Place and Perspective – David Griffith

Moving between landscape and still life, David Griffith’s paintings are grounded in the discipline of looking: landscapes begin as drawings made on site before being reimagined in the studio, while still-life compositions are painted directly from life. Across both modes, observation becomes a point of departure for something more expansive—where memory, sensation and the possibilities of paint reshape what is seen into something newly felt.

Griffith’s still lifes possess a hushed magnetism: bowls, bottles, fruit and familiar domestic objects arranged with measured grace, then rendered in dusty jewel tones, softened light and precise shadow. In these works, humble forms take on a contemplative dignity, recalling the great still-life tradition while remaining distinctly contemporary in their sensitivity and restraint. Elsewhere, his landscapes translate lived encounters with place into painterly meditations on atmosphere, structure and space.

For Griffith, painting is as much subject as process. Each canvas becomes a site of enquiry—testing colour against form, depth against flatness, illusion against surface. Objects shift in relation to one another, space opens and compresses, and the rectangle of the picture plane is treated as an arena for play and invention.

Last year, David Griffith was named a finalist in both the The Lester Prize and the A.M.E Bale Art Prize, following his debut appearance at Michael Reid Northern Beaches in 2024, ‘Still Life’.