John Griswold Creates Custom Guitars For Phoebe Bridgers

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Pasadena-based surrealist classicist painter John Griswold began a collaboration with musician Phoebe Bridgers in December 2022, after Bridgers reached out via Instagram.

Griswold, known for his intimate tableaux and animated collages that reference Renaissance and Baroque iconography, has since painted multiple instruments for Bridgers. These include a guitar she is currently taking on tour, a lyric book, a vinyl cover, and a secret puzzle for her upcoming third solo album, Lost Weekend. The public first saw Griswold's custom-painted vintage Gibson guitar when Bridgers performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this year. The small oil paintings on the guitar's aged black surface complement Bridgers's ice-blonde hair and black attire.

The two artists, despite working in different mediums, developed a shared creative vision for the guitar over four years, opting to preserve the instrument's original surface and visible wear. Griswold achieved the images by mixing oil paints with an alkyd medium, resulting in a guitar deeply personalized for Bridgers.“The surface had aged, and there was already a crack network in the clear coat of the black, and areas of wear from it having been used and strummed,” Griswold explained.“I'm attracted to this as a found object and wanted to celebrate all these surfaces, and she agreed 100 percent.”

The guitar's interconnected images, a recurring theme in Griswold's work, include an anchor weighing down a rope, a pulley device, and a disembodied hand holding a sunflower. Two Victorian-style“lovers' eye” portraits also float in space, with one seemingly about to be pierced by a Medieval-esque weapon. The largest image, a boy in a yellow satin dress and armor, draws inspiration from Griswold's admiration for Dutch Golden Age masters, particularly Gerard ter Borch's“The Card Players” (c. 1659), which he admired at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a child. This painting, featuring a boy whose face is based on childhood photos of Bridgers's late father, holds a small hand mirror reflecting a Classical Greek goddess. It serves as the central image connecting the guitar to Bridgers's album, which largely addresses her father's death. This image also appears in the lyric book for the song“Still Standing.”

Griswold believes that viewers do not need extensive art historical knowledge to connect with his work, stating that there are“so many ways in” and that its“dreamlike juxtapositions” will resonate universally.“I've always battled the idea that you have to have a program or a map to understand all the iconography of a painting,” he said.“I think the key to that is not knowing, and bringing to it your own fears and wonder and theories.” The second guitar Griswold painted for Bridgers's Lost Weekend tour features a space theme. Bridgers's incorporation of Griswold's paintings adds another layer of allegory to her music, encouraging fans to interpret her artistic vocabulary. Griswold reflected on his involvement, saying that his work made him feel like a small part of an“amazing, huge, magical machine.” He added,“Part of the point of it is people are going to make so much of it. Certainly, the music and aspects of Phoebe and her life, and her interests, and her friends, and her imagery, and what she's embracing, and all of that, they're going to make that their own.”

Source: Hyperallergic

MENAFN22102026005694012507ID1111853847