Naval Air Station Whidbey Island is home to the new Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.

Open year round, this museum features a lovingly restored World War II Catalina and celebrates naval aviation through exhibits, tours, reenlistments and events.

Information at PNWNAM.org.

I started thinking about painting as a distinctly domestic act.

The canvas as a textile has a lot of connotations and histories, and I got really interested in acknowledging its relationship to domestic space.

And the grid on the canvas is so intentionally irregular, I think, in kind of a beautiful way.

The suburb of Burien is nestled between the runway grid of Sea-Tac airport and the wide open waters of Puget Sound.

Settled in the 1880s, the city's shoreline has been a gathering place since long before.

Coast Salish tribes, including the Duwamish, built seasonal camps here to harvest clams and salmon.

Now the saltwater beach serves as the western boundary of Seahurst Park, spanning nearly 200 acres with tide pools, streams, and forested cliffs.

Proximity to the park was a big draw when artist and educator Cabl Griffith moved with his family from Seattle to Burien in 2019.

Their basement became a creative studio shared by Griffith, his wife and fellow artist Jess Griffith, and their son Forrest.

It's where Griffith carries ou his multistep painting process, starting with dyeing the canvas.

Today I'm going to be putting a fold dye onto this piece of canvas.

So the fold dye is a technique that basically folds the dye in such a fashion that the canvas kind of becomes its own resist.

- So like a tie dyed shirt?

- Yeah, it's essentially it's essentially the same thing.

And the fold dye arranges it so that it creates this pattern where you get these squares of non-dyed, in this case it would be the magenta versus the lines of the dye.

My work for a long time has had some relationship to digital images.

But when using fabric in this way and using these techniques and processes which are like, to me, kind of inherently domestic processes, it carries those associations as well to like wall hangings or tapestries or quilting and things like that.

So... - Sure, yeah.

- To me, it's become a kind of interesting way of bringing digital references in with domestic references.

Having grown up playing video games, and continuing that pastime with his son, Griffith has lon been fascinated by how computer pixels are used to form humanoid worlds.

In his artwork, Griffith translates this digital technology to analog materials, creating a pixel grid by overdyeing his canvas with a matrix of lines.

After carefull folding and clamping the canvas, Griffith places it in a dy bath to steep for a few hours.

While waiting, we took a walk in nearby Seahurst Park, where the landscape is distinctly different from where he grew up, just north of New York City.

When you moved out to Seattle, what was your experience of the landscape here?

It couldn't be more different.

I mean, you know, like it's the it's the scale of it is really like probably the most overwhelmingly incredible, expansive, majestic.

You know, I only saw things like that in movies or something, you know, so it felt like fantastical.

And did you feel, as an artist, compelled to try to capture that in your work right away?

They soon started to become more specific, started to reference actual locations.

In some ways, I've thought of some of my paintings as being post-human... that they are kind of an evolution of ecological forms that emerge only once humans have perished.

Once back from the walk, it was time to see how the dyed grid turned out.

Griffith especially enjoy the irregularities and accidents that happened during the process.

I visited Griffith a month later to watch him cover his dyed canvas with deep color and curious forms.

Layerin is a key aspect of his process, both literally and metaphorically.

By superimposing family photos from wilderness trips and everyday domestic scenes, he create tension between timeline jumps.

It's the space between that compels him... the gaps and twists in memory.

Usually there's kind of two primary images.

It starts kind of like this.

Just kind of a basic photo.

I did some basic editing to illuminate some of the darker areas, stuff like that.

But then I put a series of effects and filters on it to pixelate it.

I think of a piece of canvas that I'm going to use for it.

I have to think about how many squares there are going to be, so that I reduce the pixelization to the exact amount of squares, and then as I'm going, if I feel like I want to bring in detail elements from the original photos, I can come to this, print out new images and use those as sources.

Griffith copies his pixelated photo onto the canvas square by square, using the lattice of dyed lines to support his freer and more fanciful painting.

His invented symbology adds yet another layer — ovals and arches, that he say hold more mystery than meaning.

These repeated mark draw the viewer closer, as if to solve a code.

With lush colo bleeding across the hidden grid, some works look like glass mosaics, some like soft quilts.

In your works, you often use these vibrant, almost neon colors, like the the yellow you were just using.

And is that to add context or to add difference?

Dissonance?

- Yeah, I mean, I think the colors sometimes do come from nature, maybe directly, but I think it's also just about like an intuitive understanding of color and a desire to create kind of luminescence that I do like love and sense in nature.

Recently, Griffith has begun adding another layer to his work, facilitated by VR headset, an extension of his interest in video games, the headset allows him to see a painting in progress on the wall, while simultaneously looking through a photograph projected on the goggles.

With this augmented-reality tool, he amps up the surreal quality of the scene, adding subtle visual suggestions from the original photo, hidden like easter eggs.

I feel like I'm doing the mixing.

Do you have an intention with your paintings about what you hope people will take away from them?

- I hope that there's an amount of mystery and a sense of discovery.

There is a genuine love of believing in a space — an invented space.

If I feel sort of tuned enough into it and can create something where I get lost in it, my hope is that others can do that as well.

Like a walk through northwest woods, Griffith envelops us in old growth stumps, creeks and bridges, wet with moss.

You never know what might lie along the trail — a plant that pulses with electric color or a sudden memory of home.

This series was made possible in part with the generous support of Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.