Joel Griffith s Hyperrealistic Landscapes

The image on the cover of this month's chronogram is called North Road, which I painted on site on North Road in Tivoli over a period of a couple weeks over the summer. It's one of my nighttime pieces where I go out with a night rig that I've built with a car battery and some lamps that I can hang over the easel so I can see what I'm doing at night. I can see the panel that I'm painting on and my palette that I'm mixing the colors on, but it's not throwing light into the so the end result is if someone was standing on the street at night looking down the road. A lot of people will assume that the night paintings are somehow more difficult, but the secret is they're actually a little bit easier because the light is constant because it's artificial. A frequent comment about my paintings are that there are no people present and where are the people and it's interesting that they bring that up a lot. I think part of that is just my experience growing up in Tivoli. It's a very small place and to be alone on the street is very common. It's not rare. For me it's always been very pleasant and peaceful and so I'm making these paintings where the only person on the street is the viewer of the painting. Lots of folks will accuse me of being a photorealist and the way I phrase that tells you how I feel. I do not identify as a photorealist, nothing against photorealism, but I just don't think that's what my process is about. It's not about the relationship of photography to painting. I consider myself a realist. I think lots of folks who use that term without a strong art history background are using it somewhat incorrectly. They could just say realists. I think it's so interesting how, you know, I'm trying to make it look like the thing that I'm seeing. I'm not trying to make it look like a photograph of the thing. If you make a painting that looks like the tree and the car, they say it looks like a photograph of the tree in the car. They don't say it looks like the tree in the car. If you want something that's going to end up looking like a photograph, why not just take the photograph, right? It'd be a lot less work. You don't have to stand out all night with the skunks and the drunks and the mosquitoes. I've been working for about 10 years on a panel, the MDF panel. It's very flat, very firm because I do work outside a lot and the wind will flap your canvas and with my technique, which is very detailed, very tiny brushes, you know, I end up really placing my hand on the support and doing some fine, fine stuff and if you do that for 200 hours on a canvas, it does get a little stretched out. You know, I really like that people can put their nose right up to my painting and sort of not be disappointed. You know, there's always in painting this game of you stand back, it looks like this and then you walk up and it turns into paint. You can get really close and it hasn't turned into paint yet. You still see there's that sign, there's the bolt attaching it to that rod with the little holes in it that holds it right there and when you get close enough, you can see the paint but I don't really want people to think of them first as paintings. I want them to think of them as images which put you in a place. So I almost never edit anything. It's really, I take a lot of time setting up and choosing my framing but once I settle on it, you know, if I think the painting would be better if the car was two feet this way or the lamppost was one foot that way, I don't really do that. Well, what fascinates me working in the Hudson Valley is it's so beautiful historically and yet it's got all this texture and residue of the human presence over the centuries and I just love that friction between, you know, the beautiful nature and the rusting, decaying, and renewed vestiges of our presence and that interface is where I like to work and it's a big part of why I make these paintings.