James Griffith’s work takes substance as its subject in Small Paintings of Infinity, a solo show presented as part of Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. The artist makes his paint from tar collected at the La Brea Tar Pits, mixing the material with driers, varnishes and solvents, then washing it across wood panels and letting it pool and bubble organically. The tar itself carries many associations: it’s linked to preservation and decay, to evolution and extinction. It’s the fossil product of geologic time, and a substance that contains thousands of years of human and animal history. It’s also the basis of petrochemical substances linked to climate change that now threatens life on our planet.
Small Paintings of Infinity contemplates this life and its origins. As Griffith has noted, “burning stars manufacture the complex chemistry of life from the simplest compounds.” His new works include panoramic starfields, the violently creative forces of the sun, and portraits of people and animals intimately intertwined with the cosmos—living beings that share a heliocentric existence. Pondering a central question—“do we live in an infinite universe?”—Griffith etches, washes, and scrapes his subjects and scenes into the tar veneers, evoking a history that begins with the chemical building blocks of life, a shared origin story. Taken together, these paintings highlight the beauty and fragility of life on Earth, and its rarity in the universe.