The crayon is a magical instrument which could create fantastic worlds or perhaps terrible worlds should it fall into the wrong hands. It is not uncommon to draw and paint. What is less common are people who continue to do it long after the setting provided by primary and secondary schools is left behind.

Art class is often traumatic for those whose efforts cannot match the averaged results of the other classmates. I thought of art as an extension of what the nuns called orthography. The reason I thought this is that we were told to render symbols of trees, houses and people for the most part and I thought of it as "Alphabet 2". When I first heard the word "vocabulary" I mistakenly thought that it referred to all symbols including graphic elements. This may have been due to picture books I'd seen where the letters where arranged to make a graphic of what the word described. As I grew older, I thought of sounds as vocabulary. Comic books seemed to confirm this with "Pow" and "Wham" until eventually I had every letter, number, symbol, sound, smell, texture, temperature, flavor and mood in my head as a graphic element and all of this, I thought to mean vocabulary.

It seemed reasonable at the time because there seemed to be words for everything and all words represented an apple, a ball, a cat and so on which I thought to be visual things and found these truths to be self-evident.

One day I was reading a book by Herge who wrote the Tintin series and my teacher warned me that I had better put aside such graphic things and read books which have no pictures in order to build my vocabulary. The response to my defense of the book convinced me in short order that my nun and I were not on the same page. From that day forward I was careful to divide text from graphics as I leafed through magazines, which was difficult in the late sixties due to the explosion of new fonts and the increased use of letters as graphic elements. Indeed the world at large seemed to be divided into text-only people and the text-plus people.

One day, at my maternal grandmother's I saw the sheet music to Puff the Magic Dragon and I realized that she played by bridging the text (notes) on the page to the keys under her fingers and could see the higher or lower positions were relative to the melody I knew. Eventually, I learned that numbers supplemented the letters A through G along with notes and other graphic elements. What she was doing was essentially reading aloud without moving her mouth. In my mind this was akin to confusing text and graphic on purpose due to my habit of seeing sound or anything non-text as a graphic.

In due course I came to understand that any activity other than reading text-only books was an indulgence allowed only in small doses because it was fun and therefore dangerous.

I now understand the arts to be considered undesirable when perceived as self-involved but not dangerous when perceived to be serving the public interests. I think that this is the reason artists should be known to as many people as possible in order that their work be valued.

The measure of social involvement is most often counted in currency but need not be. Perfect example: Stompin' Tom Connors. He won a Juno but he's no Rockerfeller. This situation is part of the development of the state-approved artist.
In my view, anyone who adds to the collective vocabulary of senses, reactions, thought, etc. is an artist, regardless of the motive for doing so. Henri Moore and Henry Ford both.

Today we still use text to convey the non-text. A First Nations person's observance of the mobility of text was translated as witnessing "throwing words". but I've always felt that if the person was illiterate, then "word" would be a non-text concept and the meaning of the translation of the statement "throwing words" would be "throwing sound", which for me is "throwing symbols which represent sounds which represent pictures of whatever makes the sound".

Today, with our available media we have a distributorship of staggering visual vocabulary from the Arts and Entertainment Industry, relegating the stage to archival status. I view puppetry and animation together and the success of the Lion King and others like it is a testament to the elevated status of those arts. Dance is now practically an academic exercise unless, of course, the dances within the Lion King are viewed as dance.

Iconography, puppet shows, stage shows, street performers, simple games, self-help books, church services, art shows, farmers markets, best-sellers; the list is endless. Suffice it to say that all are stories adding to the collective body of experience and all stories have a moral whether we like it or not. The one thing that most people share is that we are all forever both spectator and contributor to a value system that is constantly changing.
What differs is the highly subjective distinction of whether we are condoning the status quo or not. However if you leave a jar of buttons on the table, there is a natural tendency for humans to begin sorting.

This tendency rather than the yielded product is art.