Mountains of My Mind

There was something familiar about these paintings and it wasn't that I'd seen Griff Williams work before. Nor was it the overlaid stencils, that technique of adding patterns onto narrative paintings to give the requisite look of deconstruction. (Yes there is an academe and they're all producing stencils.) No, it was the paint-by-numbers segmentation. I could almost smell the paints, in their little numbered quarter-sized pots. Very familiar this.

But wow. My paintings were never like this. These landscapes soar.



The show is Nothing Exists in Itself, paintings by Griff Williams at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, one of my top-five galleries in SF.

Like David Maxim, Griff Williams works with magnificent mountain landscape—the image of which has so been worked from Bierstadt to Adams, and then commodified with every picture postcard sold in every National Park to every travel brochure to become our image of "nature." Williams works in a very sophisticated way with this loaded landscape and manages to retain the whiff of mountain air.

The paintings are complex. First there's the mountain image which he splits and butterflies—bifurcates—so there's a Rorschach Inkblot effect. Hmmm, what does this remind you of? The inkblot mountain should take you somewhere. The image is broken down into areas of color and painted with his own paint-by-numbers paints, specially mixed to replicate the ones in the boxed sets of the 50s. Then there's the stenciled images: plants, insects, shapes and filigree—taken from various sources like the sketchbooks of Charles Darwin, for instance—these float on the surface and into the image. Layers of paint, resin, paint create an image that is at once flat, slick, graphic and deep, moving, luminescent.



They're really quite extraordinary, masterful and engaging. I used the word soaring. That's the effect of the stencils—as well as the size: 48" x 80", 57" x 57" —large. Williams comes from Big Sky Country. I have a feeling he's got a love of the land and an appreciation for how the image of it, The Land, The West, is just that, an image, managed, manufactured, kept in the consumer's fantasy to keep 'em coming back for more. The title of the one painting is apt: To Perceive the Object it Must be Frozen, in the mind's eye for, as the title of the show says, Nothing Exists in Itself.

But wait.

There's more.

In the side gallery, Stephen Wirtz is showing another artist upgrading childhood arts & craft. Remember sprinkling sparkles on Elmer's glue? Maybe from grade school? Laurie Reid uses this technique—to great effect I might add—to create whimsical gestural drawings of glass. The sparkly stuff she applies is crushed mirrored glass, gritty yet glimmering, shimmering diamond-like.



Sweet.