in that particular dish. So it's a skill that's a part of human development in many areas.

From a conversation in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick at Esalen

2005-11-25T18:49:00.000-08:00

Upcoming Workshop Weekend of December 2-4, 2005
The Painted Word: A Conversation between Word & Image
at Esalen,Big Sur

Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick

Gregg Chadwick
"La Palabra en el Tiempo" (The word in time)
48"x48" oil on linen 2005

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." — Simonides

For thousands of years, one of the profound mysteries of the human adventure has been the creative impulse. The urge to make new things, to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is essential to what makes us human. While most creative people focus on one art form, there is a venerable tradition, from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Picasso and Akira Kurosawa, that teaches creativity as one vast continuum with no real distinction between drawing and writing.

In this spirit, Gregg Chadwick and Phil Cousineau will use slideshows, film-clips, music, and discussion to explore the intimate relationship between words and images, as well as innovative writing, drawing and painting exercises to encourage fresh ways of seeing and expressing. The workshop will explore crossover techniques between the art forms, such as listening for the color of music while drawing, or sketching word colors while working on a poem. The goal is to marry words to images, text to paint, in order to see and feel in new ways.

Other themes include:
Play theory, visualization, and active imagination
Art and anxiety in a time of war and loss
Pursuit of excellence vs. pursuit of success
The role of mentors

This workshop is for artists, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, as well as teachers, parents, coaches, psychologists, and business leaders—all who are fascinated with the creative adventure.

For reservations and more info see: The Painted Word

Address: Esalen Institute 55000 Highway 1, Big Sur, CA 93920-9616
Esalen's Fax: 831-667-2724
Reservations:
831-667-3005

Phil Cousineau: The Painted Word

2005-11-25T18:07:00.000-08:00

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

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 Chadwick, Huston Smith, Cassiel Chadwick and Phil Cousineau photo by M.V. Heilemann

"The Blue Museum" contains the whole story of one man's life, the way poets seldom do it any more -- the way Wordsworth or Whitman did it, say, or William Carlos Williams, or even, more recently, Charles Olson. Cousineau writes in long, conversational, deceptively casual lines that quickly add up to an explosive critical mass. At times these epiphanies are dazzling, as when Cousineau recalls in "Go-Kart" the first time in childhood he took note of his own being in the world:

My nostrils fill with the smell of freshly mowed grass,

my eyes smart with streaming sunlight, my fingertips warm

to the touch of just-sawed two-by-fours

my thin arms sag under the weight of tools

hauled in from my dad's hand-made,

silver-painted workbench.

All at once --

in one swift moment --

I know I know

I know I'm knowing I'm alive

and not not alive, not dead,

not like my recently deceased grandfather,

not unborn like our neighbor's nine stillborn babies.

Yet Cousineau is equally adept at the sort of short-lined, concise, clear- eyed appreciations of nature perfected by Gary Snyder, whose influence shows in poems like "The Meaning of Happiness," an exquisite lyric about the harmony between man, woman and unborn child:

The swift flow of salmon

in brisk rivers

loud with moonlight

The murmur of lovers

Calling the restless one

In her teeming belly

It takes courage to write poems about one's living wife (Kenneth Rexroth was one of the few before Cousineau to do it superbly), but perhaps even more courage to write about those other giants in our lives, our parents. Cousineau writes of his dead father in "Slow Dissolve":

he was trying to tell me he was dying,

"I don't know how much longer I have left."

Just thirty-two, I didn't believe a guy

could lose his father that young.

I huddled deep into my black leather jacket

that still stank of motorcycle fumes,

felt my heart shrink-wrapped by his cracking voice,

the icy finality with which we shook hands

in the doorway of his apartment.

"The Blue Museum" contains several equally moving poems about Cousineau's role as father himself to his young son, Jack.

-Jack Cousineau

In one poignant poem, driving his son home from Sonoma at night, he is torn by the boy's terrible fear of the darkness, and finds himself lying, as his own father had, to comfort him: "Only then did the words spring free,/ the lie I told to tell the longer truth, / "Don't worry, buddy, we'll be home soon./ I won't let the darkness hurt you. " In this poem, as in so many others, Cousineau is able to draw profound questions out of ordinary daily life, and here he asks with astonishing simplicity: "How do you lead a child/ into the darkness and out again?"

"The Blue Museum" contains poetic tributes to a whole array of artists and heroes who have inspired Cousineau in the literal odyssey of his life, as he has wandered across the globe for decades. There are poems about John Lennon, Anne Frank, Ray Charles, Anna Akhmatova, the bargirls of Naples and the most beautiful ode to Van Gogh I have ever read, "Vincent's Search," in which the poet, perhaps thinking of his own poetry as well, speculates that the painter "never/ searched for more than frankly green, frankly blue landscapes,/ only longed to paint an olive orchard so vivid others/ would want to harvest it, a starry night sky so alive anyone/ who gazed at it would long to lay themselves down/ and sleep the sleep of the ages below it."

Phil Cousineau's latest: Native American Spirituality: Huston Smith and Phil Cousineau in Conversation