Canvas Detroit

Greg Fadell

136 GREG FADELL 137 First thing to know about the artist Greg Fadell: he believes in nothing. Nothing stirs him. He finds form in nothing and nothing pleases him more than illuminating its possibilities to those who believe art must always be about something. “I don’t expect for anyone to think what I’m doing is something ,” he says. “I’m actually just going, ‘You decide.’ I’m comfortable with nothing.” In 2012, Fadell took the idea to the extreme, unveiling a brave series called what else but Nothingness. Fadell, a University of Michigan–trained filmmaker and photographer and a former professional skateboarder, gave Detroit a major introduction to the concept, covering the walls of the Re:View Gallery with six-to-eight-foot-tall paintings, abstract in every way. No titles other than Nothing. No colors other than black and white. No artist’s explanations, just the work. Fadell’s fascination with nothing stretched beyond the paintings hanging on the gallery’s walls. He made the building part of his exploration, too. In a live installation, Fadell painstakingly “whitewashed” four stories of windows, in unoccupied lofts, with custom semi-transparent paint and dramatic brushstrokes. From prep to finish, he spent seven weeks on the project, which measured eighty feet tall and fifteen feet wide. The project received modest funding from the Detroit Design Festival, an annual community-curated showcase celebrating design projects and concepts. “The idea fit in perfectly with where Detroit is. You can either look at it as this empty, abandoned place or you can go, ‘Wait, I have a vision. I’m gonna make something happen,’” Fadell says. In many ways, the project, which he titled Paris of the West, and the paintings were mirrors of Fadell’s transition out of photography and back to a childhood passion for painting. During a trip to Paris, where he’d gone to sort out his future, Fadell stumbled upon the French custom that would spark his interest in nothing. “I came back to Detroit and started a new path from nothing,” he said. “That’s the idea of the paintings; they’re about transitions . They’re about starting again from nothing and being satisfied. There’s a shell there, but you have to fill the shell.” One night while strolling, Fadell found himself awestruck by the way the light hit the whitewashed windows of a building he’d come across. “I was just blown away. I couldn’t stop looking at these windows. People thought I was crazy.” Fadell was determined to learn everything about the windows. But there was no deep meaning to uncover. The technique, he later discovered, was merely an artful way of signaling a building under renovation. Still, Fadell kept the idea alive. “I came home and I just started working on painting what I saw. I had hundreds of pictures of windows with whitewash on them.” Fadell didn’t just mimic. He developed his own semitransparent paint to create the illusion on canvas that the paint is dripping and still wet. To achieve the effect, Fadell also designed his own brushes, and he taught himself to build his own canvases and easels. Fadell’s paintings, which list in the low-to-mid four figures, are starting to find homes. His wealth, he says, is in the work and the ability to envision it and create it as he sees fit. “I tried to get away from art because it is illogical. There’s really no reason to do it other than drive. Society isn’t set up to support it. What I realized is, I can’t worry,” he says. “You have to make up your mind to say, Look, I’ve got a different checklist for success.” Perhaps the best evidence that Fadell’s list is different is his determination to succeed from Detroit. He sees no better place. “People say there’s nothing here,” he says. “Well then, that means everything’s here, because every possibility in the world exists when there’s nothing.” During the day, the starkness of the white paint was supposed to prod people to look up as they walked by. The art of Fadell’s work emerged at night, as the windows were backlit. They became a glowing column straight through the center of the building. “It was really about looking at transition as art and being comfortable with that,” explains Fadell. (Photos: James M. Fassinger) [3.133.160.156] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...