Altadena-based artist James Griffith welcomes visitors to his studiolocated in a refurbished 1920s firehouse diagonally across from the restored Bunny Museums gleaming silver lagomorphwith a disarming line: Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin. For the past decade, he has painted with material gathered from the La Brea Tar Pits Pit 91, transforming the citys black ooze into wildlife portraits and astral vistas.
Los Angeles primordial medium
Los Angeles is symbolized by the La Brea Tar Pits, whose bubbling black substance is in fact natural asphaltcrude petroleum and methane seeping up from the 6th Street fault of the vast Salt Lake Oil Field. The sites iconic tableau of three Imperial or Columbian Mammothsdrowning mama, stoic papa, and trumpeting infantwas realized in 1967 when sculptor Howard Ball towed the first fiberglass mammoth (13 feet tall, 25 feet long) from his studio in Walteria, Torrance to Hancock Park behind a chugging 1958 Volkswagen Bug, before a crane lowered the family onto iron platforms. Adjacent, the George C. Page Museum is closed for renovation until 2028.
Griffiths link to the pits is direct. A friend of mine who teaches elementary school gave me the idea, he recalls. With the help of Emily Lindsey, curator and excavation site director for the Samuel Oschin Center for Global Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits, he learned that excavations pull up gallon after gallon of asphalt, stacked in buckets, stored floor to ceiling, and that he was welcome to take it. Although not a gloomy presence, he has called his technique painting with death.
Method, subjects, and a volatile beauty
Griffiths kinetic paintings feature owls he calls The Observers, along with ravens, rabbits, deer, bears, butterflies, big cats, coyotes, frogs, and trippy starscapesoften merging a familiar creature with a blazing orbit or planetary aura. When Im working on these everyday creatures, he says, I still have a sense of almost disbelievingthat we are all on this tiny speck of a spinning rockthats rotating itself while it circles around a giant, dying star. Of the sun, which he calls violent and exquisite, he adds: 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.
Working outdoors on a cement floor, he pours and thins the Pit 91 material on aluminum or reinforced canvas with solvents, Zippo lighter fluid, linseed oil the best one is gasoline before sealing with Dammar varnish. Water helps shape a swirly topography, letting the tar run wild like a Brutalist Rorschach blot. Curing can take days, after which he turns to power tools, including a belt sander; A #11 Exacto knife is my go-to, he says. Inspirations include Galileos drawings and wood engravings from Darwins era, while precise scraping like scrimshaw maps every hair and meteor trail. He has incorporated conifer pollen from Christmas Tree Lane and human cremains, noting, I did incorporate a little of my Dads ashes and that both parents ashes now rest in a compost heap at home.
- 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 12, Tar on Panel, 7 x 16 inches
- Origin Story, The Sun and the Gravity of Radiance, Tar on canvas
Fire, community, and an open question
Griffith met his wife Susanna Dadd, designer and founder of Real Gardens, at Art Center in Pasadena. After moving from Highland Park to Altadena in 1999, they spent four years building a terraced amphitheater from reclaimed construction-site waste; today, the backyard Folly Bowl hosts free, live summer concerts on a whimsical schedule. Though his studio and home were spared by the Eaton Canyon fire, approximately 30 paintings purchased by friends were lost; he responded by gifting small versions of the works. There will be no retrospective for me, he says, later adding a weird optimism from his Christian Scientist upbringing: everything is always disappearing and evaporating anyway.
Conversation is the right word, he says. My work continually asks the same question, Where are we? I just hope that experiencing these images leads to more compassion.
Vía artandcakela.com
