8/11/98.. Hinges.

Sometimes changes happen between the acts, when you aren't watching. You go to do something, and it's suddenly different.

Peggy's figure drawings have taken a radical leap in the past few months. She's started lining them out with ink and wash before applying pastels, and the images have acquired a new depth and richness. This new visual sensibility has been symbolized by Peggy abandoning her seat beside Carlo, where she has been looking over his shoulder for the past ten years. Now she's staked out in MY seat across the room. One of the three standup positions in the studio. She's discovered that using a stool and stretching her leg eases her chronic pain. Now she's shopping for a stool for school.

I've been relegated to a seating posture, closer to the model, and have been cranky about it. The other night I had forgotten some of my tools, my pen was clogged, nothing was working right. But I kept on drawing through the muttering, and suddenly discovered something very different was happening. I was no longer copying the model, trying to render the person before me. I was drawing some other personality, out of my imagination, in the poses the model was striking. I've watched Arlene do this for years, with admiration, wishing I could, and not knowing how. But there it was on the page before me. Reflections of inner poses.

Later, at home, I looked over drawings from the past few months, and saw that I'd actually been doing this trick for some time. My whole act had changed, and I hadn't noticed. I'd crossed over a creative boundary in the dark. So much for knowing what you're doing.

Seth is home for a couple of weeks, and looks great. As always, he cheers us up, makes us feel good about the world. He lugged a guitar home from Colorado, and eavesdropping on his licks, I realized his playing has taken a giant step since the last time I'd listened in. Isn't it curious how we labor along on a plateau, then take a quantum leap? He's been gigging out with his musical buddies in the mountains, and rooming with musicians. Nice to see that the music is woven into his life to a point of mastery.

He also sets a pretty stiff pace on a bicycle for this old creak to follow. That's what it comes to, of course. We try to keep up with our kids until we fall off the bike.

I've been biking round town, and doing these chronicle landscapes pretty regularly since the frost went out. Pop Frizzle, the RFD deliverer, calls herself the painting inspector, and stops to examine my daily effort, whenever she catches me at it. And I get just enough commissions and print orders from the passing public to rationalize the process, if it needed that.

Reading Peter Coyote's "Sleeping Where I Fall", I've been reminded of other justifications for this local artistry. Coyote's book is a devastating memoir of "the 60s", and it stirs some old pots that have been way back on the stove. I can't say I miss the anarchic social and psychic chaos, or the heavy drugging, but the idealism he recounts still niggles at me. He contends that the mass consumer culture devoured the forms of hipness, but suggests that it swallowed a dose of the message, too. That the sixties changed the culture, while it wasn't watching.

This comes home to roost in my own barnyard. My initiatory vision of the woodwork was to turn pieces of found wood into totemic objects which could be exchanged for a subsistence. Part of a 60s make-you-own-world economy. I also discovered, early on, that there was laughter in the wood you could sell to the unsuspecting. Calling yourself Bryce the Toymaker bypassed all the ART horseshit, and cut to the chase: communicating with everyman through images. No gallery intimidation. No curatorial intermediation. Just a wooden joke between friends on the street.

But it got too serious. That's inevitable when you put all your eggs in a basket. The carvings came to represent all aspects of consciousness: frivolous and mythic, absurd and religious, whimsical and troubled, carefree and commercial. Each piece had to synthesize and express all the stuff going on in my head. Sometimes the magic worked, and the sacred clown played through. Got paid. Other times it was like beating your head against a wall. There was no such thing as a simple carving. And it took so long, and took such psychic effort, to make even the smallest piece, that I'd priced myself out of a local economy. Despite my best intentions, I was making gallery art.


That's why these casual drawings have been such a relief. They aren't masterworks. The technique is too crude. I haven't come to the place where I can see all the subtext in the landscape, the way I can in symbolic carvings, so they aren't freighted with self-awareness. They are a novel delight that open my eyes. The fact that they result in a democratic artform takes me back to square one. Subsistence art for everyman. I've gone from being a gypsy toymaker on a streetcorner, to being a local painter on the roadside. If it's about looking into the world, this current prank may not be as deep, but its isn't as heavy, either.

When it changes to something else, I'll be the last to know. Trying to discern an evolution of insight by looking at these local views is a puzzle. Depending on the day, or the view, they are more or less detailed, more or less expressive. The lines are looser, or more crabbed. I'm getting "better" at it, in technical increments, learning about watercolor clouds or water effects. But the subjective content still eludes analysis, for me. Probably just as well. I seesaw between framed views of conventional scapes, reporting on the scenic, and peripheral views, portraying the unremarkable which defines a sense of place. It still surprises me when I go out to the same places and there are new sights to see.

Maybe that's the lesson of this exercise. We keep on performing our daily rituals, barely hoping for some opening, until one day a new door cracks. Something shines through. Meanwhile I'll keep doodling.