Hazel

Artist Hazel Griffiths

Watchers I.

Watchers II.

Watchers III.

Watcher I. II. and III. Encaustic Wax and Mixed Media, 24×48” $3,600 each

“I am originally from the UK. My roots in the rural Shropshire and Herefordshire areas have certainly influenced my work in many ways. Even though I am now based in Florida some of the forms and textures from my childhood landscapes often come through in my work like latent memories.

I have worked in a variety of techniques and styles in the last few years, mostly in encaustic wax and mixed media. My most recent work is a combination of these mediums and textures in a mixture of acrylic, encaustic wax and natural fibers. I also like to use gold leaf to add abstract forms to many of my paintings: the way in which it reflects light so differently from the other materials, produces something that is a little magical.

My new work is heavy with an almost pagan symbolism that for me is a subconscious return to the hedgerows, woodlands and bracken covered hillsides of my childhood, with snarled thickets of Hawthorne and briars that become like talismanic constructions in my memory.

Another theme most that reoccurs in my work is the submersive medium of dreams. Often having vivid dreams myself, I like to explore the way in which a dream immerses the dreamer like an amniotic fluid, the world beyond rendered only in suggestions and symbolic clues; a world we see only in a mysterious half-light. The paintings then tell just a fragment of a story, the rest forgotten or obscured. These ‘clues’ are rendered in the form of something recognizable like a human form that is either insubstantial or lacking in features yet weighted with a meaning that is out of our grasp.”

Hazel modeling for Gallery 212 Miami opening Second Saturday in April, 2011. Style Hair Wardrobe by Deux Love Photograph courtesy Jonathan Dvoretz