Clara Griffith

Absurd and delightful paintings

About Me

I'm an artist residing in Austin, Texas, who finds joy in beautiful colors, pleasing shapes, intricate details, and chocolate cake. My artistic roots trace back to childhood, where I would watch and try to copy my mother, herself an artist. While my formal education focused on music performance, I would take courses in photography, drawing, painting, and sculpting wherever my schedule would permit.

After college, I spent ten years as a software developer. During that time, I would experiment with ways of combining my day job with my art practice, but it wasn't until 2021 that I discovered triangles after tweaking a script I wrote that originally generated kaleidoscopic videos.

About My Triangles Collection

I start a "triangle painting" by first choosing a couple of images to combine. Sometimes I will have a specific theme or narrative in mind, other times selections are driven by color or emotion. Source material comes from many places - magazines, google street view, pop art, playing cards, rennaisance paintings, and so on. I keep an ever-growing collection of inspiring images to pull from for this purpose. While many of the images used are appropriated from other sources, I also use images of my own creation as well. These could be snapshots from my phone, some of my older paintings, and photos from photoshoots that I have directed or assisted.

The selected images are fed to a custom computer program I wrote. After I give the program a few parameters, it conveniently slices the images up into triangles and randomly reassembles them into a single picture. I can also tweak the result and select what image layer appears in each triangle. I then use the resulting collage as a reference for the painting. The process of translating the digital image into a physical one gives me a chance to tweak the colors a little bit and add a little more personality.