Steps of Time

Concept

Ghosts of earlier ideas appear within Gregg Chadwick's artworks and combine with other transparent moments to create a semblance of movement, of time passing. In antiquity and later during the Middle Ages, manuscript pages made from animal hides were often scraped down and used again. Faint traces of the underwritings on these parchments, called palimpsests, survived. Chadwick's painting process involves a series of applications and erasures, echoing these layered fragments from the past. At times, he scrapes down entire wet paintings leaving a fragile palimpsest. These under images often bring forth mysterious fragments from his subconscious. Chadwick builds a combination of shadow and illumination in each painting to create a sensation of light emanating from the work. He works with oil paint and usually create at least one color in each painting from ground pigments mixed by hand with linseed oil. Linseed oil has the propensity to grow more transparent with age and visible traces of earlier painted marks gradually appear because of this tendency — called pentimenti.Chadwick embraces this eventual outcome in his work and incorporates planned and unplanned pentimenti in his process.

By layering paint upon paint, Chadwick builds an artwork through a succession of present moments in time that often combine in unforeseen patterns. A viewer recently remarked that Chadwick's paintings resemble "time travel where the molecules are not quite sure where they belong." This visual conundrum plays with the proposition of many quantum physicists that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.