Taking in Laguna Art Museum’s Rick Griffin retrospective
By Ellen Griley

The Giver

So much of what we’ve come to label “psychedelic” dilutes (for whatever reason) into well-worn, singular catch phrases—hippies on acid, surfers on acid, etc.—that it’s often easy to disregard it entirely. Especially in the case of an exhibition like Laguna Art Museum’s “Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence” (the first of three similarly-themed area exhibitions opening in the coming months), which at first seemed it would demand little more than a fairly quick walk-through. Call it the ‘you seen one Grateful Dead poster, you seen ‘em all’ effect.

And yet, though Griffin did design and draw a number of posters and album covers for the Dead (and the Doors, and the Who, and also Timothy Leary’s Human Be-In), and yes, they are chock-full of trippy imagery and distorted text, “Heart and Torch” succeeds as a fascinating—and truly moving—retrospective/story of one man’s incredible life/journey. From Griffin’s beginnings as a Mad magazine-influenced illustrator for Surfer magazine (his early Murphy strips owing much to Don Martin) through his immensely prolific time as a poster artist in San Francisco (which landed him in Life magazine’s 1967 story The Big Poster Hang-Up) to his later years as a figure in the underground comix scene, and even later years as a born-again Christian (during which he teamed up with Calvary Chapel’s Chuck Smith to create the illustrated Gospel of John), Griffin’s work both humanizes and decodes his surroundings—surf culture, drug culture, Evangelical culture.

In the accompanying book to “Heart and Torch,” guest curator Doug Harvey writes, “The validity of [Griffin's] works relies less on their arguable merits as potential luxury status objects in the fine art world than on their role as indicators of a far richer and more vital vision of art’s role in the interlaced aesthetic, psychological and spiritual possibilities of our species.” And as someone who has never surfed, tripped on acid, or fell before the Lord, I have to agree: Griffin’s talent is in illustrating, but his gift was in communicating. However unintelligible his text and graphics may be, his message is always received.

HEART AND TORCH: RICK GRIFFIN’S TRANSCENDENCE LAGUNA ART MUSEUM | 307 CLIFF DR | LAGUNA BEACH 92651 | 949.494.8971 | LAGUNAARTMUSEUM.ORG | OPEN MON, WED & FRI 11AM-5PM THURS 11AM-9PM AND SAT & SUN 10AM-6PM | $8-10 | THRU SEPT 30