About Mark Griffin
As an artist, Mark Griffin worked across a multi-disciplinary array of mediums to produce images and forms that spoke in a language beyond words. Griffin was a painting student at the San Francisco Academy of Art in the late 1970s. During the same period, he was deeply involved in two other areas of study, which continued to be central components of his art practice. Griffin studied music composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music while also being a devoted student of Tai Chi, meditation, and yoga. Alongside his artwork, Mark would go on to be a meditation master, Tantric yogi, and spiritual teacher opening the Hard Light Center of Awakening in Los Angeles, California.
The content for Griffin’s work comes from a yogic view of the metaphysical structures of body and consciousness. His artwork manifests these internal energy states as embodied moments of ecstatic being. The ancient yogic texts of India portray a world with four interrelated dimensions. The physical world is one level, but in addition, three more increasingly subtle yet equally real, energetic levels exist. Thus, human beings have a physical body, an emotional/subtle body, a mental body, and a supra-causal body beyond mind and form. In this view, human beings are seen to move between levels of awareness on a daily basis as they cycle through waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states.
Mark Griffin’s art operates on a symbolic level using this rich, multidimensional yogic view of human existence. Each painting emerges from a process that seems to be a record of energy felt and expressed as it passes through the artist to brush and canvas. In this way, the painting-as-process connects Griffin to the flow between the inner and outer world through his expressionistic use of color, texture, form, and movement as he captures the ebb and flow of subtle energy fields within matter/mind.
In Griffin’s work on canvas and his large-scale photographs, the artist juxtaposes layers of images straddling the boundary between abstraction and representation. One may find the outline of a body together with the shape of a bird or some other animal. Yet additional layers might include flames or abstract washes of color. Griffin’s expressionist style’s bold, energetic gestures present us with a vision of the world as dynamic, complex, and pulsing with a life beyond our “normal,” egocentric vantage. We find within Griffin’s art this tension of opposites, a dynamism held in check by juggling the disparate elements into a harmonized whole. Ultimately, his work is optimistic, evidence that despite all the opposing forces at war within the human form, integrating principles exist through creative expression.
Artist Statement
“These past years I have been involved in two streams of work: Large scale photography and lost wax bronze sculpture. The connecting idea is that these forms and images are essentially figurative – an explanation and expression of the matrix between the physical and unseen energetic components of the human form.
My interest is the study of the Human Form. My art seeks to express the nature of the unseen True Self. Both the individual and Universal identity…”
Mark Griffin Discusses "The Fabulous Mr. Head" Series
“Somewhere along the line in my career I became what is called a figurative artist. I work with the human form, the human figure more often than I don’t. And that’s the case with this series, the Fabulous Mister Head series. It’s clearly an idea based on the human form but there’s also a little bit of a twist to it. In spiritual thought the human form is said to have not one body but four bodies – a physical body of matter, a subtle-physical body of energy, a causal body of mental formation, and a fourth body of pure consciousness. And, I kind of take that idea and I say, OK, this is a more inclusive idea of the human form. And that’s my launching point when I do figurative art. I try to visually express all of those elements physically and include it in the form and the expression.”