With one's eyes and ears open, you see that the world is kind of stressed, and we've got lots of issues that we're dealing with, homelessness and with AIDS, and there are artists who are really terribly politically involved, not only with the art making, but with advocacy on behalf of those problems.

As an artist and as the assistant to the director of the Columbus Museum of Art, Denny Griffith speaks out about issues he feels are important.

I've always had this dual career.

Arts administration is sort of outwardly directed, outwardly driven about working with people to make change.

And the practice of making art is about looking inside yourself and culling out ideas and things that are important to you that you can speak to through your work.

And so I started last year working on this series that has to do with, in a kind of a poetic way, with deforestation and with, you know, what's going on in the Pacific Northwest and down in Brazil.

So they're not highly literal narrative paintings that are about Earth First stuff, but they're a way to get people who can relate to art but not always relate to issues to start to see the relationships between tree trunks that look like torsos.

And tree limbs that look like human limbs, and the fact that they're in flames or they're sort of charred looking, black and white and a little tortured.

There's a lot of metaphor that kind of percolates through the work.

Now, I haven't been to those places, so I've got to kind of envision them.

And most people who see the work haven't be to those place, so together we sort of envision some of the consequences that are implied in the work I had for years been strictly an abstract painter.

And I got hungry for content.

I got hunger for having the work be about something.

And the first place I looked, because I'm infinitely interested in people, is to pictures that I'd taken of my friends and using those pictures as a subject matter and then trying to take it beyond just standard sort of stock head and shoulders portraiture, you know?

But to catch my friends at a party with their head thrown back, laughing, but it's that laugh that's right on the edge of a kind of a grimace.

At that moment, when you've captured them on film, you really don't know whether it's joy or sorrow.

There's a lot you don't but you sense the humanity behind it.

What I do is I work from these Polaroids, and I've got a whole stack of them here.

Polaroid's are friends.

This is Amina Robinson, artist in town.

Might be known to a few viewers.

This is Floyd and Sally, my mom and dad.

That's just for kind of a, I did a sort of a regular portrait of them.

So anyway, these are all friends of mine, and they've all been turned into art.

I've got this love affair with the material, and I love to get it on thick and juicy and work it around and smell it and push it to its limit.

I like a lot working with not only layering the marks over the faces, but actually layering.

I think of these words as a different kind of a mark, and what happens then is they seem to sort of title the piece and there's a story, you know, and so in the telling of the story, I only give the viewer just a little tiny piece of the story.

Just like a hint.

Many of these paintings will illustrate a book Denny's been working on with Columbus writer George Meyer.

The name of the book is going to be called Jump Hope, the storyline, which is about a woman artist who's writing in her diary about her life and about her art making and about how she and her husband attempt to see some control over some things that their daughter is experiencing.

So it's a little bit about control.

I suppose you could say about censorship in an oblique kind of way.

This is from the narrative that George Myers Jr. Has written for this collaborative project.

So this is one of the day's entry in this fictional diary of the artist.

It's a Saturday.

Knowing I've begun this dream book, Dad gave me a dream he had last night.

He wrote it down for me.

It says, a Nepalese man lived in a village isolated by the surrounding mountain ridges.

The winter was long and cold.

Food was running low.

The mountain passes were closed by snow and ice.

Famine had visited the village before.

Now, however, it was not a visitor, but a permanent part of each family in the village.

In one of his fruitless attempts to find a way to a lower village where food would be available.

Our man came upon the camp of a European who, from his equipment and supplies, was judged to be a mountain climber who had become separated from his party and froze to death.

His camp did, however, contain a small supply of food preserved by the very cold that had taken his life.

Our man loaded all the food his broad-backed carry and returned to his village.

Nep and his brother distributed what was available to each family in the village, saving just one portion for themselves.

Nep and Sib placed the portion between them on the floor of their shelter.

They were alone.

The weather worsened.

They became isolated from the village.

The portion of food would be enough to keep one man alive till spring, not two.

Each urged the other to eat.

Each waited patiently for the other to save himself, neither would.

In the spring, Nep and Sib were found seated on the floor of their shelter, dead from starvation and freezing.

The food they had placed between them was untouched.

I don't have a real clear sense where I'm going, because the process of art making is more like exploration.

You're trying to create something that's not been created before.

That's where the search is.

That's were the kick is.