The Road To Home Is Paved With Acrylic

Around 10 years ago, Sarasota-based painter James Griffin began typing out quasi-quarterly newsletters for his online followers. They appeared sporadically in the inbox, as Griffin had new work to show and maybe had a little something to say about the process. “Just a few thoughts,” he says. “I was very undisciplined about it.” But he did stick with it.

The newsletters became more regular, Griffin’s writing more lyrical and pensive, evolving into miniature essays that spanned everything from the perils of plein air painting to deeper musings on the nature of dreams, the meaning of authenticity and the power of art in the face of fear or personal tragedy. “It took on a life of its own,” he says. “Became a thing in itself.”

Now, these essays form the backbone of the artist’s latest project, a newly released book entitled The Road To Home: Art and Essays of James Griffin.

Hardcover. 135 pages. Even more paintings and sketches.

And while those old newsletters provided a solid backbone for a book, turning them into a book worth publishing still involved a lot of work—and a lot of rewriting. The goal wasn’t just to copy and paste the old emails into a book and call it a day, but instead to bring those exercises to their full potential, to find the right words in just the same way he would seek out the right colors. “And it took about two years,” Griffin says. Many essays he rewrote as many as five times, with fellow artist, wife and muse Debbie serving as editor.

Divided into 40 chapters, each only a few pages long and typically dominated by full-page images of Griffin’s work, the result is a compelling retrospective recorded in word and image—always earnest but never self-important. We’re with the artist in the early years and his misadventures plein air painting in Maine, whether it be an entire fleet of docked boats performing an about-face mid-painting because the tide started going out (“I completed the rest from memory.”) or a rickety easel collapsing and sending paints and tools into the harbor, forcing Griffin to go for an unscheduled dive. We’re there as he takes commissions in Cortez and explores the grounds of the Ringling Museum, sits in on rehearsal with the Sarasota Ballet and gets lost in the clouds that roll overhead.

And as the chapters go by, the journey of an artist finding their voice rises from the page, with Griffin moving ceaselessly from landscapes to street scenes, portraits to still life, experimenting in abstraction but never abandoning his realist grounding—and always maintaining the sense for narrative drama that first made him so successful as an illustrator. It’s the artist as seeker, though it’s difficult to say if the conclusion is one of discovery or acceptance—maybe both—as all roads in the book eventually lead to home.

“Perfection isn’t really worth everything that we think it’s worth,” Griffin says, thinking over his decades-long wrestling match with his own personal style. A devotion to realism that seemed to come more from an intellectual perspective than an emotional or artistic one. Feeling obligated to experiment with abstraction although it never really did it for him. Changing the marks he made on the canvas not because the artist in him said they were wrong, but out of fear.

Fear disguised as a pursuit of perfection.

“I didn’t want to trust myself and I used perfection to hide my own truth,” he says. “I would call them mistakes, but it’s actually my style. It’s me.” It’s a confidence that comes through on the page, with later chapters full of what is perhaps some of the artist’s finest work, seeing all of those disparate threads of a life coming together into something distinct and all its own.

And with that confidence comes a streamlining of old problematic processes, as well. Gone are the days of lugging 40+ pounds of easel and paint out into the world and hoping to get some painting done before the light changes, the sky falls or an undiscovered sasquatch takes offense at your trespassing and sends you running. “Now it’s just a sketchbook and pen,” Griffin says, and with those he’ll capture what he calls an “abbreviation” of the painting in a matter of penstrokes.

Still, it’s more valuable to him than a photograph, which he sees as too literal and unemotional.

“But my drawing has emotion," he says. "My pen records the feeling that I had when I was standing there better than the photograph.”

And, of course, readers get a chance to see some of this process as well, with pen-and-ink sketches included in several chapters.

And just as Griffin’s brushstrokes become freer and more distinctly Griffin, so do his thoughts and words come more freely. He’s finding his voice, opening up on everything from his love of the Tennessee mountains to the love of his life, adventures in Italy and the challenge of painting water. His essays move away from simple discussion of technique and harmless anecdotes to venture into the philosophical and, eventually, starkly political. But by the time we get to police brutality and the pandemic, his voice is that of an old friend. And when, in a closing chapter, Griffin talks about losing vision in his right eye due to macular degeneration, we feel that fear with him.

But it’s not the type of book to dwell on the negative or to preach, and the vast majority of the essays are devoted to the artist’s curiosity and sense of wonder at a world that is ever-changing but constant in its beauty. It's a painted record of things loved and people loved even more, of clouds and sunsets and that quiet neighborhood street where the shadows fall just right and, for a moment, you believe it can last forever.

“At the heart of this book,” Griffin says, “I just want it to be a positive thing.”

The Road To Home is available at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and on Amazon.