MARY GRIFFITHS
Recent Work

Written by Mary Griffiths for EASEL WORDS IN The JACKDAW March 2007 by courtesy of David Lee.

As a figurative painter in the 21st century,listening to the revelation that man's unprepossessing ancestor in the Jurassic era spent it's time scuttling in the Pangaean scrub giving those ponderous dinosaurs the slip,I recognised the tactic immediately.

There is such an imbalance in the preferred work shown in publicly subsidized galleries.As a society,and don't believe anyone who asserts that there's no such thing,we need to see the full sense of ourselves reflected in the art we show.And while I'm not averse to peeking at the dishevelled detritus of an unexamined life,the solipsism of a lot of conceptual art and it's epizoic acolytes doesn't,for me,constitute the full panoply of human experience.

Art is a way of shaping our lives,of giving it value and meaning.But what I don't see much of is our relationships with one another.We don't see love.We look to the Old Masters for that.And the other unfashionable quality I don't see enough of is joy.Yet it's the quality with which we seek to imbue all our activities.Our natures are hardwired for it.
Several years ago I met Angela and Emma Paczy.Angela,Emma's mother,has Pick's disease which is an early on-set,degenerative brain disorder akin to Alzheimer's but rarer,less known and with no ameliorative medication on offer.And it's been such a privilege to witness the extraordinary bond between them.Emma interprets her mother's feelings,anticipates her needs,returns the care which once she received and restores her mother to the world.She insists on complying with her mother's expressed wish to remain at home which involves confronting the byzantine complexities of local authority funding at every stage of her mother's illness which she does with a natural contumaciousness any artist would identify with.

I'd be so pleased if these portraits were seen as a homage to our best instincts which is to value life in it's infinite variety and intrinsic worth.For me,irrespective of whatever else one's bent on expressing,the act of painting with it's deep and boundless pleasures,conjoins us with the perpetual flow of humankind at it's venerative best,exclaiming it's"transcendent wonder" and ineffable joy in being alive.Or as my mother once put it succinctly"it's your way of saying hallelujah".

MARY GRIFFITHS