David Griffin    painting   drawing    isometric projections    interference   Excavations   background   links   research    contact info@davidgriffinart.com

The whole world as metaphor  

     In the book of Genesis, Adam is presented with all the things of the world, and by naming them -- by giving words to their immanence -- he plants them back into the mud, to re-cognise them in their new growth. Likewise, these paintings are drawn from life, re-constructed through a cascade of metaphors. To make a metaphor is to step away from brute facts, using a symbolic language to build a bridge between what is known and what is not. Metaphor is therefore an act of translation: here understood as an organising inter-activity between painting and lived experience.

     Painting is a thinking practice, and a blending of materials and metaphysics, and these pictures are composed from things that passed in front of the artist, elaborated through symbolic languages of colour and line, word and image. Each picture starts with notations of human or animal forms in cadenced interaction, and is resolved in a counterpoint of colour, space, and narrative. The images connect real events such as the misery in Sudan with mythologies of salvation (Burghers of Khartoum), or economic displacement with spiritual appetites (Woodsmen). I approach their composition as the syncopation of sinew, drapery and dream, but also hunger, anticipation, and diminishment.

     And as a painter seeking to understand the work after the fact, so to speak, locating their allusions, and new connections, I note that they circle human social conditions, power relations, mythologies, names and places, descriptions and delusions. But there is also, finally, a view of painting as a bloodless way to grasp the world, and a concrete gesture of consolation to our common, wounded states.