For more than a decade, itinerant artist James Garland has roamed the United States carrying his easel and painting materials on his back. James is on a mission to extol his spiritual and artistic beliefs everywhere he goes. All the while, he swaps his paintings to obtain his supplies, to feed himself, and just to get by.
The onset of colder weather prompts James to leave his New York City home in Central Park, where he lives and sleeps outdoors. He travels by Greyhound bus to Santa Monica, California and soon barters with a local businessman to create a 16-foot mural. Filmmaker Jacobsohn, with his camera gear, joins the 45-year-old evangelist on the Coast to begin filming what turns into a yearlong, cross-country sojourn.
James envisions his work adorning the living room of the client’s high-rise apartment situated atop the coastal bluffs, overlooking the Pacific shore below. The mural is a striking fusion of water, earth, and sky. Uncomfortably, as the work takes shape, the painter and the businessman find that not only do their artistic visions differ, but their personalities and belief systems clash: The mural becomes a battlefield—their theater of war.
The journey continues on to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where James revisits the Family Worship Center of the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. He is warmly received and his canvases are greatly admired. He plans to spend his winter refuge in the Florida Keys.
Shortly after his arrival in Key West a phone call from his estranged family beckons him home: After a ten-year absence, not unlike the Prodigal Son, James returns to his childhood Tulsa, Oklahoma for reconciliation. Yet, his restlessness soon draws him back to the streets of New York City.
With encouragement and financial support from Jacobsohn, James sets about procuring his first passport so that he may realize his dream of traveling in Europe. A vagabond existence has kept him invisible from the US Department of State. Fortunately his determination to claim his identity is rewarded, when filmmaker and painter jet to Paris.
