by Anthony DeMatteo
Staff Writer
When Chris Grisaffe goes home now, it’s to collect the ruins of his city and make them into art.
The New Orleans native, whose media are peep holes from ruined Bourbon Street doors and virgin cypress unearthed from Louisiana swamps where they were submerged by Katrina, was one of the artists at the Florida Theatre Friday for the annual Art After Dark fund raising event.
Girls in eye masks and tables of catered food greeted those braving a slow, steady Downtown rain as the event started.
The artists – photographers, jewelry makers, painters – displayed their goods, hoping to make some sales before the night’s end.
Grisaffe holds a “rubbing” he fashioned from a peephole in his native city.
“To keep the bad element out, they looked through this to see who’s knocking,” he said. “That’s the last original. I can’t do it anymore.”
Though he lives and works in Jacksonville, Louisiana still has his heart.
“That’s home for me,” he said.
The doors the artist molds into art were once under water on Canal Street. He said making art from the broken pieces of his city is bitter-sweet.
“It was going to go,” he said. “There’s mountains of it. And now that New Orleans has been flattened, the source for all that good wood is gone, so we go in the swamps and pick up driftwood pieces. We don’t cut any trees. We just find them floating.”
Grisaffe goes to Louisiana two or three times a year, filling the odd request to find a ruined parking meter or some flooded object and turn it into decor for a client.
At his first Art After Dark, and Grisaffe said he was unsure what success he’d have selling his work.
“I have no clue,” he said. “I’m expecting not to have to carry anything home. They keep telling me it’s going to sell.”
Frank Donator leans against a wall near a theater stairway. Waiting to start graduate work at New York City’s Parson School of Design, he is at Art After Dark to support his friend, Bobby Davidson, a University of North Florida senior displaying mixed media and photographs.
One photo by Davidson features a tiny image of a light switch surrounded by the darkness of background.
“It’s been great so far,” said Davidson.
Davidson plans to go to graduate school, then teach.
Other photographs feature a girl model surrounded by strobes of light, which Davidson captures by running in and out of the frame with a flash bulb.
“I love to talk about my work,” he said. “I don’t get enough of it, so when someone comes up to me and asks me about it, I’m very open.”
Tim Foli, who drove with his wife, Kari, from Orange Park to attend the event, said Jacksonville needs more nighttime shows to draw the art crowd.
“There are some of us who watch for these things,” said Foli. “And this show, in particular, is something we make a point to come see, and that we enjoy.”`