The World Speaks Everything To Us

In a series of oil paintings titled “Synthetic Nature” Los Angeles artist James Griffith presents elements of the natural landscape viewed through sheets of plastic. A highly regarded botanical painter, Griffith’s exquisitely wrought images of leaf, branch, and sky could certainly stand alone, but seen through the lens of that ubiquitous synthetic, they seem even more compelling and mysterious. The plastic obscures and distorts, even creating its own beauty at times, and yet what we perceive beyond is still luminous and powerful, and rendered oddly poignant by the plastic layer of separation.

Griffith himself has written eloquently about the inception of these paintings: I was hiking deep in a Canadian forest last fall. The leaves were turning and the sun's dappled light was just about as high as it could get on an October day. The rhythm of hiking carried me into a meditative state of mind in which I was pondering the difficulty I had been having finding a visual metaphor for the existential chasm that separates human nature from wild Nature. An hour or two passed. Then suddenly I was literally stopped in my tracks by wall of plastic sheeting that someone had stretched across a large swath of the forest. It must have once served some sort of function but now simply stood catching the dappled light, sparkling with reflections, and obscuring the view of the forest like a Vaseline-smeared lens. It was at once stunningly beautiful and appalling, a veil of petrochemicals separating me from the forest. I knew I was looking at a form that could express the problems I wanted to explore in paint. The forces of the moment did not fall into simple polarized opposites of good (nature) vs. evil (industrial man). While the plastic intruded into the forest it was still a part of our chemical world and it billowed in the breeze as beautifully as any leaf. The plastic romanticized the view by its soft focus effects, but at the same time it threatened the scene with the suffocating power of a plastic bag. I knew I would paint this for a long time.

The acknowledgment here that the forces of the moment cannot be neatly dichotomized into good and evil is an important one. Our relationship with nature is complex and ambivalent, and as humans we can never appreciate it without changing it. It is tempting to idealize the natural world, but its indifference can also be frightening, and even those most deeply troubled by what is lost or threatened in the current environmental crisis realize there is no pristine and perfect state to which we can return. We live in an uneasy balance of use and preservation. We crave a bit of wildness but want a manageable space.

The removal of a moral perspective here allows for a more capacious interpretation of the work. In Griffith’s paintings the intrusion of the plastic and its interplay with the landscape brings to mind the idea of Gaia and how the living and nonliving components of earth function as a single organism or system. Nonliving, of course, extends to manmade objects, and indeed it is impossible to imagine our earth without the stuff we have added and the alterations we have made. Does the plastic (in one painting stretched and pinned to a plain plank of unvarnished lumber) frame the landscape like a fence, or fracture it like a prism? Does it hinder our seeing or enable us to see differently? Either response is valid.

As a child growing up in the city, and with a child’s sense of wonder, I can remember seeing oily rainbows in the gutters and thinking they were pretty. They were filthy and ordinary, of course, and I have since seen them described (in an online urban dictionary) as “toxin poison swirled in puddles on the road” but maybe the best way to look at the world is with a child’s nonjudgmental openness to what is interesting or beautiful. In time, values, associations, and desires will attach themselves to all things.

Today, living in a rural, off-the-grid kind of place that has not yet lost its wildness, I am constantly aware of the natural world that pulses outside my door. Although I certainly want to preserve it, I also work to keep it at bay, and we coexist cautiously. But when I push aside the curtain, there it is -- stunning and shuddering in its magnificence. One cannot help but yearn sometimes to be absorbed into it, to reclaim some elusive oneness, to transcend the separateness and belong to the universe. Perhaps Griffith’s work provides a visual metaphor for this yearning and sense of exile. The paintings reveal the shine and glimmer of the natural world but seen through an altering lens. The lens of our own innate limitations? Our excesses? Our mistakes? One can ponder it endlessly.

But on the other side of that beautiful and appalling plastic, the earth is breathing, and the landscape holds promise. So maybe it is best to simply look and enjoy, for the paintings possess a shimmering loveliness, glinting with life while suggesting a sense of the loss and mutability that make everything more precious.