Griffin D’Zmura McGuire

– mixed media painter (USA)
Contact: griffindmcguire@gmail.com
Website: Linktree griffindart

“The looking glass has broken, we must brave the Kaleidoscope mirage…”

Q: Who are you?

I’m Griffin, an artist on the other side of a degree in Philosophy from UC Berkeley. My favorite mediums are acrylic paint and ink. One of my aims is to invite viewers into another world, one which will remain with them in the hidden alleyway of the subconscious mind.

Q: Darkness is not only the absence of light. What more is lurking in the shadows (of mind)?!

Shadows conceal, but also provide form and feature. The play between shadow as a metaphor and shadow as absence of light provides an interesting field of exploration. In my work I often explore autonomously without intention. I feel that this allows me to explore the shadows in my own mind without censorship.

Q: What is the most important taboo in art?

For me, I find the association of a price tag with a piece of to be a taboo that is worthy of deeper exploration. Many of the artists that are most widely spoken of are known in part due to the notoriety of their sales volume as opposed to the questions their work explores. In this strange dynamism between value and creativity there’s much more to think on and is one of the reasons I decided to move my digital work into the blockchain space.

Q: Why is the beauty in ugliness so fatal?

Art is not just a pursuit of Beauty. In the unsettling, and disturbing, a whole range of emotions which are under-explored and critical to artistic exploration are able to be brought into the open.

Q: What question would you ask the most evil person on this planet?

Though I’m not sure there’s someone who is the most evil, I’ll ask them if they enjoy Pineapple on pizza.

Q: The world seems to become more and more a violent, unkind place. Greed and egoism seems to be the only impulse of any change. Did mankind still have the chance to build a peaceful, sustainable world for every living and feeling being or would it be better if somebody dispose everything in the sewer of the evolutionary failure?

From my perspective, it seems that history shows us a world in which violence is the norm. We see much more of the ugliness in the world with news and the advances in new media, though this doesn’t imply that the world is actually more violent than it was in the past. A new slate, a Tabula Rasa, can be an appealing idea but in practice only leads to forgetting our standing as humans and moves us away from working on the problems we face.