JIMMY AND THE DEMONS (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Leslie Combemale
Cindy Meehl, director of the new documentary Jimmy and the Demons, noticed that artist James Grashow, the subject of the title, “eats, sleeps and breathes art. That’s what he does all day, every day.” In working to capture Jimmy’s process making what he says might be his “grand finale” (he suffered a pulmonary embolism a few years back), she created over 300 hours of footage. The result is an engaging and emotional portrayal of one artist’s brain at work, and one man’s perspective on life, death, love, and art, all within the context of his creation, “The Cathedral”, a highly detailed work in carved wood.
Grashow, in his early 80s, has been creating art his whole life. Meehl covers his background fairly briskly, but his experience as a dyslexic child obsessed with art is covered, and Grashow himself shares how he broke into the art world. Ever humble, he jokes about it being the only thing he was ever good at, barely mentioning his Fulbright scholarship. He focuses more on his partnership with lifelong love Lesley, better known as Guzzy, whom he met as a young artist on the rise in New York. As an illustrator, he is known as the cover artist for Jethro Tull’s 1969 album Stand Up, and the 1971 live Yardbirds album, and 30 years of illustrations in the New York Times. As a fine artist, his work, which is largely created in cardboard and wood, has exhibited in MOMA, and other museums around the world.
The Cathedral is a highly detailed commission made of wood, featuring Jesus holding up a church, surrounded by demons at his feet. He calls it a sort of self-portrait, not because he believes himself a deity, but because he sees it as articulating the distance “from hell to hope”. He has had a life-long fixated on death, and struggles with finding the balance of dark and light within himself. The documentary itself is a balance of darkness and light, in that while working, Jimmy is joy personified. He is clearly in what Csikszentmihalyi called “flow”, and it’s such a delight, it becomes mesmerizing to watch. Grashow is also very reflective of his life and life in general, on suffering and what it means to be human. In the course of the film, he also undergoes major challenges relating to art and commerce, and is, at one point, treated with the sort of disrespect by the artistic establishment even to most successful artists sometimes face. Dark indeed, for a man whose art is so filled with depth and wonder.
Intense, playful, humble, and incredibly talented, Grashow is a worthy subject. Jimmy and the Demons offers a great example of one person finding a way to exist successfully enough in the art world to continue to create. It also shows one man’s lifelong journey with art as his constant companion, finding joy in that journey no matter what is happening outside his studio.
4 out of 5 stars.
