At a refurbished 1920s firehouse in Altadena, James Griffith greets a visitor with characteristic mischief: \u001cHi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin.\u001d 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\u0019 Pit 91\u0014a practice he has described as \u001cpainting with death.\u001d<\/p>\n
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 \u001cgallon after gallon of the stuff,\u001d stacked in buckets, floor to ceiling\u0014and 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 \u001csolvents, Zippo lighter fluid, linseed oil\u001d and, \u001cthe best one is gasoline.\u001d Dammar varnish seals it in. He then pools the \u001cswirly topography\u001d of the black mixture with water, \u001cletting the tar run wild\u001d to invite surprise\u0014\u001clike discovering a Brutalist Rorschach blot.\u001d After days of drying and curing, he returns with power tools (including a belt sander) and a \u001c#11 Exacto knife is my go-to,\u001d carving with scrimshaw-like precision inspired by Galileo\u0019s drawings and wood engravings from Darwin\u0019s era.<\/p>\n
Griffith\u0019s kinetic portraits of owls (which he calls \u001cThe Observers\u001d), ravens, rabbits, deer, bears, butterflies, big cats, coyotes, and frogs often intersect with trippy astral fields. \u001cWhen I\u0019m working on these everyday creatures we encounter easily in nature, I still have a sense of almost disbelieving\u0014that we are all on this tiny speck of a spinning rock, that\u0019s rotating itself while it circles around a giant, dying star. So, the everyday is really anything but ordinary.\u001d Of the sun, an entity he calls \u001cviolent and exquisite,\u001d he says: \u001cI 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.\u001d A recurring, molecule-like chain of linked spheres\u0014found on a scrap of embroidery\u0014threads through recent works: \u001chow I see nature, little worlds, all attached.\u001d In a current series of pomegranates, a seed-shaped drop even formed on its own.<\/p>\n
Select works include The Observer \u0013 Owl<\/em> (2023, tar on aluminum panel, 24 x 18 inches), Pair of Ravens \u0013 Fellow Travelers<\/em> (2022, tar on panel, 20 x 16 in.), Fellow Travelers \u0013 Raven with Tool<\/em> (2021, 20 x 16 in.), Small Painting of Infinity 10<\/em> and Small Painting of Infinity 12<\/em> (tar on panel, 7 x 16 inches), and Origin Story, The Sun and the Gravity of Radiance<\/em> (tar on canvas).<\/p>\n 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. \u001cI did incorporate a little of my Dad\u0019s ashes at one point,\u001d he says. \u001cBut since then, I\u0019ve interred both my mother and father\u0019s ashes in our compost heap at our house. So now I get to greet them every day.\u001d With his wife, Susanna Dadd\u0014designer and founder of Real Gardens\u0014he 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.<\/p>\n The Eaton Canyon fire spared their home and studio, though about 30 paintings purchased by friends were lost. \u001cThere will be no retrospective for me,\u001d he says. \u001cDuring and after the fire, I didn\u0019t cry. We were so lucky. But I was kinda lost for a while.\u001d He later made small versions of the destroyed works to give to their owners. Raised a Christian Scientist, he admits to \u001ca weird optimism\u001d and adds, \u001ceverything is always disappearing and evaporating anyway, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not.\u001d \u001cConversation is the right word,\u001d he says of his art. \u001cMy work continually asks the same question, \u0018Where are we?\u0019 I just hope that experiencing these images leads to more compassion.\u001d<\/p>\n