ESSAY FROM 'LOOKING BACK' 2002
OUT OF THE DARK INTO COLOUR

Chris Griffin has emerged in recent years as one of the finest colourists in Wales. His paintings in acrylics have a burning intensity and a marvelous sense of harmony in their warmly vibrating reds, blues, purples, and golds. His subject matter is the south Wales landscape, with its barns and houses huddled against the steep hilsides. He abstracts the shapes and field patterns, and endows them with rich and emotional colour.

He never considered himself as a colourist, and friends who knew him in his early years as a painter must be startled by the transformation, both in pigment and in subject matter. As a student in the early seventies in Cheltenham, he was notable for making black in his colour of choice. Having grown up in the Rhymney Valley, when great coal mines dominated life in that part of South Wales, he painted miners and collieries and even mixed coal-dust with his paints. The coal gave a rich texture to his paintings. It was probably the stark contrast between the coal mining valleys he knew so well and leafy Cheltenham which set him off on his track of gritty social realism.

There is, however, a continuity in his work. He has always been an artist striving for resonant colour and exciting texture, even when he has confined himself to reverberating blacks and the effect coal-dust has when mixed with paint.

Nowadays, he has taken that further by allowing brilliant colours to emerge from deep and dark backgrounds. The intensity of his dark grounds gives the colours an astonishing luminosity, built up in numerous layers of paint that have been scraped, glazed and scumbled over the surface of the painting.

In his early days, he acquired a battered miners helmet to use in his studies of miners, but decided it was a more powerfully visual object in itself than any of his paintings. That set him off on a process of using found materials in his work, and the production of collages- a process that took him into a much wider use of colour. Later, he turned to painting rural South Wales after the closure of the collieries and the disappearance of that industrial world he had known when young. He developed watercolour skills and for a long time, applied them conventionally to produce work which was attractive, but lacked the intense commitment of his earlier work. It was only when he married these skills with the feeling for more intense colour and for abstract design which he had explored in his collages that a real excitement entered his paintings. He has always expressed in his art a fervent identification with the world of the South Wales valleys- but the gritty, social realism of early years has given way to a passionate lyricism which is a joy to behold.