Artist's Statement

If it still existed I would have included in this exhibit a drawing of a wide-eyed pilgrim I drew in the first grade. From that early memory to the present, art has been a constant in my life. Sometimes confident and focused and other times searching and experimental, I have continued to pursue art not so much for the objects produced, but for participation in the ongoing creative process. In some ways that first grade drawing was a self-portrait; at times I still feel like that wide-eyed pilgrim.

Choosing a handful of works from nearly a thousand paintings, drawings, prints and photographs was a more difficult task than I originally anticipated. In having to reappraise work I had not looked at for years I found there were many pieces I had not considered successful, which now suddenly took on new meanings. And works I had considered diamonds have lost some of their luster. The final thirty-four choices in this exhibit represent work from those more focused times and, because of lack of space, does not include the more experimental work. Although it was from those times of searching that these works evolved.

As I now look at the past twenty-seven years hanging on these walls they remind me of fossilized tracks that hint at only part of the story and I fear that my statement may lead viewers away from their own interpretations. Risking that, I would like to make a few comments because in many ways I feel like any other gallery goer viewing this work for the first time.

Even though, at first glance, the work seems to be disjointed, I now see many threads holding it together. For example, when I look at a small watercolor done in 1977 titled "Stirring the Secret Soup" it strikes me as a comment on my own creative process. I have taken many ideas and inspirations along with my interests in photography and painting, images and abstraction, and have thrown them all into a pot. Stirring the pot allows certain combinations of these elements to surface for a time before sinking and being replaced by another. A good example of this can be seen in the earliest work in the show, "Figures" painted in 1968. The early paintings in this series were figures painted with some depth which were gradually replaced by flat screen printed figures that eventually were overlaid with fine-lined "moon marks" (inspired by early moon-scape photos) which then surface as the major element in this painting.

My changes in direction are more gradual than it seems here with many of these paintings and drawings representing related work of up to fifty or sixty pieces in a series. It would appear that the biggest single leap is from the realist work to total abstraction, from the "Bobbers" to "Homage to Jon Gnagy #40". To me the bobber paintings were the perfect transitional works both conceptually and technically. Before I began this series I was at the end of a representational path, but with no clear idea of where to go, so, I went fishing--literally at first and then figuratively. The bobber was a very abstract element that was connected to representationalism by a thin line which allowed an endless combination of color in both restless and calm waters. After completing two hundred and fifty bobber paintings, I dove into total abstraction.

The abstract work, my main focus for the last fifteen years, having started with more formal and hard-edged concerns, has become more organic mainly through working with photography. The Polaroid transfer pieces, "St. Vincent #13" and "St. Vincent #3c" lead to a more expressionist approach in later paintings such as "Circles #1" and "Circles #3" and that interest in the photographic process continues through the most recent work in the exhibit. In this work the photographic process and abstraction floated together to the top of the soup resulting in the manipulated photographic emulsion abstractions "Template #4" and "Abstraction #46".

As I look again at the exhibit I realize that it too is a kind of artwork. Put together at another time, the result might have been quite different.

Wayne Kreuger, 1968 Photograph
Rob Gassie, 1994 Photograph

Steve Griffin Retrospective
Mary Washington College Galleries
Fredericksburg, VA 22401
URL:http://people.umw.edu/~ernie/sg/artstate.html

For more information, email Ernie Ackerman at ernie@mwc.edu

Return to Home Page for Steve Griffin Retrospective URL: http://www.mwc.edu/sgexhibit.html

Last Update: Wednesday, September 27, 1995