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an CONVERSATION with george lawson.

painter, curator and FORMER gallery OWNER.

april 2025

George Lawson: Christopher, I want to draw you out a bit about your painting, about the image, the picture you feel you are creating, and secondly, their pronounced physicality and your understanding of their material promise. Finally, I want to ask about your practice, and your understanding of painting as a way to live. To the first point, let's start with the elephant in the room, the 4-letter words. You've chosen a graphic stylization of words as a working motif. How'd that come about? What was the impetus?

Christopher Griffith: I was making a move out of commercial photography in the desire to unpack unfulfilled creative ideas that had sat by the wayside for many years. My wife and I had relocated to our farm in the Hudson Valley having been in NYC for over 20 years. It took me a year of thinking and procrastinating before I embarked on a nine month full immersion into my first ever text based project IN MEMORIAM. It was a highly contentious and emotionally charged project of large scale silk flower sculpture wreath motifs that depict the failings of a human life and how some will ultimately be remembered in death once the ceremony is over. I took four of these funeral offerings to the EEC group show during the Venice Biennale in 2019. 

This was then followed by a photographic series POPLIFE, a social commentary project that used the extremely bizarre and perverse nomenclature found on commercial bottle caps at a time that there were thousand of regional bottlers across America vying for customer attention, a time prior to the mass corporate consolidation into a handful for global players. It was a second stab at the use of text to create discourse. THESE TWO INTIAL PROJECTS WERE DEFINITELY THE CATALYST THAT LED ME INTO THE TEXT BASED ABSTRACTIONS I FIND MYSELF IN TODAY.

GL: So the appeal of text, but also an increasingly tactile involvement, the sculptural element of the wreaths and the sensation of the bottle caps. I have a strong sense memory of pressing those things against my fingers, the smooth flat dome of the convex side against the rough, serrated edge of the concave side. Where’d that lead to next?

CG: Well, Covid happened. I was deeply in my head worrying about how bad the situation might get as I knew it certainly was not going to be over by Easter and that we were likely in it for the long haul. I don’t think I was alone in reliving visions of the Great Depression as unemployment skyrocketed over a matter of weeks and I feared we were going to see homelessness on a mass scale. That’s when I thought about the Hobo-Glyph project. I had always been fascinated with these rudimentary symbols used by travelers at the end of the Civil War up until after the the Depression when men traversed the country, primarily by rail, in a quest for work and a better future. These glyphs are mere chicken scratchings etched on buildings, box cars, lamp posts and fences to warn their fellow travelers of the dangers or virtues that might lie ahead. It was a secret code that served absolutely no benefit to its author and was there solely to aid a fellow traveller. The glyphs are very simple geometric shapes that denote a secretly understood vernacular for a sub-culture that was commonly uneducated and illiterate. This was my third foray into somewhat text based communication in my work and my first stab at painting.

GL: The glyphs are a solid progression. The raw communication of living rough. Photography is pretty flat. Seems like you wanted to get physical.

CG:  Yeah, I’m not sure I ever consciously saw getting into painting as a desire to have a greater physical involvement in creating the work, but it is true that a lot of my energy had been channeled into multiple building projects over the years and I haVE gained a very applicable skill set for painting.  I had renovated a completely defunct 1880’s Dutch barn in upstate NY into a home in 2008 and the following year I tore down an old tractor shed and rebuilt an identical sized 2400 sq. studio. For many years I had casually said that I eventually wanted to paint, not really knowing if this was pure fantasy or might come to fruition. The studio was purposely designed for painting with an open plan with a fantastic 12x24' North-facing wall of glass. I had spent several years in Paris and knew that many of the purpose-built artist ateliers faced north for the consistency of the reflected light throughout the day. The studio was epic, but then sat pretty much unused for any real artistic outpouring for seven years until we moved permanently upstate in the summer of 2017.

GL: It’s like The Field of Dreams. If you build it they will come. You were acting on the impulse before you really understood it. The impulse to paint. So what pulled the trigger?

CG: Yeah, it is true that for those 7 years I had this nagging desire to use the studio for the purpose that it had been built, but Covid lockdown proved to be the tipping point. I was well aware early on that we were in this for a year at the very least. We lived on an isolated farm and I knew that if I did not find something to occupy my time and my brain, that my family and I were in for a fucking rough ride. So, I finally decided that it was time to have a stab at painting even if it was purely an exercise in retaining my own sanity. It may well have been the best decision I have ever made.

GL: Did you have influences? Other painters?

CG: At the time that I was doing this first painting series I was reading every day about other painters. It was when looking at Christopher Wool’s work that a shoe firmly dropped. I had always admired his text work of the 1980-90’s. I loved his FOOL painting for the fact that is was visually punk rock with a seemingly fuck-you attitude. I remember looking at this painting and ADMIRING THE simplicity AND balance OF THE two-over-two quadrant design. It was the exact design of every window I had consciously designed into my barn home 10 years earlier. Wool made paintings of AWOL, RIOT, FOOL, RIOT and other 4-letter words. There are 5,600+ 4-letter words in the English language. I wondered if there was room to reinvent what Wool (and actually, Robert Indiana) had started decades earlier.

GL: Yeah, Wool’s an obvious one—at least stylistically—he and Indiana because of the bold san seraph, but their word/image functions quite differently from yours. Theirs is in your face. The read is readily apparent—it doesn’t require any unpacking. Yours is a puzzle, and takes time to get at. It may seem counter-intuitive, but even though the type isn’t melting, your paintings work more like psychedelic Fillmore posters, the art of Rick Griffen and Stanley Mouse. You slow the viewer down. They have to crack the code. Also, merging symbology and geometry puts you in a continuous historical line of painters who also did this, from Kasmir Malevich and El Lissitsky to Fernand Léger and Stuart Davis to Peter Halley and Peter Schuyff, with a host of others along the way. Any thought on your placement in this string of beads? 

CG: I certainly have been inspired by the graphic styles of most of the latter artists you mention. But I am also very conscious of not repeating that which came before me. To be honest, even though my work is partially based in text, I am generally not a fan of legible text work in painting. It seems a little obvious, easy and trying to be clever. That said, I was really drawn to the shear elegance and simplicity of the two-over-two design and I was bewildered by the fact that Wool and Indiana had not delved much further into the extensive bank of 4-letters words. I knew there was room, but it needed to be an interpretation that was 100% my own. Inspired by, but not a copy. In fact, two years ago at Art Basel, I saw from afar what I thought was a Christopher Wool painting. I was drawn to it like a magnet, only to find that is was a hand knitted version of the FOOL painting by a different artist. It was exactly what I had known at the onset of this project that I did not want to do. My play on the quadrant design was to create constructs that unlike either Wool or Indiana, did not immediately read as words where the viewer could appreciate the painting on a purely abstract level. 

GL: The thing about slowing the viewer down is important. Your obfuscation of the text is more than a puzzle, or a design lark. By merging a linguistic element so integrally with the grammar of imagery—color, shape, composition, scale, surface and so on—you produce a hybrid of two disciplines, the lovechild of symbol and gestalt. They share DNA, and inform one another. The word takes on a slant it wouldn’t otherwise have if it weren’t couched in bold colors and glyphic building blocks, and the geometry gets grounded in ways it wouldn’t as pure abstraction, and this without referencing landscape, or portraiture, or still-life. 

CG: WELL, That is a very generous way of describing your perception to the work- one I am sure to steal. As I said, I wanted it to be far less obvious than mere legible text. I wanted the visual text to be really subtle and secondary to the graphic identity of the painting, more like an onion that needed to be pealed. I initially spent two months creating the purposely designed font that represented each of the 26 letters in the most reduced visual forms before painting anything. A lot of that time was spent on the letter S alone. It proved extremely difficult to find an abstraction that worked. The abstraction of any word has multiple potential constructs based on the changing of a letter to either its positive or negative form. Furthermore, the redacted nature of the letters creates interactions of the positive and negative spaces into unexpected geometric forms that further enhance the abstraction of the overall construct. I spend my days and nights collating different words and then sketching them out, working and reworking the interplay of the spaces between letters in forming the most effective, balanced and visually successful interpretation of a word. Some words simply don't work and they will likely never work for purely aesthetic reasons.

GL: I’ve seen these working studies. To put it mildly, there are a lot of them. 

CG: I have designed hundreds of potential paintings. My most common challenge in doing the work is in deciding what piece to do next. It’s a pretty great problem to have, BUT CAN ODDLY BE REALLY PARALYZING.

GL: You mention going after the best treatment of a word, but back to the idea of an image, ultimately, you must make your decision on which to use based on some criterion for what makes the best picture. What can you say about that?

CG: I think the criteria is not at all absolute. There are many reasons by which I judge a construct in evaluating whether I think it works visually, because if I don't think a construct works visually, I don't make it and many do not work at this juncture. They sit in a pile awaiting a eureka moment where I see a different way to merge the positive and negative to form a construct that I feel works. Some paintings when finished immediately get relegated to the never-to-be-shown category and many have been destroyed. Some words simply don't work. At least not yet. Paintings do work for a variety of reasons. Some work for the balance of color blocking, some for the merging of spaces and some for identifiable geometries that are created in the merged in between space. The same painting can be redesigned in a multitude of ways by flipping the positive/ negative representation of the letter, thus changing the interaction with the adjoining space. The possibilities for novel paintings are seemingly endless and that does not even take into account employing different color blocking of the same construct. This creates a constant battle in terms of what painting to execute next. 

GL: Do you have an idea about what makes a painting relevant, what makes it speak to its time?

CG: I spend a lot of time thinking about what is going on in the world at any given time when deciding on what next to paint. It focuses my attention onto words that I feel are of some relevance to present day topics. I like producing work that might inspire a dialogue—either verbal or internal—that relates to a moment in time. The works are intentionally vague. Most words have multiple meanings and can therefore be interpreted by the viewer from several angles. I like that the viewer is asked to create their own interpretation of the work. My hope is that once deciphered, the viewer then might create context and meaning based own their own history and possibly see their potential bias in the use of a word. I want people to contemplate why a word has been selected and create its relevance based on their own relationship to a selected word.

GL: And you think about all this when you are selecting from the studies, picking which ones to produce?

CG: Most of the time, yes, but if I am totally honest, sometimes I simply land on a bold design that I feel works as a graphic construct that has no apparent direct relevance to how I am viewing the world. If I get jazzed about it visually, I’ll definitely make it, even if it does not relate to a current event. I have multiple databases of words and word associations on my phone and computer. Sometimes I love to be funny, whimsical or even irreverent. It lightens the mood though it is increasingly rare these days. I recently discovered the word YEET. It’s an online slang word that means to aggressively hurl something. The construct was kind of fantastic. I told my gamer 14 year old son I was making the painting. He was flabbergasted and deeply amused that the word even came out of my mouth. Then, a month ago, I heard someone on instagram in a rant say that something had made him yeet his phone at the wall and I thought, ét voila.

GL: What kind of reactions have you gotten from people in the art world? Have you had the sense people get what you’re after?

CG: Along the way I have had several very impacting conversations with gallerists regarding my intent and my own personal bias in the work. Two things stand out. First is when I occasionally have done diptych panels, it was suggested that my personal political agenda is far more apparent. Secondly, that the titling of my work can seriously bias the viewer in terms of my intent in creating the piece. Not that this is necessarily bad, but that by imposing my own personal objective in a simple title, I am altered the interpretation of the work. For example, SHOT-THEM, 2020-22. I actually created SHOT during Covid when vaccines were being vilified by many, but I had actually created the work in response to the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in South Carolina by a White Supremacist. I originally called it EN MASSE. Much later I added a second panel to create SHOT-THEM in reaction to the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse to the murder of innocent protesters in Wisconsin. I angrily named it KYLE. I subsequently unpacked this single piece for an hour with a gallerist in Miami. He was delving into the motivation in my pieces and correctly pointed out that the naming illustrated significant bias. In short, I was wearing my heart on my sleeve. The conversation changed my process significantly for the better. I renamed the piece THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS. Still politically charged, but far less 'on the nose.'

GL: You know, it is tricky. If you simply use the word as the title, you give the whole process of making entry into the work away, but then, yeah, anything else has the hazard of seeming a bit like editorializing. I guess you just have to strike the right balance.

CG: OK, so it is an ongoing debate whether to inform the viewer immediately what the word is in the title or allude to the word with a more esoteric naming. The risk being that without knowing the graphic code, the impact of the work will not be fully realized or at least not initially. On the one hand, there are those who gravitate to the work purely for the abstraction and have had collectors simply not care what the word is. Then again, I have had collectors who have bought with very clear intent. Recently I sold two paintings to a 30-something lawyer who worked for an international mergers and acquisitions firm in New York. I delivered the two paintings to her home in Rhinebeck, NY.  We unpacked HONK and CUNT in her living room and I asked why she had picked the latter. "Oh, well that’s going in my office in midtown and is going to be hung behind me so that it is on display when I am dealing with arrogant douchebags on zoom calls.” I told her she was- and remains- my favorite client ever. 

GL: Clearly, a lot of thought goes into the narrative. What interests me as well in all this is the role the pronounced physicality of your paint plays in your final imagery. For all the bold shape and color, for all the graphic muscle, the pull of the paint sticks in my mind, like the raking wale of some tight corduroy. You use some sort of device, don’t you, and mustn’t you have had to go to some trouble to make it? It must be important how this surface, this kind of marking, facilitates your vision, your mission. Could you talk a bit about the effect of your attenuated surface? How did you arrive at this? 

CG: When I originally started painting the HOBO-GLYPH series, I was abundantly aware that I was not yet a painter. I had a decent idea, but I had absolutely no understanding of what was involved in painting. I had no apparent skills, no supplies, no knowledge, no experience, no education in painting. I actually had no idea where to start. So I started by looking at other paintings and decided what I liked and disliked in a painting. It was quite difficult as this was being done during the Covid lock-down, so I was limited to looking at books and online images. Even so, a few things jumped out. First, I really did not love multiple, super garish colors in an abstract and I thought early on that I did not like glossy paint….and I really dug black; a lot. So my first self taught lesson was that 98% of the time I do not use color straight out of the tube. I generally mix in other colors to tone down the garish edge of out of the tube paint. Like they say, when in doubt... add umber. I also started playing with additives to cut the sheen. Initially I worked with bone ash and marble dust, but then settled on cold wax which also led to working in impasto. 

GL: You certainly seem to have come up to speed pretty quickly on handling the material. What cues were you picking up from perusing the work of other artists?

CG: I have a tendency to react to things I don’t like in other artists work and then figure out how to not do that thing in my own work. When studying a lot of artists, I felt there was a strong tendency towards flat block color resulting in ostensibly 2D paintings. I was really influenced by the work of French painter Pierre Soulage and the lesser known paintings of sculptor Richard Serra that are a lesson in dimensional paint that give the impression of being made with tar and asphalt. They really affirmed that working in impasto was critical to the final impact of the work I wanted to create. Conversely, the hard edge perfection of Ellsworth Kelly and Carmen Herrera have also played heavily on the exactitude of the linear execution of my practice.

GL: It seems as if you went from initially looking at these artists in reproduction, like during the constraints of Covid you describe, to actually seeing the work, and their physical traits lifted you out of a purely graphic appreciation. You saw the paint.

CG: Yeah, I actually took little day trips to NYC when the museums finally opened up to very limited admission to actually study the application of paint. I experienced paintings in the permanent collections of the MET and MOMA with completely different and analytical eyes. I came to understand the interaction of the painter that you simply can’t appreciate in any reproduction. It’s odd, in my own work I always feel that I am attempting to create these graphically perfect constructs that retain a level of human imperfection to facilitate a desire for a tactile appeal. It’s an interesting balancing act. When I discovered cold wax impasto, I saw that it could really add dimension to the painting purely through the texture of the paint and how it was applied. I initially created paintings with 2 textures. Flat mat under colors in acrylic with a heavily textured final layer in an oil and cold wax impasto. This is still the primary schedule of how I paint today, though multiple different textural practices are now employed in the color blocking of a painting. In creating texture with impasto, I started using highly serrated 6-8” brushes that allowed for thick linear grooves, or as you say a 'rake of tight corduroy’ like application of paint. I initially did this by hand and was able to create near perfect linear applications up to a 4x5’ painting. I then wanted to work in a larger format of 6x8’ which resulted in the linear impasto looking like it had been applied by a drunken sailor as it proved impossible to get the paint consistently straight.

GL: So you built some sort of device to help you?

CG: Correct, I built a rig. I’ve redesigned it three times. The rig is an easel of sorts, but it has fixed rails that run horizontally top and bottom with an attached rolling assembly that allows dragging a serrated brush across a painted canvas resulting in perfect horizontal textures. I have different brushes and scrapers which allow for multiple textures within the same painting. I create differing textures and yes, gloss finishes in my acrylic under colors, which serve to really distinguish the color blocking in any painting. I paint with industrial dry wall pallets knives, flooring glue scrapers and an array of everyday cooking utensils each creating unique textures. It adds a third dimension to the work.

GL: Yes, it does. I find your surface to be a real differentiator, the cross-over from visual to tactile. Probably my bias, but to me it’s the most intriguing part of your work.

CG: I think seeing my work in person is a very different experience as you quickly realize that the color blocking has a textural element that generally does not translate fully on any reproduction. I regularly request the viewer to place their hands on a painting to fully experience their physicality.

GL: Whoa, I’d be careful about that.

CG: I am honestly not that precious and I think it is integral to understanding the work. It is really fun to watch peoples reluctance to oblige and their general reaction having been convinced to do so. There is a lot of ‘Ohhhh, wow’. It always feels like we have gone full circle and actually, it has resulted in some immediate sales. People literally 'feel' that they understand the work.

GL: Going back to the 4-letter word for a minute, do you feel like, apart from the design element of the quadrant which just naturally stems from you painting on rectangles, that there is some gain in limiting the syntax to four letters? Why not—I don’t know—five or six letters?

CG: You can’t overlook the balance of the quadrant. It is everything. The two-over-two is visually perfect and is the defining structure of every painting.  I also appreciate the boundaries of a highly restricted vocabulary. All things are simply not possible, which is incredibly liberating. I have very clear, albeit quite broad guidelines that define every piece I create. Every execution relates to every other piece from the series. It gets pulled, tweaked, manipulated, flipped and changed all the time creating constructs that I would never have even dreamed of two years ago, but it's all of a DNA that has remained exactly the same. I have done multiple two-panel diptychs of two separate 4-letter words (ie. 8 letters.) I generally make these as verticals because I like the positive/negative interplay of the two panels top to bottom rather than side to side. I also like that they end up being ten feet tall. But again, each panel needs to work on its own as a single word as it is the fundamental core of this series. 

GL: You enjoyed success for a long period as a commercial photographer. (Not to mention a stint as a bio-chemist along the way but that’s another story.) The transition to painting from your description seems to have been a matter of following your nose—trying out ideas, fleshing out impulses, but also a lot of concerted study. And now, relatively suddenly, you find yourself in the midst of a full-blown commitment producing remarkably resolved work. At each step, painting must have been affirming you. What can you say now from this new vantage about your choice to paint, and the situation you find yourself in? 

CG: All I can say is that I wish I had started sooner. I am definitely one who once I jump, I am truly committed. Painting has become the single most enjoyable, fulfilling and rewarding discipline I have ever engaged in. It is a culmination of multiple different skill sets that I have acquired along the way. It involves a high level of experimentation from my science days, it is a continuation of the hyper graphic minimalist approach that was the core of my photographic career and it involves a physicality in construction and technique that is served from having renovated five homes in upstate NY over the years. But it stands alone for the single fact that I am doing this solely for me. No client, no team, no agency, no magazine, no deadline.  I answer to myself. I now go to bed thinking of painting.  It is the ultimate definition of freedom.

GL: That’s really great. As someone who stepped aside from an arguably more contemporary medium, photography, in order to paint, how do you see painting asserting its relevancy in the midst of the nagging narrative about its demise? Is it holding its own against rapidly evolving technologies, and is yours doing so in particular?

CG: I honestly think that the narrative about the end of painting has been a long-serving pile of horse shit in the art world since long before I even started painting. I have heard this nonsense for decades. I guess it’s a great headline. Do I think that the balance is shifting and maybe collectors are rethinking the price tag associated with the commodification of painting and art in general? Absolutely. Do it think that this is actually a real opportunity for smaller galleries and their artists in the primary market to thrive as collectors buy more what they love rather than collecting purely for investment? Definitely. But do I think that NFT’s and AI are somehow the end of painting, or that painting is on the way out on its own? I do not. I think all you need to do is visit any gallery, any museum, any auction house. The name of the game is painting and I don’t believe it is going anywhere. There is certainly room for newer things in the art world, there always has been, but the idea that this inclusion would result in the complete demise of painting is utter nonsense.

GL: Overall, what are your ambitions for painting then, your own work in the medium and for the endeavor as a whole? Where do you see it going from here in the culture?

CG: I think painting will forever be part of our culture if for no other reason than it is the product of human abstract thought that artists willingly and mostly unsuccessfully attempt to translate onto a mere canvas with the all too present reality of their technical failing and human imperfections. It is the wonderful train wreck where true creativity and beauty lives and breaths. Nothing mechanical will ever replace our appeal for human endeavor. Ever.

My immediate ambition for my own work is simply to have it seen. I have quietly watched people view my work, slowly figure it out—sometimes with a few prompts—and then engage in figuring out what each piece represents. I thoroughly enjoy witnessing other people get jazzed about figuring out the riddle. My favorite art show experiences are when I am half way through an exhibit and I am trying to figure out the work and something clicks and I realize I have had no idea what I am looking at. These are the most memorable shows. You return to the beginning of the show to revisit that which you have already seen with new eyes that further understand the meaning and intent of the work. What it all mean moving forward? Who the fuck knows. I don’t really think that is necessarily in my hands. I can only do the work I feel needs to be made. Frankly that is enough. I don’t even expect -or want- that when people figure it out that they necessarily like the work. I am very comfortable with the work not resonating with everyone.

As a wiser person than me said long ago, "As an artist, if 5% of people TRULY appreciate, understand and support your work, you will be a very successful and extremely busy artist”. I have amended this to 1%. I appreciate that many may not be impressed with what I do. It’s the nature of art. You can’t—nor do you necessarily want to—please all the people, all the time.

GL: Well, I’m pleased. You’ve taken the tropes of hard-edged geometric abstraction and crafted an art that is in degrees literal and expressive. Kind of shows up the impoverishment of our descriptors and categorizations. But also the largess of the creative mindset, and painting’s capacity to tap it. Just keep going, and thank you for taking the time with this.

CG: Jesus George. Yet another layered perception to the work that I will try to live up to… and possibly steal. Thanks so much this has been extremely clarifying and a joy to unpack with you.  Cheers.