Field Notes

"The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? Griffin’s is a strange, playful, stubborn kind of vision – in the best tradition of Stanley Spencer or Eric Ravilious. He animates landscape, brings pylons to life."
Tom Jeffreys, author of Signal Failure

Field Notes is about looking. It is about exposure to the elements. It is about deep history and the present. It is about being present in space, a space that happens to be Lincolnshire.

Field Notes is about landscape. It is about topography and time. Chalk and flint and sea marsh. The coming and going of the sea, Neolithic farmers and the razzle dazzle of weary coastal towns. It is as much about the ghost of a mammoth as it is the scream of a jet fighter, heading east. It is about movement – the strike of a brush, the pan of a camera – flames in the woods. Each drawing is a still from a film – a film that is under constant production inside Griffin’s skull.

Field Notes is part of a tradition – it is kin with the cave painters and the antler scratchers, JMW Turner, Raymond Briggs, Alan Garner and Alan Moore – it is about taking a place and looking at it over and over again and with each looking it becomes strange and new. It is about battle fields and burial mounds, old gods and dirty water, tracer fire bouncing into the mouth of the mighty Humber. It is the biography of a territory in full colour, raging in the first light of day.

It contains Werner Herzog, sausages and mild peril.

Field Notes will be 128 full colour pages of paintings and words; a beautifully designed and bound hardback printed on art paper.