Artist’s Statement – Gallery 57 Summer 2025
“Meditations on surface and depth, illusion and reality, their painterly touch and mark
synonymous with their mood of contemplative stillness.”
Nicholas Usherwood, Art Critic, from a review in 2012
I continue to explore the coexistence of surface and depth, reality and illusion. These abstract concepts can be interpreted more widely as standing for our human experience of the material things we can touch and things we can only glimpse or sense. The physical presence of these works can have a visceral effect on the viewer, whilst the thin layers of overpainting hint at the transcendent.
My paintings, as if they are visual poetry, work on different levels; they hold varying layers of meaning, depending on the mind’s eye of the viewer. I construct each piece using an experimental process that I have developed over the years, applying a coat of plaster on a prepared wood panel and, just as it sets, I give the surface a rough and pitted pitted texture. Once it is dry, I incise random marks then finally I draw carefully judged, precise lines into the surface.
I approach each piece with an open mind. Art Critic and writer Frances Spalding puts it like this:
“Like Bridget Riley, Michèle Griffiths often begins with no specific associations or title
in mind, and criteria for judging progress only develop as the work evolves, when
sensations begin to indicate the direction that it will take. These criteria, as Riley
herself admits, ‘are not attached to anything particular, but when I recognise them in a
painting, in certain abstract relationships there, then I feel that I have got something
real, that I am on firm ground and can build’.*”
With repeated painting and overpainting, I engage in a dialogue with the messy raw material, aiming to create from it a composition that works aesthetically, embodying balance and harmony. This is a metaphorical way of lending meaning to the random mental and physical scars we all experience in life, to a greater or lesser degree. Some marks, like experiences, are erased/forgotten, others defy that process and can never be erased/forgotten.
I use plaster as it is absorbent and can be worked into easily; acrylic paint as it is waterbased, easily absorbed and quick-drying, enabling me to work fast and intuitively. My work is abstract, but it is also “representational” in that it replicates surfaces of timeworn walls with the imprints of their history. Overpainting, with countless, successive, fine layers of acrylic paint, like the annual whitewashing of the old walls of Greek island houses, speaks of the passing of time and the workings of memory/forgetting.
As the work progresses, I create “openings”, often evoking doorways or windows. This illusion of deep space:
“… gives them a quality of invitation: we are beckoned to inhabit, not just to peruse
these surfaces (…) Michèle Griffiths creates images within which to spend time.” *
My work is intended to encourage “slow looking” and to withstand the test of time. I invite you to reflect on the interplay of concepts of surface and depth, illusion and reality… to appreciate each work as a physical entity in its own right and, perhaps too, to read into it a deeper meaning; the possibility of what lies behind and beyond it.
MG 2025