- Timothy Griffith
- Ghost Ranch. Abiquiu, NM
- Oil on canvas
- 30 x 24 x 0.875 in
- Signature: Note: the 'Ghost Ranch' branding graphic (similar to the New Mexico state flag graphic) of lines radiating outward from center, surround the bottom centered artist signature.
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Available
Artwork statement... This visual composition is quite typical of my overarching style of a painting narrative with intricately woven simplifications and complexities and can be viewed (interchangably) delicately to aggressively, that viewing resolving always to the opposite of initial approach.
This painting started with a fantastical mental vision I had while looking at the front porch of Georgia O'Keeffe's Abiquiu, NM home (September 27th, 2024) and imagining her 98yo+/- spirit/ghost still looking out the window while I looked in, the distant landscape reflecting in the sectioned window panes.
This vision echoed in my thoughts until I resolved the challenge of how to paint it. As with all my works, I began mentally rearranging the basic elements (the aperture, porch, window, and reflected landscape) long before I ever sketched out a composition (in this case, the mind composing lasted about 14 months before starting the canvas).
It was during these thought compositions that I brought her beloved Cerro Pedernal mesa into the reflection, and decided that the reflection would actually be one of her paintings of that mesa => which led to the thought of pairing/layering her style of precisionism to my divergent version of precisionism. The porch used in the artwork was not her 'home' porch, but rather the porch from reference historical photos, probably the porch of a building in the 'ranch' area of the Abiquiu property. The last part of my mind composing was to edit down the number of elements (keeping the compositional goal ,yet easing the viewing burden). During that refinement, I also realized there was a conceptual similarity of this work to that of M.C. Escher's "Three Worlds" etching, and its three layers of visual existence.
Georgia's Precisionism focuses on the form/shape (outer edge) and segmentations, whereas my Precisionism is emergent from the chaotic inner elements (so that the sum of elemental probabilities coalesce into larger, cohesive, and easy-to-discern shapes/forms [inner constituent parts]).
This work has extended my creative envelope.
- Subject Matter: Magic Realism Landscape