A BLAZING PALETTE
NEVER HAS WALES LOOKED AS COLOURFUL AS IN CHRIS GRIFFIN'S PAINTINGS - YET, AS JENNY WHITE DISCOVERS, THE COLOURS SEEM SO RIGHT
If there is such a thing as a "typical Welsh palette" it's probably an earthy, rather sombre affair. Chris Griffin's work is different. It is proudly, evocatively Welsh but his paintings are warm as embers, alive with reds and yellows that you'd struggle to find visually in the Welsh landscape.
Somehow his blazing palette serves only to amplify the Welshness of those teetering rows of houses and streetlights that glow like fireflies. Griffins paintings don't just look like Wales; they feel like Wales.
" I work on colour feeling rather than actual object colour," the Cardiff-based painter explains. "When I put something on the canvas I decide if it feels right. It's an entirely different process from putting down the colour that's supposed to be there. If the colours don't feel right then I'll change them and work on until eventually everything works."
Griffin's style has gone through several major shifts during his forty-plus years as a painter. As a student at Gloucestershire College of Art, then the Royal College of Art, his main focus was assemblage and collage - an interest that is echoed today by his fascination with texture and composition. Starting out as a professional artist, he began by making accessible watercolours, then gradually shifted into acrylics.
" Bit by bit I started to make more challenging work and many of my buyers came with me. This meant that I gained confidence for making better, more creative work whilst finding a market for it at the same time. It's been quite tricky but you get there in the end."
A similar process of evolution is evident in each individual painting. Griffin is not a planner; he lets the painting go wherever it needs to. A landscape may evolve into a still life, and the position of any house or object is decided not by it's real life location but by the composition of the painting. Sometimes the arrangement of objects becomes a metaphor for the human condition.
Griffin explains: "You may have a group of houses huddled together for security, or I might arrange terraces around a chapel like a mother or father figure. These things are not the initial purpose of the painting but if it crops up I'll just go with it and use it".
Griffin's main purpose is simply to " make a painting". He is not interested in creating a picture of a specific scene; he's interested in paint, texture, colour and composition.
Why, then, does he paint Wales rather than making abstract paintings?
"Somehow I need an object or a subject to paint," he explains. "Very often I use the subject as an excuse to paint; what I want to do is make a painting, so I'll borrow a terrace or a mountain. They suit the sort of painting I want to make."
" I paint Wales because I know it so well. If you know a subject really well then it's easy to identify when you've got it right or not. The Valleys and houses suit my purpose particularly well: Most of my compositions haven't got much sky; what you are looking at is a hillside - a vertical surface. The Welsh Valleys in particular have all sorts of angles and interesting shapes and I feel quite a lot of excitement in those things".
Having taken Wales as his starting point, Griffin lets the painting take shape in many layers, which are scraped back and re-applied.
" I scrape the paint off with a razor blade or sandpaper and then I'll put another layer on and scrape that off and repeat the process so that it's built up in very thin layers. The paintings are quite flat - there are no textures sticking out from the surface, but there's a kind of patina building up as I work and work into it."
" That's what I enjoy doing, because I'm principally a painter: I want to animate the surface in such a way that it's interesting. I'm not keen on tromp d'oeil type paintings that try to fool the eye into thinking that you are not looking at paint. I aim for a synthesis of paint and object: when you look at the painting you can see the textures and scrapes so you know it's paint, but you can also see that it's a house."
Ultimately, this approach gives Griffin the freedom that allows his work to continue ;
" I don't worry about how people will react to the work - I'm not aiming to communicate that much; all I want to do is make a good painting. If I'm happy with it, I can send it out into the world happy."
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WESTERN MAIL
Feature by Jenny White
A BLAZING PALETTE
LOOKING BACK
by Robert MacDonald
OUT OF THE DARK INTO COLOUR
BBC Wales website
Welsh Artist of the Year winners
Art in Wales
Chris Griffin
Attic Gallery
Chris Griffin |
