Painter Cable Griffith Unveils New Works at G. Gibson Gallery
The exhibit Sightings elicits awe and pleasure
By Jim Demetre December 14, 2015
This article originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of Seattle magazine.
Painter Cable Griffith’s landscapes bring an electronic pulse to pastoral scenes, fusing the order of human-built infrastructure with the chaos of the natural world. The smooth surfaces and rounded contours of his trees, islands, hills and rivers; the deeply saturated palette with its warm, backlit glow; and the stilted perspectives and cartoonish sense of scale owe as much to video games and systems-design graphics as they do to Albert Bierstadt and other painters of the American West.
Griffith, 40, who is also a curator and faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts, describes Sightings, his December exhibition of new works at G. Gibson Gallery, as “conceived in conversation with the history of landscape painting, notions of the sublime and reports of unexplained phenomenon in contemporary society.” The luminous presence that lurks behind the trees in “Mysterious Light in the Woods” (above) brings awe, terror and a sense of pleasure reminiscent of the works of early Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. The nature of this light in our own world may be less divine and possibly the result of some as yet unrecognized human activity. Or possibly aliens.
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