Ron Griffin Essay
#13 Charles Arnoldi (Visiting Painting)
#14 Ron Griffin (Response Painting)
To be truthful, it was the crate that caught my eye when Shane and Laura came to my studio. An impressive travel crate, clearly most important for this project. Inside the beautiful container, nestled in padding, a finished wood tray held two linen canvases of amazing quality, one surface with painting and one primed white with taped edges ready for my contribution. I noticed the Oz clips holding the stretchers to either side of the tray and commented that I hadn’t seen those in a while. Clearly, a class act.
It was an abstract painting that came to me in the crate. I was supposed to be in the dark concerning identity of the artist, but I knew who did it. I had seen enough of those, the Arc paintings and the sea of permutations. But, there was something out of the ordinary about this one – of course. There were two brackets of color, one warm in the upper right corner, one cool in the lower left. These elements, so completely foreign to the series, must have been part of his reaction to the painting he received in the crate. These things, then, would be part of my reaction.
My response to the abstract painting was realism, a kind of realism, anyway. I made the white surface of my canvas black. On the black I added the likeness of an airmail envelope, open side down with flap up and little red airliner exposed at the apex. This envelope is one of my favorite bits of ephemera, and perfect for this purpose as it has two diagonal stripes in the lower, right corner, one red and one blue. Seemingly contained in the likeness of the envelope, and veiled by what looks like the translucent paper of the envelope surface, I added a simulated photo with the image of one of my paintings from a series in 2000. I chose the image of this painting because shapes in it are similar to Arnoldi’s abstract ones, but my seemingly abstract, anthropomorphic shapes are actually an exact representation of a paper toilet seat cover folded in a complex situation. Like other things I have done, what looks like collage is not, like the envelope in my painting, but this time, like Arnoldi, I tossed something different into the mix, something I’ve never done, an actual stamp which I painted over and then applied the likeness of an appropriate bureaucrat. So the painting I sent off to the next participant had become a real collage.