April 16 - May 28, 2022

Reception: April 16, 2022 5-7 pm

Artist Talk: April 30, 2022 11 am

James Griffith: Fellow Travelers

In this body of work, I examine my sense of place in the universe, orbiting a small sun, on a tiny planet, as part of a network of life. I ask if we can recognize ourselves in the eyes of other species who are fellow passengers on this elliptical ride. Painting is how I make these ideas visible, how I record feelings, and how I bring subconscious motivations and themes into the light for observation.

Animals began appearing in my work when I read Darwin’s books about evolution and extinction. I began to see other species with the same importance I afford to human beings. With each painting I try to imaginatively become or inhabit my subject. I become the rabbit, mouse, or bear that I am painting. In this way I give credibility, value, and equality to my subject.

My images are made by scratching or etching into a layer of tar on a panel. This method grew out of my love for the 19th century engravings that naturalists like Darwin made to document their findings. As I began emulating their linear crosshatch patterns, I found I could record the smallest details of an animal’s body and facial expressions. I felt I was nose to nose with my subjects, imagining their breath, their heat, their whiskered itching. This unexpected intimacy was a transformational experience that added a more open-ended compassion to my world view.

Unfortunately, we live in a time of crisis. The networks of our natural lives are collapsing around us. On nights when I don’t lose sleep over this I still wake at dawn and, before I rise, try to make sense of my life in light of the tragedies of our time. I come up with many questions that can’t be answered. Words fail me, but after a pot of coffee, I go to work painting again.

These dawn meditations on the current conditions of life became the inspiration for my paintings of words and phrases. I have long been interested in the relationship between paintings and their titles. I sometimes imagine the title of a painting floating across the canvas the way a title sequence passes over a movie screen in the cinema. In the series Dawn’s Early Light, the titles become skywriting across images of the sunrise. The open-ended ambiguity of a word’s meaning makes it a worthy muse for art. These works pose questions without a specific agenda and that viewers can answer for themselves. The painting, Words Fail Me, was spawned by my frustration with political battles of the day, however, when placed in a cosmic landscape, the phrase also came to express my awe and wonder for our small living planet.

In pursuit of a vision of our place in the universe, from the ancient stardust origins of life to the current environmental crisis, I present these paintings hoping to evoke compassion for the life that our planet and other heavenly bodies will engender, with or without humans.