| I paint images of imaginary people who lust and who are lusted after. Through the visual images that I paint, I am experimenting with lust in its many vital aspects: the relationship of the viewer to the image; the relationship of the images to each other. I explore the depths and breadths of life force energy with the goal of evoking within the viewer an exploration of their own relationship with lust. “Through my paintings, I am experimenting with creating a language that is felt rather than understood.” My psychiatrist said this with his eyes rolled back in his head, pretending to be me. It’s true. |  |
Eliza Griffiths
I paint images of imaginary people who lust and who are lusted after. Through the visual images that I paint, I am experimenting with lust in its many vital aspects: the relationship of the viewer to the image; the relationship of the images to each other. I explore the depths and breadths of life force energy with the goal of evoking within the viewer an exploration of their own relationship with lust.
“Through my paintings, I am experimenting with creating a language that is felt rather than understood.” My psychiatrist said this with his eyes rolled back in his head, pretending to be me. It’s true.
I try to rationalize it, but it is magic and not controllable or stable. Paint is my partner in an investigation that is mostly about humans and desire. It contributes an unpredictable element that creates dialectic so, with my intention and the response of the materials, I get something I didn’t anticipate—a new material presence.
Although most of my characters appear to be from the same casting-couch aesthetic, I don’t know what they’ll be until they are done and manifest. I add and subtract mustaches and bruises, tilt eyebrows, dart eyes back and forth, re-orient heads and move nipples.
Almost everything is open and subject to change. I do the directing, the casting, the costume, the make-up, the set design and I write the narrative—I coax and fluff and fight with them. My studio feels like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory and like I am sending out these monsters to notice and love their viewers in ambiguous and complicated ways.
A curator once said to me that my characters looked like horny aliens, and I was pleased. A rock star once said, “I like that you paint real people,” and I liked that he thought they were real even though they don’t exist apart from the bits of pigment on the canvas.
