Buffalo Rising Online

Jul 17th 2008, 11:15am By Elena Cala Buscarino

At the age of 14, Larry III began working on his father’s steel commissions. During high school summers, Larry was involved in moving Griffis Sculpture Park to Ashford Hollow and then erecting and installing the sculptures. There was great excitement in the early years in Buffalo at both the Sculpture Park and Essex Street.

"My father would have these huge projects, and I worked for him in the summers," Griffis said. He taught my brother Mark and I how to work with steel, how to fabricate it and how to bend it. Think Birds Excited Into Flight on Bidwell Parkway. I've been in this for most of my life." Though, when pinned down for an answer, Griffis says his favorite medium is bronze, he has extensive experience with many different mediums.

Griffis recalls a five-minute sketch his father made on a napkin that became a summer-long lesson in fabrication for him. The resultant figure of a giraffe ended up being 17 feet tall. "There was no mold for this one, so there'll never be another. I remember drawing the giraffe on the cement floor, 17 feet long, and then bending the steel to it, right there," Griffis said.

The workload was as tremendous in scale as it was arduous in nature. "When I got into this, I was a young, athletic guy who loved working with my body. When you're 20, swinging a hammer 40 or 50 times is nothing," Griffis declared. As for now, "I didn't expect I'd be working on this many large project at once—it seems like I'm doing everything at once, designing, forming, foundry work, installations…but I try to work on so many different things to stay challenged."

Though he was 20 years old before it dawned on him that he was more sculptor by his own right than laborer for his father, Griffis followed a path to those ends when he spent time in Italy during his training at Goddard College in Vermont. "I was in Italy, studying Renaissance non-stop. I was hand-drawing and sculpting every day, while my peers were the epitome of drawing and painting. It dawned on me after spending all of those summers working for my father that I wanted to form my own work," Griffis said.

"My later studio work was drastically different than my early work," Griffis said. When I came back from Italy, I felt like I could express a few things."

At present Larry is working on several projects involving bronze and stainless steel. A large bronze globe has been created for the Frederick Albert Cook memorial to be placed in Forest Lawn Cemetery. Amherst High School will have two life-size Tigers at the school's entranceway, and the Village of Hamburg will receive two, twelve-foot-high abstract sculptures.

And then there's the piece, Energy Weave that Griffis is completing for Rick Smith III's Rigidized Metal office building on Ohio Street in Buffalo's Old First Ward. It only makes sense that metal sculptor Griffis and metal manufacturer Smith, would team up on a project that would highlight a common material for which they are both known—in conjunction with their artistic concepts and collective community spirit.

The two met up on July 4th of 2007, in what Smith defined as a "heavy dawning moment." Griffis said that Smith had been looking for something artistic to do, and he wanted designs. "I thought about what Rick wanted for a long time, and then I was sitting in my home studio under my skylight, and I started sketching in pencil. I had a few choices for him, but I really liked the one Rick chose. I showed it to him at the end of November, and we didn't change a thing," Griffis said.

"It's eighty feet from beginning to end, and I wanted it to look like a ribbon of energy. I had these solid shapes, and I was trying to make them flow," He explained. Saying he was looking for the largest pattern or heaviest material, Griffis picked the Rigidized sheets he wanted to use.

Griffis explained that because of the nature of the design, they had to take into account that the snow that would accumulate on it would be heavier than the steel itself. He had to consult with structural engineers and design an anchoring mechanism that would allow for the heavy pieces to attach to Smith's building, as well as working with IBC's expert animators to design the functional 3D models for the piece.

Smith said that aside from giving Griffis loose parameters, he didn't get involved in the design, but he couldn't be happier about it or what it means to him. "In essence, we wanted to spruce up Ohio Street and our expansion. I had a plain brown box, so I told Larry, 'Do something. Help me make the neighborhood more interesting," Smith said.

"A lot of art is commissioned by the public sector. I figured it was high time the private sector boys invested in the creative class," Smith reasoned. "We're going places like… What's the name of that magazine you work for? Buffalo is rising. I wanted something happy to celebrate its history, geography, people.

This sounds just right to Griffis. As an artist with installations all over the world, he says he's happy to be in Buffalo—newly wed—and working on local projects near family. "I could have gone anywhere in the world and worked," Griffis said. But he's right here in Buffalo because, he says, "I like to feel connected to people."