AN ARTIST'S LIFE Creating a Spiritual Space With Physical Art
	APRIL 2005

by Chris Scott
Photos by Russell Byrne

Jason Robert Griego is a self-taught sculptor working in the East Bay, whose greatest teacher or mentor was his father. “My father believed that art could not be taught but rather lived,” Jason said. “Through life experiences and hard work, we hear his voice still speaking inside us.”

Griego’s father never understood the demarcation that exists, in most people’s thinking, between manual and professional labor. He instructed Griego to learn the trades from the bottom up, maintaining that doing so helps strengthen a person for any subsequent work he does. Labor serves to ground an individual, giving him an appropriate sense of now being the time and here being the place to live and to work.

Laborers are able to step back from their efforts and see and usually actually touch the thing they’ve accomplished. Griego’s father maintained that there’s no high work or low work. With no hierarchy, we’re all cogs in the wonderful wheel of life that is turning through the world. He believed that all work is, ultimately, noble.

Being a sculptor involves an astonishing amount of manual labor. Griego fashions all of his own molds and wax castings, which entails a great deal of work. Then he does the finish work with hammers, chisels, awls, and knives. He’s plying tools used by laborers the world over.

Griego began sculpting seven years ago in response to a prophetic dream he had at 3:00 one Saturday morning. In a state of cold sobriety, he said that he awoke with a vision of himself as a sculptor. The revelation was vivid beyond any possibility of denial. “I always had done pictures, drawings, and paintings, but never sculpture.” Now Griego had received an unmistakable call. He awoke his wife, Lisa, and told her that he was to become a sculptor.

Griego quit his construction day job and went into sculpting as a full-time occupation. Being self-taught, there was quite a lot of trial and error. Sculpting for 16 to 18 hours straight, Griego would sometimes work with plaster until his hands bled. “It wasn’t easy in the beginning,” he said. “The materials are difficult to find as well as expensive to purchase, which means I skipped many lunches in order to pay for clay.”

Six months after receiving his vision Griego gave the first public presentation of his works, showing pieces that he had carved. He was fortunate to make enough money from sales to cover the cost of materials and to get a larger studio space with better lighting.

A Personal Pittsburg Beautification Project
Griego’s background in construction, coupled with his talent for sculpture won him a commission to renovate the façade of the Historic California Theater Building. The project included recreating two life-size sculptures depicting music and drama that had long since been lost to weathering and neglect, as well as two decorative urns that he recreated from archival photos. “I felt very fortunate in landing those jobs,” Steve said, “Even though the money was not exceptional, the work was very rewarding and served to strengthen my understanding of the medium.”

While working on the California Theater Building, both Jason and his wife fell in love with the potential of the area. They found property in a prize downtown Pittsburg location, right on the corner of Fifth and Railroad. The structure, dating back to the early 1900s, was one of the city’s first stores. It had originally been built in the beaux-arts style that was popular at the time. In the 40s more practical-minded owners stripped all of the columns, façade, and cornice work off the front of the building. Jason and Lisa found pictures of the structure as it looked in the days of its elegant past and spent a year and a half restoring the building to its former glory. The restoration was a huge job since it’s a two-story building, with a fancy façade that was 25 feet high and stretched the entire 180 feet of the building’s front.

The entire project was a labor of love. The ornate style included delicate nuances and numerous details, many of which were in disrepair or missing entirely and had to be re-modeled, reshaped, recarved, or recast. Always humble, Griego said, “I really owe a great deal of thanks to the community for all their support during the rehab of our building.” Griego’s efforts on the beautification project became a proxy for the community. His neighbors and other residents watched with ever-growing interest the transformation that took place during the year-and-a-half that he worked on the project.

Wanting to give something back to the Pittsburg community that was so supportive of his efforts, Griego donated to the city the concept design for Heritage Plaza, which became a beautiful little urban oasis with themes depicting the spirit of the community.

Heritage Plaza is located on Pittsburg’s 4th Street. Griego’s large sculpture, “The Dreamer,” serves as the plaza’s focal point. This monumental sculpture is both deeply personal and universal in representing the connections that hold together the past, present, future. The base of the sculpture represents the past as it molds to the needs of the present, which is represented by the dreamer who is artist, writer, and musician. The figure of the dreamer shows us that the only true now is our thought that provides the razor’s edge dividing the rest of the world into past and future. The female figure rising above is the embodiment of both the dreamer’s inspiration and the future, which is the subject of his dreams. She is his muse and as such always remains elusive and just beyond his reach — both the dream and the inspiration behind the dream — beautiful but remaining always a mystery.

Griego has taken on an apprentice, his younger brother Anthony, and the two of them are currently focusing their efforts on creating an allegorical sculpture of Saint Juan Diego for St. Peter Martyr church. Griego will use his work to represent the strong connections that he believes bind together community, church, and family. “It’s fantastic to be able to work on such an important piece of sculpture with Anthony,” Jason said, “because he comes from the same place as I and sees through similar eyes as mine.”

A Heritage Wide and Deep
Griego is the oldest of eight children, having four brothers and three sisters. The first sculpture he made was a statue of his father. That act of creation became seminal in the most direct meaning of the word because the image personified the spirit and philosophy that would characterize his art from that point. Creating an image of his father, Griego said, was a perfectly appropriate acknowledgement of the important role that he played in his life — and in the lives of his seven brothers and sisters.

Griego learned from his father the virtue of patient endurance. For many years, he watched him sit by open fires with a piece of cold steel. When the end of the steel grew red hot, he would pound on it with a hammer. Over many years, that raw piece of steel was transformed into a useful object. Through years of pounding he gradually transformed the piece of steel into a poker, with a loop on the end of it. This constant pounding became part of the rhythm of the conversation around the fire.

“In reflection, I look back and realize that nothing my father did was arbitrary,” Jason said, “but always deliberate. I was surprised to see this cold piece of steel over the years of my childhood gradually become transformed into a useful implement. The image will remain with me forever.”

Jason said that the experience illustrated how we are steel that is formed and tempered by life’s heat and the hammering. His father believed in Nietzsche’s famous dictum that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Life is meant to be experienced to the full rather than hidden from.

Jason said that his father, an Apache/Basque born on a reservation in New Mexico, had the soul of a great artist. He would sketch beautiful objects and, when finished, would throw them into the fire. This would happen at the tail end of an evening when the fire was burning low so the sons were able to secretly retrieve of few of them before they were completely incinerated. “Father’s art would have been well worth saving.” Jason said. “Destroying his pictures, however, served as an embodiment of my father’s philosophy.”

“Don’t let anything own you,” Griego’s father would say. “Not possessions nor pride. Only you can tell your worth; other people can’t judge you, either by curses or compliments.” On one hand, that is a difficult position for an artist to accept. On the other hand, the attitude is the only way an artist can possibly remain perfectly true to his art and, thereby, to himself.

Passing a Test for Humility
Griego experienced a real test of whether or not he was following his father’s advice to be free of other people’s disdain or acclimation at the show he is currently involved in at the Brentwood Arts Commission Gallery in the Business and Technology Incubator. One of Griego’s main pieces is a large nude in which he invested a great deal of his mind, heart, and spirit. Surrendering to his vision and to his ideal, the sculptor is shown kneeling before his triumph. He is praying for the courage and strength to heed the voice that flows through us all if we listen. Griego created the work to be timeless and, in the tradition of classical art, the nude figures become current to every age. “The human form is the greatest of all artistic statements,” Griego said. “It is a gift — honest, truthful and good.”

When a few Brentwood people saw the work at the front of the gallery, however, they were not so moved. And, over many objections — including those of Bill Weber, the curator — they moved the sculpture to a separate room, together with other pieces these few people objected to, behind a door that could be closed.

Of course, segregating his or her art is a blow to any artist. As Griego said, “It would have been easy for me to respond with anger and to remove my pieces from the show. But my negative response would have indicated that I was, after all, acknowledging other people’s judgments. In the end, beauty and vulgarity can never share the same temple. The artist can only hold up the mirror — what you see is within you.”

Griego believes that the Creator gave us our physical bodies in which to move among the regular world. We were also given spirits to help us see past the physical world. The sculpture was intended not to be of a man, but rather to capture the essence of humanity — aiming at honesty rather than glorification. He said that his statues are intended to lead the observer beyond the outside beauty — the nuance of curves and surfaces — and to honor humanity and by so doing, to honor life itself. His figures are, therefore, not merely people, but they are vessels into which he is attempting to pour hopes, dreams, feelings, and beliefs.

At the reception that was held for the show Griego responded to a question about the matter by saying that he welcomed the experience as a way of opening up conversation. Moving most of the nudes that Griego and other artists in the show had created into that room really did generate in many people’s minds questions about what art really is and what it is supposed to be that, otherwise, the people might never have asked.

“I welcome the interaction between the community and the work and I feel that it is an artist’s obligation to help guide the community toward its hopes, wants, and dreams. The Brentwood Arts Commission has handled all issues well and is taking important steps toward improving the quality of life in the city. They should be commended for this forward thinking vision.”

So some people think some of Griego’s work as edgy; others think it marvelous. He is, in turn, condemned and complimented. Which reaction should he listen to? “I’m still listening, in fact, to the advice of my father,” he said. He believes that works of art rightfully occupy a place beyond praise or censure. They just are what they are. Each one is a statement of artistic truth and impervious to people’s opinions. In the final analysis they are unaffected even by the opinion of the artist who created them.

Coming to a Clarity About Life and Work
The last time Griego visited his father as he lay on his deathbed his father said to him, “You’re my eldest child. You imagine that you look at life through clear eyes.” Then his father added an enigmatic and profoundly prophetic blessing, “My death will become my final gift to you. You think you see now, but after I’m gone you will be able to see things with new clarity, color, depth, and perspective than your eyes can see now.”

The next day he died and his prophecy immediately came true. “It was the first time death had touched my life in a direct way,” Griego said, “and as I received the news of his passing the phone that I held in my hand took on a changed appearance. The world around me really did become charged with a new clarity and brilliance.”

Whatever piece he is working on at the current time seems always to be Jason’s favorite. He likes to think that none of my works own him, as his father taught that material things should not own us. The piece he said he wouldn’t want to give up, however, is that statue of his father. “The figure demonstrates, with 100% sincerity, our respect for him,” he said. Leon Russell, a favorite musician of both Griego and his father, has a song, “Magic Mirror” with a line, “we’re owned by our possessions.” Griego said his father’s statue is the possession that comes closest to owning him.

Griego struggles every day with issues of creating honest work versus striving for effect. As he says, “the greatest followers are the rebels. The real revolutionaries are traveling through life incognito and don’t fit into categories; they find their own path”.

Griego explains that adopting the role of rebel is an enticing pitfall, but it is a box that often constrains true creative processes and can produce tired results. The point isn’t to be different, but to be honest with what’s inside the creator’s heart. So he concentrates his efforts on producing something that will be perfectly honest to his vision and pilgrimage.

Griego’s profession as a sculptor has beat materialism out of him. He loves cars, but loves them at car shows; the love doesn’t involve ownership. Ownership is temporary at best anyway. The things he’s most interested in these days involve his media. When he gets a check for one of his works he translates the sum into the amount of clay, wax, bronze, or marble it will buy. These days raw materials for his art are the only “possessions” he longs to acquire!