We are seekers of knowledge and from the rich humus upon which we walk; histories unfold in the hands of those gifted in unweaving its tapestry of knowledge. It is an alchemical pursuit that has fascinated the human species since ancient times; it is also the prime mover in the work of the artist James Griffith.

“Isn’t this luscious stuff?” says artist James Griffith as brown shiny goo drips from a stick he’s pulled from a five-gallon pail. A grin stretches across his face. It’s tar — from the La Brea Tar Pits, no less — and it’s the material driving new paintings on view at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica through Nov. 30.

An artist thrives on challenges, and a decade ago Griffith sought a different medium. He looked around his Altadena studio and found asphaltum, a material used in printmaking, and he began painting with it. He fell in love with its dark, rich tones, and he realized that he could get tar from a novel source. The tar pits provides him with a bucket of the stuff that lasts a year.

Instead of depicting nature, Griffith works with nature itself, extracting images of the milky way, flora and fauna out of tar so that his paintings exude life. Rather than making paintings of nature Griffith’s artwork behaves like nature - recalling Jackson Pollock’s famous comment “ I don’t paint nature. I am nature.”

Oil. The world runs on it. Despite major inroads in sustainable energy sources, it still powers about 80% of our systems. Though unquestionably an integral part of the modern world, fossil fuels were borne out of ancient animal remains. This tension between past and present within this unusual medium is what keeps artist James Griffith coming back.

"When I thought of tar as a material, I loved it because on one hand it is this primordial goo. At the same time, it's at the heart of the whole environmental problem. It has a contemporary quality and but also an incredibly ancient timeline quality.