The Exquisite Violence of James Griffith
- artandcakela
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Victoria Thomas
Altadena-based artist James Griffith greets me at his studio, located in a refurbished 1920s firehouse diagonally across the street from the gleaming silver lagomorph of the restored Bunny Museum, by saying "Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin."
Great cities announce their identities through their monuments. New York City has the Statue of Liberty, St. Louis the Gateway Arch, Chicago the Cloud Gate, Philadelphia the original LOVE sculpture. And Los Angeles is symbolized by the La Brea Tar Pits, where our city's twin addictions — insatiable cars and cheesy entertainment — are captured in a pit of primordial ooze that smells like an old-school roof installation, or a newly blacktopped road on a sweltering summer day. Technically, the bubbling black ooze is not "tar," which is produced by burning pine pitch or coal. It's actually natural asphalt, oil in its crudest form. The raw, liquid petroleum along with methane seeps up from the 6th Street fault of the vast Salt Lake Oil Field.
In the pit, family tragedy is played out by models of three life-sized Imperial or Columbian Mammoths, which went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch between 10,000 and 11,500 years ago. The iconic scene may be read not only as a dystopian parable for our region, but also for our times — the once-mighty doomed by the sticky nature of carbon-emitting fossil fuels. And unwittingly, the sulfurous substance of the pit itself also serves as a metaphor for our city's socioeconomic disparities. The Los Angeles Basin contains about 68 named oil fields, with the majority of active drilling for crude oil now taking place in historically redlined neighborhoods — communities where immigrants and people of color were denied loans and credit. Jefferson Park's Murphy drill site is an example currently making news, with community outcry over health impacts potentially closing the site.
Most importantly, this iconic scene uniquely belongs to Los Angeles for its hallucinatory goofiness. This becomes even more surreal when we recall that in 1967 the sculptor Howard Ball, who also made VW camper tops, towed the first fiberglass Mammoth — which measures 13 feet in height and 25 feet in length — from his studio in Walteria, Torrance to Hancock Park hitched to his chugging 1958 Volkswagen Bug. A crane later lowered the three Mammoth family figures — drowning mama, stoic papa, and trumpeting infant — onto iron platforms installed in the site.
True to our city's role as fantasy camp, it's easy to presume that the pit has been there as close to forever as we can get, undisturbed since the dreamtime when ancestral humans hunted megafauna. In fact, the La Brea pit is quite recent, a souvenir of mining operations during the 1800s. But this in no way diminishes the mythic quality of the La Brea Tar Pits, nor does the fact that the George C. Page Museum adjacent to the pit will be closed for renovation until 2028.
Griffith relies upon his unusual relationship with the site's Pit 91 as the medium for his paintings, which he's made from La Brea tar for the past decade. "A friend of mine who teaches elementary school gave me the idea," he recalls. "She had taken her class to see the pit and told me about how the kids reacted. So, I got in touch with this wonderful woman named Emily Lindsey, who is the curator and excavation site director for the Samuel Oschin Center for Global Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits, and she explained that, whenever they excavate fossils, in the process they pull up gallon after gallon of the stuff. It's stacked in buckets, stored floor to ceiling. So, she said that I was welcome to come and take as much as I want, any time." Although his demeanor is anything but gloomy, Griffith has referred to his technique as "painting with death," since the sludge of Pit 91 is composed of the remains of ancient life-forms.
Griffith's kinetic paintings depict wildlife — owls which he calls "The Observers," ravens, rabbits, deer, bears, butterflies, big cats, coyotes, frogs — and trippy astral starscapes. Often, the two subjects will meet within a single painting, with a familiar beast superimposed over a blazing orbit or planetary aura. A skilled draftsman, Griffith's portraits are highly naturalistic, yet convey an instant feeling of otherworldliness. He says, "When I'm working on these everyday creatures we encounter easily in nature, I still have a sense of almost disbelieving — that we are all on this tiny speck of a spinning rock, that's rotating itself while it circles around a giant, dying star. So, the everyday is really anything but ordinary." He says of his paintings of the sun, an entity which he calls "violent and exquisite": "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."
Growing up in Long Beach, California, the son of a photographer and a fashion designer, Griffith says that he began drawing at age four, then moved to oil painting before exploring first molten plastic, and then black gold (asphalt) as artistic mediums. He has also included conifer pollen from Christmas Tree Lane, as well as human cremains, in his current work. "I did incorporate a little of my Dad's ashes at one point," he says. "But since then, I've interred both my mother and father's ashes in our compost heap at our house. So now I get to greet them every day."
His process is messy, noisy, smelly, potentially flammable, and probably dangerous. He explains that he begins not with an easel, but by positioning a section of aluminum or occasionally reinforced canvas on the cement floor outside the studio, to keep inhalation of fumes to a minimum. The bucket of La Brea goop requires additives — "solvents, Zippo lighter fluid, linseed oil," says Griffith. "But the best one is gasoline. Then Dammar varnish seals it all in."
He pools what he calls "the swirly topography" of the black goo with water on the horizontal surface, "letting the tar run wild. I am trying to be surprised," he says, "like discovering a Brutalist Rorschach blot." Sometimes, as with his current series of pomegranate paintings, the medium flexes with a mind of its own. In one piece from the series, a seed-shaped drop formed on its own. To some, it may resemble a delicate navel in a swelling belly, as if to reference the pomegranate as a symbol of sacred fertility across the ancient world. Many of his current paintings find commonality in Griffith's use of a stylized pattern of a molecule-like, grapevine-like structure superimposed over the figures. Griffith describes the pattern of linked spheres, which he discovered on a scrap of embroidery, as "how I see nature, little worlds, all attached."
Then comes the waiting, for the amalgam to dry, harden, and cure. This process may take many days, depending upon the mix. From there, Griffith comes in with power tools, incl
uding a belt sander. "A #11 Exacto knife is my go-to," he says. In spite of the rugged-seeming technique, he explains that Galileo's drawings and wood engravings from Darwin's era are a source of inspiration. Precise scratching and scraping, which the artist compares to scrimshaw-making, allows him to define each hair on a coyote's muzzle, and every feathery trail of a passing meteor. When painting animals, he says, his aim is to "paint what the animal as an individual is thinking."
Griffith met his wife Susanna Dadd, designer and founder of Real Gardens, while both were at Art Center in Pasadena. The couple moved from Highland Park to Altadena in 1999 and spent the next four years building a terraced amphitheater on their property primarily using reclaimed and salvaged construction site waste. The backyard location is now home to the Folly Bowl, where free, live concerts are offered on a whimsical schedule throughout the summer months.
The artist's studio and home were both spared by the Eaton Canyon fire, which is not to say that Griffith is untouched by the experience. "There will be no retrospective for me," he says. "During and after the fire, I didn't cry. We were so lucky. But I was kinda lost for a while." He shakes his head, adding that approximately 30 paintings purchased by friends were burned in the devastation. Griffith's response was to create small versions of the lost paintings which he then gifted to his bereft survivors. He says that his upbringing as a Christian Scientist imparts "a weird optimism that was built into me," adding that "everything is always disappearing and evaporating anyway, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not."
Unlike much of the art engaged in the conversation regarding our earth's current distress, Griffith's work is free of virtue-signaling. "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." While the artist does not lay claim to the notion of Panpsychism, which posits that all matter possesses some level of consciousness, being in the presence of Griffith's work does suggest unheard dialogue. This includes the possibility that the substance he uses to make art — not to mention the ubiquitous, petroleum-based plastics that we all have come to loathe — may in fact be sentient. After all, the fossil fuels which now spawn international bloodshed and wreak planetary destruction are what's left of responsive, living beings that once knew sunlight, seasons, moon cycles, rain, and time.
James Griffith
jamesgriffithpainting.com
Folly Bowl penick.net/digging/?p=35365
Murphy Drill Site, Jefferson Park laist.com/news/climate-environment/community-resistance-south-la-murphy-oil-drilling-site-could-be-shut-down
Victoria Thomas writes about pop culture and social justice. @miss_vickums
Photography Courtesy of the Artist.
James Griffith in his studio James Griffith, Pair of Ravens - Fellow Travelers, 2022, tar on panel, 20 x 16 in. James Griffith, Fellow Travelers - Raven with Tool, 2021, 20x16 in. James Griffith, Small Painting of Infinity 12, Tar on Panel, 7 x 16 in.
