Jim McVicker paints the Lost Coast of Humboldt County, California, a stretch of Pacific shoreline south of the Oregon border with almost no roads, few towns, and stands of old-growth trees running down to the cliffs. Director Karen Graves Granrud follows him into the field: meadows, forests, small weather-beaten harbor towns, and the ragged sea-cliffs where he sets up to work. The camera watches him look at a scene, then watches the same scene reappear on canvas in his own palette and brushwork, so the film's structure is essentially a series of before-and-after comparisons between the land and the painting it produced. Granrud pushes past a straightforward artist profile to ask what ties McVicker to this particular ground so tightly that he keeps returning to it rather than painting elsewhere. There is no narrator arguing a thesis; the film lets long stretches of landscape and studio footage make the case for the place and the painter together.