Sagadahoc Story #68: 11/27/98

We had a run of pet days before Thanksgiving. Mild, sunny, still. Made me nervous as a cat, and I scuttled about the quarter acre yanking up lawn ornaments and stowing the furniture. New moon and a foreboding of weather. It's putting away time. Now we're all buttoned up, and the ravens and wolves have the lawn to themselves.

Bruce Kaminski rolled in Tuesday lunchtime, with a portrait of The Toymaker he's just completed. A payback for the Phoenix job I did on him last month. A story-telling image, and a tour de force in Renaissance washes and egg tempera. It's a touch dissociative to face yourself across the room, and at the same time feel defined and coherent in the paint. I was intrigued to discover that the persona Bruce captured to perfection is no longer the who I am. And he doesn't call this a portrait of me. It's: "The Toymaker." The artist sees this painting as a mirror for imagining an archetypal role. Geppetto, not Bryce.

The Toymaker

Steve Dunwell, a freelance photo-journalist, did a feature of me peddling my wares on a street corner in Providence in 1971, and dubbed me "Bryce the Toymaker." I liked the lyric, and took up the dance. The whimsical innocence of this calling served me well, and let me create sculptural images without all the burdens of curatorial judgment. I was just making toys, not ART. But the toymaker persona began to wear thin for me fourfive years back, and it's been hard to assume a new mask. Or put the masks aside.

Seeing my old mask on canvas reminded me how we know ourselves in this culture. We are what we do, and those doings have a title, a name and a mythos. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. I acted out a role for 25 years, and put my face on a fable. Now Bruce has put the finishing touches on The Toymaker, and I can walk away from it. I hadn't thought of portraits as cathartic.

The wind picked up southerly on Turkeyday, and it was raining hard by noon. No snow on the coast. We've been spared the first shovel-out until December. It's got to be close, though, and I decided it was time to finish Chico's scope stock. I wanted to have it done before he pushes his plow up the drive.

Good to get back into the sawdust doing something functional. Some years ago I converted an old gunstock to carry Chico's camera and long lens. Now he's got a new mega-lens, and asked me to make a stock to handle both rigs. Took me a couple days of tinker to devise a mount that would support the different optics, with a self-lubricated sliding connector made of lignum vitae, a spring-loaded forward handle, and a trigger-mounted shutter cable. Nice hunk of black walnut. I rubbed the finish in Thursday morning. Took the finished product down the hill to Chico's just as it started to spit.

So what do I call myself on this one? What's the federal ID number for jack of all arts? What do I report on the 1040? How many plowings, at how much per? And what do I pay Uncle with? Walnut chips or shovelfuls of sand? The whole idea of taxing "underground" income is a fools errand. You do barter because you don't have cashflow. Because you're bound together in a gift economy. Trading favors. But try and explain that to a desk jockey on salary. It's an insult to our neighborliness to call this trade "income producing." It insults our intelligence to ask for part of our cash profits. If it's an even trade, where's the profit? Where's the cash? No identity and no income? Must be illegal.

Mr. Mann, Marsha and Theo joined us to devour the bird, and afterwards the ladies flopped down in the front room, Theo dove into the web, and the guys retired to the shop. I've been rounding up figure studies from our drawing circle to hang next week, and Mr. Mann is a fellow traveler in that cadre. So we admired fleshtones in charcoal, jawed about technique and being artists in the boonies.

We share an uncertainty about names and masks. Mr. Mann has no titled persona. He won't claim the tag ARTIST. He just is who he is, without income. But the world asks -- "What do you do?"-- and sometimes it drives him nuts. He hardly ever shows his paintings and drawings, and gets all torqued at the prospect. Somehow we've been distracted into believing that real artists have gallery shows, are represented in museum collections, get critical acclaim. Publicity means you are. If you don't play with the big boys, you aren't. Simple being is invisible.

We were underwhelmed. As always at group shows there are artists whose work is technically masterful. And a few works that speak right into you. But the collection is a hodgepodge whose only unifying thread seems to be a concern for unusual effects. Is that what real art has come to? Quirky takes. These may be talented Maine artists, but you could hunt a long time for any Maine content. If there was a Maine ethos in the work, it was hidden by the smoke and mirrors. Of course that wasn't what the organizers were looking for. They wanted to showcase provincial artists doing the contemporary thing well. Art, you might conclude, is a motley of individual visions in a sophisticated language.

The idea of a regional sensibility must seem strangely anachronistic to the cognoscenti in a media age. Who needs local art in a global village? But I'm reminded of the later works of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and Bernard Langlais. World talents who shrugged the acclaim game to be artists of place. You might put Winslow Homer on that list, too. I think they saw that local art is precisely what we need to ground us. If art teaches us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, a collection of the unusual defeats its purpose. I was amused to see that when the Biennial featured artists working the Maine vein, the examples they chose to show were notably abstracted, extraordinary. Maybe that's as close as the overheated ART world can get to a local view. The only works that said "right here" had rocks in them, or trees.

Over Thanksgiving week the town has been full of returnees. Folks who've followed the yellow brick road to affluence and away. Home for the hols, and out hunting. The herd is blooming, and everyone seems to be getting his deer. It's kinda poignant to see these beenaway guys in wool and blaze orange doing the pickup standaround. You know their lives are full of pavements and paperwork and this is the one escape of the season. For all their obvious affluence, they look comfortably down home, out jawing in the parking lot in plaid caps. Did they buy into the American Dream, like successful artists who go away, only to hunger for a taste of venison? Is that why they drive SUVs? Is their view of life blurred by a craving for success and acclaim?