EveGriffinArtWork

I am an artist living in Shgagwei, Lingit Aani (Skagway, Alaska). Like so many, when I washed ashore in Skagway, I never expected to stay. Flash forward about thirty years, and I'm still here, wondering how it happened. I never knew what I wanted to do with my life, but now that I'm in my sixties and the whole thing is mostly over, I can relax and not think so much about that. The result is that I consider myself “retired” and now spend as much time as I can doing artwork.

 

I was born in Rhode Island and spent an idyllic toddlerhood there, spent my childhood in Alabama, and my adolescence in Detroit, Michigan. I became an adult in New York City, lived in Rhode Island again for a time, and also North Carolina. I've lived in Alaska longer than anywhere else. It depends on what mood I'm in when I'm asked where I'm from. My parents were wonderful, artistic intellectuals, and my brother was a violinist. My mother had been a model and secretary, and my father, a career National Guardsman and then insurance executive. As a child, I drew compulsively. They actually call it that: “compulsive drawing.” It’s when, for whatever reason, a child learns about the world by constantly drawing instead of doing other things like writing and reading. Aside from playing baseball, drawing was all I cared to do.

 

Later on, because of this “talent,” I was sent to a special high school where I worked hard to earn a scholarship to somewhere in order to escape what I considered a dreary life in Detroit. At The Cooper Union art school in New York City, I got to study with famous abstract expressionists and conceptual artists like Lee Krasner, Dore Ashton, Reuben Kadish, Louise Bourgeois, and Hans Haacke. But once I had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1980, I promptly quit artwork altogether, unless you count doing paste-ups for magazines as artwork. I think I was just terribly confused.

 

In 1981, a chance encounter got me hired to go on an archaeological expedition to arctic Alaska as a photographer. Nothing was the same after that. Alaska ruined everything. I continued to live in Manhattan for a time, advancing in magazine publishing until I was able to eke out a living freelancing as a graphic designer. I eventually ended up in the ready-to-wear fashion industry, designing such things as hang tags and sew-in labels for Gimbel’s and Macy’s. But, all the while, I longed for the adventure, romance, and oil wealth of "The Last Frontier."

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For about ten years, I lived an impossible life divided between Manhattan and Alaska. I worked in the fashion industry in New York and in archaeology in remote, wilderness Alaska, going back and forth as opportunities arose, loving both lives and losing my mind in the process. Eventually, I had to make a choice, and a difficult one it was. To this day, I wonder what might have been...

 

I enrolled in grad school at The University of Alaska in Fairbanks in hopes of becoming a real archaeologist. Eventually, I became fairly competent in some aspects of the discipline and the appearance of the word “archaeologist” on my tax returns finally did not seem so strange. This was a spectacular career; I traipsed, and flew over, endless tracts of wilderness, living for years out-of-doors, and meeting all manner of wildlife and remarkable people in the process. I think I made my small contribution to knowledge of the prehistoric and historic north as well.

 

Although I began in the field of early man in the New World with its stone tools and bone needles, I ended up in tin cans, bottles, and old shoes. Archaeology is what brought me to Skagway. For seven summers, I roamed the mountainsides and river valleys of the Chilkoot Trail out of Skagway, looking for the leavings of the Klondike gold rush and of those who had come before it, on behalf of the National Park Service.

 

And then, I started to get tired. As it was, I had pushed the limits of age for a field archaeologist, successfully delaying the day when the government field worker turns to an office-bound administrator.

 

I found I couldn't abide this kind of career adjustment and, as ever, lacking any kind of sensible plan for what should come next, I defaulted to a position as a maintenance worker at the same National Park in Skagway where I had last worked as an archaeologist. I would still be outside, albeit on scaffolding in town, and I would earn good pay. I went from being a white collar professional that everyone wanted to talk to at parties to a blue collar grunt, and spent the next seven years pretty much scraping paint.

 

But this turned out to be good fortune because simultaneously, I had a chance encounter with Wayne Price, the now-famed Lingit artist, maker of “totem” poles and carver of canoes (Lingit: the people indigenous to this region). Wayne needed a painter for an upcoming show of his works, and I happened along at the right moment, able and willing to translate rough sketches of his designs into paint on his carvings. I worked with him over the course of several winters, at Alaska Indian Arts, Inc., in Haines, Alaska, a town neighboring Skagway, and returned to scraping paint on historic gold rush buildings during the summers to supplement my income.

 

Working alongside Wayne and the other artists at AIA caused my love of artwork to come flooding back. Suddenly, I was immersed in a great and ancient artistic tradition that is also vitally contemporary, and working alongside some of its greatest masters, no less. It's hard to express my great esteem for the indigenous people, art and culture of this region. After a while, I began producing my own designs and wood carvings and began to be noticed as an artist in my own right.

 

And then came the phase of life when I needed to care for the elderly in my family. In 2013, I packed up and went back east for a period of years. At my mother’s house, I happened upon the old oil paints I had used as a student at Cooper Union. They were still useable, and so I began to dabble.

 

Now, back in Skagway, the dabbling has manifested itself in my most recent painting, Green Hill Surf.