Cable Griffith, “Return to Sender”

by Matthew Kangas

J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Continuing through July 26, 2025

Cable Griffith, “Return to Sender,” 2025, fabric dye4 and acrylic on canvas, 57 x 81”. All images courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle.

In his current exhibition, “Return to Sender,” we immerse ourselves imaginatively in Cable Griffith’s alien landscape paintings. Griffith recently completed a series of mosaic murals at the new Sound Transit Light Rail station in the affluent Seattle suburb of Redmond. Having seen those murals in reproduction, I can only surmise what effect they have had on Griffith’s mostly mid-size easel paintings. What the new work evidently shares with the murals is the imagery of his own forest world, trampled countryside, deep garden spaces, and long mountain vistas. Executed with repetitive strokes and dots, they share a vision of nature as cartoon or caricature instead of the grandeur of the sublime. This is nature as a projection of consciousness, providing destinations for us to contemplate relative to the nature we live in and allowing us to mentally travel to a recognizable but still exotic land.

Cable Griffith, “The Procession,” 2025, acrylic on paper, 60 x 45”.

Griffith endows “Return to Sender,” with the deepest perspective space in the exhibition. It is a cultivated garden clotted with veils of colored lines distributed to simulate a perforated screen that we gaze through, as we roam over a nearly seven-foot-wide canvas. Shimmering as a result of the artist’s power over the colored line, “Return to the Sender” memorably pulls you into its space and makes you want to stay there and explore.

Elsewhere, the artist’s vision is alternately more abbreviated or extended in complexity and formal encounters. In some works the space is flattened; others deepen it with flickering dots and dabs of color that lure the eye into variously direct and complicated sites. Among the smaller works, in “Waypoint” and “Outpost” the scene is abruptly frontal. The latter image, with its rainbow band and looming upright pole behind, is not strictly speaking a landscape. “Outpost” sets itself apart by being at least suggestive of a built location. “Waypoint” is an abstract blizzard of dashes and curves that make it among the exhibition’s most abstract works. I’m now anticipating that Griffith will push toward completely abstract paintings based on what we see here.

Cable Griffith, “Day Trip,” 2025, acrylic on paper, 30 x 22”.

Until then, “Haunted Garden,” “The Procession,” and “Day Trip” operate as straightforward, imaginary landscapes that place us in deep natural spaces. The latter painting focuses our attention on the artist’s version of a waterfall, placing us within a daunting mountain-hike pathway in “The Procession,” and “Haunted Garden” sets us in its dark forest as we are about to emerge into a glowing, light-saturated meadow with a view of the mountains beyond. In quirky ways they also echo historic forerunners like the Yellowstone School. Refusing to denote specific sites, Griffith’s paintings insist on a psychological plane of meaning. They are emphatically imaginary places defined by a variety of chromatic approaches as well as clustered imagery, painterly marks, and comical references to the grandeur of Romantic-era nature painting with their high peaks and distant vistas.

Two small black-and-white depiction of mountains and lakes, “Rendezvous” and “Timeout,” act as points of origin for the larger works. Executed in acrylic paint, they function as drawings devoid of the artist’s usual chromatic attack.

Cable Griffith, “Waypoint,” 2025, fabric dye and acrylic on canvas, 29 x 30 1/2”.

If there is a mannerism or fallback position on which Griffith relies too much, it is the insistent black line in every painting. This device acts as pictorial outline and underlying compositional strategy, a habit the artist may have picked up from his late mentor, Robert C. Jones (1930-2018). For Jones, a one-time student of Hans Hofmann, colors are notable for their vaunted “push-pull” qualities. They complement one another, but also set up tensions and conflicts. In Hofmann’s method, black was seen as a co-equal color. However, for Jones, black acted not as a co-equal so much as a crutch, bolstering other colors he was unwilling to let act on their own (as with Hofmann or Matisse). This is happening to Cable Griffith, too. When downplayed, black is a filigree or scatter of lines distributed throughout. At their worst, as in “Intermission,” they set up an irregular grid awaiting the fill-in of colored areas.

Cable Griffith, “The Interloper,” 2025, acrylic on paper, 30 x 44”.

Maybe “The Interloper” points another way. In this black and white painting, two hairy legs descend into a trampled garden scene. The humor is welcome, and the lack of color becomes irrelevant. The prospects of abstraction are here set aside. In lieu of complete abstraction, Griffith might be well served to engage what is currently missing from the landscapes: the human presence beyond formal and chromatic decision-making.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.