Gregg Chadwick
Gregg Chadwick
Rio Grande
30”x40” oil on linen 2015
I grew up with the rails of America in my blood. My grandfather Arthur Desch, worked as a fireman stoking coal in steam engines before he advanced to train engineer on the Jersey Central Line. Parties and family gatherings in my grandparent’s home brought the rhythms of the rails home. In their clean but Jersey dank basement, the sounds of railroad workers echoed in the music my aunts and cousins played in the shadows of the train lines outside. From Junior Parker, to Elvis Presley, to Bob Dylan, to Johnny Cash, to The Band, to Bruce Springsteen, to Michael McDermott, to arts writer Greil Marcus, to film writer and director Jim Jarmusch, the enduring mythos of America and its legacy has been wrapped in the blues notes of the song Mystery Train. Recently, while flipping through my mom’s carefully tended scrapbook, I found black and white memories of my family’s yearnings, struggles, and triumphs. Whispers of cellar mysteries found their way back into my thoughts and dreams. Today as I paint, a current song by Gary Clark Jr., When My Train Pulls In, propels me back into memories of earlier sounds of passion and propulsion. My current series of paintings, Mystery Train, is steeped in these powerful echoes of those machine days.
Mystery Train
Stay Tuned for Dates and Locations!
A Traveling Solo Exhibition of New Paintings
Click Here for More Images of Artwork in Mystery Train
Read More on Mystery Train in the Huffington Post:
and the Wall Street International.
Gregg Chadwick
Mystery Train (20th Century Limited)
60”x48” oil on linen 2016
Gregg Chadwick
Pink Cadillac
(Elvis at Graceland)
24”x30” oil on linen 2017
August 2 - 31, 2017
5040 Sanderlin, Suite 104, Memphis, Tennessee 38117
901-767-2200 art@lrossgallery.com
“Gregg Chadwick takes the opposite stance in the oil-on-linen Elvis Presley (Suspicion). Here, a familiar depiction of the singer is rendered in blurry, shadowy lines, as if his memory is slowly fading and becoming the stuff of rumor and legend tending toward oblivion.”
- Fredric Koeppel, The Commercial Appeal
My paintings Pink Cadillac (Elvis at Graceland) and Memphis Train (Arcade Restaurant) have just arrived at the L Ross Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee for my latest exhibition. They will join my painting Suspicion (Elvis Presley) in the exhibition Elvis Has Left the Building which runs from August 2 - 31. This group show, which has become a notable annual event for the L Ross Gallery, will kick off with an opening reception on Friday, August 4 from 6 – 9 pm.
In my recent Clark Hulings Fund podcast with Daniel DiGriz, DiGriz caught me implying that Elvis is alive. On the walls of the L Ross Gallery this August, Elvis does live on, but as Fredric Koeppel writes,"his memory is slowly fading and becoming the stuff of rumor and legend tending toward oblivion." The show title makes this poignantly clear. I have been reading Ray Connolly's new book Being Elvis: A Lonely Life which deftly examines Elvis' life through the lens of Memphis in the 1940's and 1950's. Childhood poverty and class aspirations spurred Elvis on in a way that left no room for error in his art but left his life dangerously open to misfortune and eventual tragedy.
At the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo, Mississippi on September 26, 1956, Elvis played a powerful, homecoming show in the town where he was born in a two-room shack 21 years before. Elvis had left Tupelo when he was thirteen. In the interim, Elvis had become Tupelo's most famous person. As Ray Connolly recounts in Being Elvis: A Lonely Life : "Elvis put on a special show that day...It was staged outside the fairgrounds in front of a large tent, and, as he sang in the afternoon show, he could see over in the background, a long freight train rolling past." Starting on that day, as the concert closed, Elvis and the band slipped off stage through a trap door. No encores that day nor in the future. Instead an announcer would express over the PA system that "Elvis has left the building."
