Hello
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My Story
I’m Steve Griffin, a retired Doctor of Nursing Practice with more than thirty years in healthcare leadership. I now live near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, where I’ve turned a lifelong habit of building, fixing, and learning into a focused artistic practice.
Intarsia began as a pandemic diversion and quickly became something more. I was drawn to its balance of precision and expression—the way it allowed me to work with my hands while constructing something narrative and layered.
My work pushes beyond traditional intarsia. Rather than flat mosaics, I build depth, movement, and atmosphere—often suspending figures within mixed-media environments shaped by pyrography, paint, resin, and natural materials. Each piece becomes less a composition and more a constructed scene.
The process is deliberate. I select woods for their inherent character—grain, density, and tone—then cut, carve, and shape each element before assembling them into dimensional forms. What begins as separate fragments is brought together into something cohesive, though never entirely complete.
While my early work drew from 19th-century illustration, I now use AI to generate reference imagery from my own photographs—drawn from childhood and years of travel—reconstructing moments that no longer exist except in memory. These images guide the work, but each piece is ultimately built by hand.
The Making of Electric Demons
The seed of Electric Demons was a fascination with raw, invisible energy—the way it pulses, twists, and seems to take on a personality of its own. I wanted to capture that restless, unpredictable movement in wood, a material that is usually thought of as still and grounded.
The process began with the careful selection of woods whose grain, color, and density could echo the chaotic vitality I envisioned. Using a scroll saw, I “unstitched” the individual demon-like forms, cutting them in ways that suggested jagged movement and distorted anatomy. From there, each piece was shaped and sculpted with rotary tools and abrasives, not simply for fit but for motion—edges that curl, surfaces that ripple, contours that look stretched or pulled by unseen forces. Cloth-covered wire becomes writhing hair tendrils
The demons were “floated” onto a mixed-media background built up with silverleaf, alcohol dye, paint, pyrography, and resin. These layers created the sensation of a fiery electrical field: resin lending depth and transparency, paint laying down vibrant bursts of energy, pyrography adding scorched, erratic lines, and mineral inclusions sparking like sudden currents. The finished composition was framed in a shadowbox to enhance its dimensionality and to pull the viewer’s eye inward, as though witnessing a frozen explosion of motion and power.
Conceptually, Electric Demons is about the uneasy marriage of energy and form. The demons are embodiments of forces that resist control: electricity, passion, creativity, even chaos itself. Their distorted, dancing shapes capture both menace and vitality, suggesting that what gives life and light can also unsettle or destroy. By working in intarsia—a method traditionally associated with order, precision, and calm—I aimed to push against the boundaries of the medium, allowing disorder and intensity to intrude.
The piece invites viewers to reflect on their own relationship with unseen currents, whether emotional, spiritual, or elemental. Electric Demons is not just an image of chaotic forces—it is a reminder that we live with them, carry them, and sometimes, become them.
The Making of A Girl, A Pig, and A Promise
This piece began not as an artwork, but as a story—a grandfather’s quiet wish to leave something lasting for his granddaughter, who never goes far without her trusted sidekick, Piggy. I wanted to create more than a portrait: I wanted to capture the bond between child and companion, and the promise that their love, comfort, and shared adventures will live on long after the toy itself is set aside.
Each element was cut from carefully chosen woods, selected for their warmth of tone and gentle grain, as though the material itself could carry affection. The girl’s form was shaped with patience, softened edges suggesting innocence and trust. Piggy was given equal care—rounded, sturdy, and endearing, his shape designed to echo the way a child might hold him close. Shaping and texturing became as much about emotion as technique, every curve meant to capture tenderness.
I floated the figures on a background enriched with needle-felted marino wool: layered color and finish. This gave them space to “breathe,” to stand not just as a picture but as a memory held in three dimensions. In the glow of resin and paint, the scene feels timeless—anchored both in the present moment and in the legacy it carries forward.
The promise in the title is simple and profound: that love shared between a granddaughter and her companion, and the love of a grandfather for them both, will not fade. It will live on in wood, in story, and in memory.
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