My artistic practice is
and always has been based on the creation of fictive characters who perform
distilled psychological, social and experiential narratives in painting
tableaux, drawing, and painting-based installation. Central themes that have
occupied my work have included issues of desire and sexuality, gender identity,
intimacy, and relationships to self and other. Over the past number of years I have
worked in thematic series, beginning each with a conceptual framework and then allowing
an intuitive and improvisational layered painting process to determine the
eventual form and content of the work. In this way, my process has the quality
and sensation of being a director, writer, casting agent, costume and set
designer, for a compressed film or fiction that slips and glimpses, and that
occupies a single field—yet remains unfolding. (Eliza Griffiths)
It’s
great to see the work of former Ottawa visual artist Eliza Griffiths featured
in the new issue of Grain magazine,
subtitled “home-myths” (a detail of her "Love Story/Fear Eats the Soul (after RWF)," 2013, is reproduced on the cover). Griffiths was one of the early members of The Enriched Bread Artists collective over on Gladstone Avenue, and I featured her work in
an issue of Missing Jacket magazine
back around 1996. There is something about her work that has always been quite
striking; able to paint variations of similar faces, and yet, each managing
their own personalities. As always, the details are deepest in the eyes,
becoming more ghost-like as the image ripples outward. The characters she
paints exist almost entirely within the scope of the face, and she manages to
create real people we haven’t yet met.
The
issue themes around a fairly familiar trope – the idea of home, and the
myth-making that can’t help but occur. “We mythologize our past,” editor Rilla
Friesen writes in her “Editor’s Note.” It harks back to a line from John
Newlove, in which he reminded us that the past is, indeed, a foreign country.
As Friesen writes: “The works in ‘Home-Myths’ each have a different balance of
geography/love. If there is no fixed home place, the need for love is
increased.” I’m uncertain I agree with her thesis—she should read the piece
Yann Martel wrote, “Philadelphia Green Blue – Musings on the Meaning of Home,”
from the anthology Writing Home: A PEN Canada Anthology, ed. Constance Rooke (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart,
1997). Home is simply an idea, and to have no specific sense of home does not
necessarily make one groundless. Still, there are some impressive pieces in
this issue, from the short, descriptive lyric of Anita Dolman, the myth-lyric
of Jessica Bebenek, and the two historical/myth lyrics by Catherine J. Stewart.
There are pieces here on Snow White, Daphne and Apollo, weddings, Lamborghinis,
Mahler, Freud and Nazis, millennials, and various incarnations of what could be
called home.
Galena
Claim staked in 1883—
Jubilee Mountain
marked,
measured, owned.
____
Over 70 years, Galena
ore—
silver, lead, zinc—clawed
out
of the mountain,
ballast
shipped out of the
valley.
____
Barite, white dust
dredged
from the tailings
ponds, rose
from the ore trucks and
settled
into the clothes
hanging on the line. We
wore it to school,
basketball games.
We danced in it.
____
The ducks we plucked
on the hillside,
breasts filled
with shot made from
Galena ore,
lead finding its way
home (Catherine J. Stewart)
