At a refurbished 1920s firehouse in Altadena, James Griffith greets a visitor with characteristic mischief: Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin. Diagonally across from the restored Bunny Museum, the studio is where this Altadena-based artist has, for the past decade, made paintings with tar drawn from La Brea Tar Pits Pit 91a practice he has described as painting with death.
A medium pulled from Pit 91
Griffith traces the project to an elementary school teacher friend and a call to Emily Lindsey, the curator and excavation site director for the Samuel Oschin Center for Global Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits. As he recalls, Lindsey explained that fossil excavations bring up gallon after gallon of the stuff, stacked in buckets, floor to ceilingand invited him to take what he needed. The artist works outdoors on aluminum or reinforced canvas laid on a cement floor, calling his process messy, noisy, smelly, potentially flammable, and probably dangerous. He thins the La Brea goop with solvents, Zippo lighter fluid, linseed oil and, the best one is gasoline. Dammar varnish seals it in. He then pools the swirly topography of the black mixture with water, letting the tar run wild to invite surprise like discovering a Brutalist Rorschach blot. After days of drying and curing, he returns with power tools (including a belt sander) and a #11 Exacto knife is my go-to, carving with scrimshaw-like precision inspired by Galileos drawings and wood engravings from Darwins era.
Wildlife, suns, and linked worlds
Griffiths kinetic portraits of owls (which he calls The Observers ), ravens, rabbits, deer, bears, butterflies, big cats, coyotes, and frogs often intersect with trippy astral fields. When Im working on these everyday creatures we encounter easily in nature, I still have a sense of almost disbelievingthat we are all on this tiny speck of a spinning rock, thats rotating itself while it circles around a giant, dying star. So, the everyday is really anything but ordinary. Of the sun, an entity he calls violent and exquisite, he says: I paint the brightest thing we know, using the darkest material I have. I love bringing a glimmer of life from a hole in the ground. A recurring, molecule-like chain of linked spheresfound on a scrap of embroiderythreads through recent works: how I see nature, little worlds, all attached. In a current series of pomegranates, a seed-shaped drop even formed on its own.
Select works include The Observer Owl (2023, tar on aluminum panel, 24 x 18 inches), Pair of Ravens Fellow Travelers (2022, tar on panel, 20 x 16 in.), Fellow Travelers Raven with Tool (2021, 20 x 16 in.), Small Painting of Infinity 10 and Small Painting of Infinity 12 (tar on panel, 7 x 16 inches), and Origin Story, The Sun and the Gravity of Radiance (tar on canvas).
Raised in Long Beach, California, the son of a photographer and a fashion designer, Griffith started drawing at four, moved to oil, then molten plastic, and finally to black gold. He has folded conifer pollen from Christmas Tree Lane and human cremains into his work. I did incorporate a little of my Dads ashes at one point, he says. But since then, Ive interred both my mother and fathers ashes in our compost heap at our house. So now I get to greet them every day. With his wife, Susanna Dadddesigner and founder of Real Gardenshe moved from Highland Park to Altadena in 1999 and built the Folly Bowl, a terraced backyard amphitheater of reclaimed construction waste that hosts free, live summer concerts.
The Eaton Canyon fire spared their home and studio, though about 30 paintings purchased by friends were lost. There will be no retrospective for me, he says. During and after the fire, I didnt cry. We were so lucky. But I was kinda lost for a while. He later made small versions of the destroyed works to give to their owners. Raised a Christian Scientist, he admits to a weird optimism and adds, everything is always disappearing and evaporating anyway, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. Conversation is the right word, he says of his art. My work continually asks the same question, Where are we? I just hope that experiencing these images leads to more compassion.
Vía artandcakela.com
