Meet the Painter Adorning Phoebe Bridgers’s Guitars
The musician and indie darling was drawn to John Griswold's intimate tableaux evoking Renaissance and Baroque iconographies.
On an average day in December 2022, the Pasadena-based surrealist classicist painter John Griswold got an Instagram DM from musician Phoebe Bridgers.
“I remember she said ‘big fan,’” Griswold told Hyperallergic, “and I thought that was pretty funny, given the fact that, to quote a common epithet of hers, she’s ‘Phoebe Fucking Bridgers.’”
The indie darling went on to ask Griswold if he had ever painted on a guitar, and from there a collaborative artistic relationship was born. Griswold, known for his intimate tableaux and animated collages that evoke Renaissance and Baroque iconographies, has now painted multiple instruments for Bridgers, including another guitar she has been taking on tour as well as a lyric book, a vinyl cover, and a secret puzzle for her much-anticipated third solo album, Lost Weekend.
The world saw Griswold’s most personal commission for Bridgers, a custom-painted vintage Gibson guitar, for the first time when the singer performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this year. The small oil paintings jump off the aged black surface, echoing Bridgers’s ice-blonde hair sparkling against her black wardrobe.
The two artists, though fluent in different mediums, spoke the same creative language and worked hand in hand over the course of four years to finalize a vision for the guitar. Neither artist wanted to change the instrument's surface or alter its visible wear. Griswold used oil paints mixed with an alkyd medium to create the images, and the final product is a guitar that is completely personal to Bridgers.
