გილოცავთ ახალ წელს *

For some of us, by no means all of us, presently magnetised by the gravity of this spinning globe, it is the end of another year. Happy New Year, we say freely. Sretna Nova Godina. Godt Nytår. Bonne Année. Is-Sena T-Tajba. Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku. Blwyddyn Newydd Dda. С Новым Годом. สวัสดีปีใหม่. And yet we never really think about what a year is. Except perhaps in terms of its relationship to ourselves. It is fascinating therefore for ignorant people such as myself to be reminded of the fact that a year is really just the period of time during which the planet, earth in our case, completes a single revolution around the sun. Like a kind of Icarus flying in the opposite direction, we are so adept these days at getting away from the big picture. I suppose another pertinent thing about this time of year which separates it from the rest of the year is this appetite for resolutions we have, and it is perhaps interesting therefore that we are forever preoccupied with what it is that we are going to give up and seldom in what it is we might wish to take up. It is as if our view of ourselves is governed entirely by a rich vein of self-indulgence. There is also the equally troubling difference, is there not, between the year's end as translated by our personal year and the often more fierce year as seen through more global eyes. (I fear the burden of empathy has it that I am as much caught up in my mind with the latter as the former, which is to say a far greater ache. Indeed, if only I could be more selfish, I sometimes think, I would be a far more successful man.) No, regarding the global, I cannot say with any real confidence that the world is in a better state now than it was a year ago. Can you? All right, there are all manner of statistics available to disprove this view, but there would be wouldn't there? Especially with all these statisticians tumbling like large boxes of unexplained facts off the statistics conveyor belt at universities and colleges these days. Scatterplots. Discrete probability distributions. Examples of constructing confidence intervals. (72% of all statisticians write in an extraordinary language don't you think?) But what of this naturally selfish take on a year? (How did I do? How was I?) What are or will be the consequences? If it's any help, I was walking alongside a small and muddy river with the less coughful artist these days an hour or so ago and we were talking precisely about how people view themselves. We both agreed - in that possibly harsh and sometimes unfair way of ours - that any such form of smugness or self-pleasure is tantamount to a kind of little death, and a blight therefore on the chances of a living and breathing culture. Still ... a Happy New Year to one and all. Or Naya Saal Mubarik, as they say in the land of the peppered people carrier. Let's make it a good one.
*Gilocavt Akhal Tsels, Georgian: "Happy New Year"

Mobile: On

The car cut through the mobile phone masts, where once there was countryside, and the sun slapped on the fields with a kind of old pal heartiness. At one point by a junction we saw a jay in one of the trees and as the cars pulled away again I thought about the car crash the other night involving the police van, and the small article I read today in which it was stated that nine people had been injured that night, three of them seriously. Now I am in the office of the artist's brother, an amateur pilot, with whom we are now staying for a few days. In fact I am typing as quietly as possible as the artist and our daughter are trying to sleep in the next door bedroom. The artist is still unwell, but her spirit has not flagged entirely. Being away from her work does not help. But she is with her family and that must be important otherwise she would not have made it such a central theme these past eight years in her work. Mind you, sickness - the other present theme - has never featured in her work. Not if you exclude the three toy bears with their knotted and worn faces that she once did and which now belongs as a triptych to a collection across the ocean I believe. No, I had never seen so many mobile phone masts as I did this morning. Portals to so much dead language. Relay systems for neuroses or idlenesses. I can hear our own relay system of coughs in the other room. At least we are mobile.

Advice to Self

It is perhaps important at this stage for the artist's husband to remember that coughing is an important part of the artist’s defence system. It forcefully propels unwanted invaders up and out of the artist's body. A cough signals some irritation in the artist's air passages, just as the coughing itself may innocently cause some irritation in the mind of the artist's husband. This irritation may be in the throat, the lungs, or in the passageways connecting them. (That is to say, connecting the throat and lungs, not the artist and artist's husband.) An artist's cough often accompanies infections of the upper or lower respiratory tract, such as colds, flu, sinus infections, croup, bronchitis, bronchiolitis, measles, pneumonia, pastel allergy, and fixative exposure. As already suggested, sometimes the artist's cough will linger once the infection has cleared and regularly wake up the artist's husband at night. Hair cells, called cilia, normally move mucus along the respiratory tract to keep the area clean and moist. If these cilia are damaged during an infection, the artist's body may use coughing to move this mucus along – even after the invading germs are gone. (As many a bedside bucket or pile of tissues might testify.) Thus, the cough sensors tend to be hypersensitive following an infection. This however should by no means represent grounds for divorce on the part of the artist's husband as at no time is any of this the artist's fault. Wisemen and tribal elders through the ages have advised calm, faith, and relaxation over such matters. When the artist wishes for something, for example, the artist's husband should rise, salute the artist, and go hunt for whatever it is that is indeed the artist's wishes. He may well find that when the artist fully recovers, it pays him dividends. At no stage should the artist's husband court compliments from the artist, as this will ultimately work against him.

Junctions

Some time ago during a similar festive season when I was still a boy living in a place by the sea with my grandmother, I felt this unseasonal urge to swim. Anyway, it was freezing outside and I had to push hard to close the door before walking with gutsy gusto down the grey steps and across the small road onto the sea-front. Looking back I could see the lights of a tree in one of the windows. The rest of the building looked dark and empty. I peered outwards and headed towards the beach. Gusts of wind ripped across the thick tufts of grass. Trails of eye-splitting sand tore up from the beach. Bracing myself, I climbed down the steps and landed with a thud on the ice-hard sand. I was freezing too and jumped up and down a few times like a footballer about to be introduced, before taking off my clothes - except for my swimming trunks - and then suddenly racing towards the sea. Why was I doing this? Without stopping to consider the full madness of my actions, I plunged head first into a large and breaking wave and felt a kind of deadening euphoria as all of my nerves froze at the same time and my skin quickly tried to recover from the sudden leap of faith and slap of ice cold salty water. I kept swimming, turning into an iceberg being the only other option. I still couldn't believe I was in the water. Peering up at the building again where my grandmother lived with my aunt, I remember thinking this was my home. Presently, however, I am all shook up. What I mean is, this would have been my blog were it not for the road outside the flat having suddenly become deafened with the sound of sirens. Like the boy earlier in the blog, stumbling out of the building, I went to see what was happening. I am afraid it soon became clear. A police van was wrapped around a post. Another vehicle was smashed too. Grim-faced firemen with cutters were already moving in. One man by the side of the road, a neighbour, said he had heard some children wailing earlier. The police meanwhile surrounded the van and tried to keep everyone away. Feeling helpless, I nonetheless checked there was nothing I could do, made some kind of photographic record, and left. My daughter stirred when I returned. She asked what I had seen. I didn't really tell her, but now, an hour later, I am thinking about the wailing the neighbour heard. Sometimes, I guess, when you look back from the water, life can be gone.

The Artist's Cough

The artist in particular has been bed-bound for several days now and coughs erupt throughout the flat like regular small explosions. (A larger one maliciously enjoys its prey on TV.) In this capital, these past few sick days, the sands of inaction have been kicked into the face of frustration. For compensation, though, we have the beautiful delight of our children. I take them out with me. We cough too but race at speed across smooth tarmac. The city feels idle but we feel good. Our daughter glides with ease on gifted roller blades while our son angles through the park on a fast-pedaled bike. A squirrel looks up as they pass, stares, bows his head, and resumes chewing at his stash. Just then, a huge noise breaks out. Everyone turns. It sounds like a tank. But it is not a tank. It is a four year old driving a motorised quad bike, the same type crushed on the news by a car. Seldom is the modern world so absurdly exposed for the folly it is than when a child nods sternly at strangers as it drives a pile of mechanised pooh, thinking it the queen of the world. It is like a leader running for election in a prematurely presumed victory, only to fall - or expolode - at the last furlong. Our son now sits down in the cafe and eats his rock cake. Our daughter wipes some dirt from her roller blades and smiles modestly at a friendly waiter. We are enjoying each other's company but feel for the artist back home. Across the park and through the oak tress, we imagine we hear coughing.

Getting Well Soon

1. Influenza (commonly called the “flu”) is a contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses.
2. Now (commonly called "time-off") is an annual winter celebration welcomed by many people.
3. This (commonly called "the blog") is a daily written statement positioned by eccentric habit.
4. Apologies (commonly called "sorry") are in order for all three.

Peas

P E A C E

Fog of time

The fever of the virus comes in waves. Tiny branches of feeling disappear in a fog of someone else's doing. Dreams become like prisons and the weight of imagined air bears down on you.
I woke up early with the various viral members of my cold racing like busy Liliputians through my over-heated body. The artist lay next to me feeling no better but as the light crept through the blind I admired her absence of humbug or pretence. Indeed, if hypochondria is a form of pretentiousness, the artist is the most unpretentious person I know. Our daughter meanwhile coughed from across the small corridor while her brother slept as silent as a robin in the bunk below. Outside, a thick blanket of fog spread like the metaphor I have always been looking for across the great city. The hum of the traffic, lost in the fog, became a pleasant abstraction. The children remain excited.

A Twilight Evocation

Colds, I realise, are almost more nostalgic and evocative to me than the festive time of year. While the artist has not entirely given up on being an artist for a few days - she is doing a small drawing of the children from the sad interfaith marriage breakdown I mentioned not so long ago - there is a kind of turning down of the volume, a cessation of creativities, a nulling of the void. This is probably why I am left to roam dangerously from the plot into the orbit of pure nostalgia. It was with my dear grandmother for example that I first remember colds and this time of year. The central heating would be up, the carpets would feel softer than usual, the three dogs would be lounging on the rug, and various beautiful and old decorations from across the sea would be placed with years of experience and a kind of coded strategy about the room. My head would be placed across a bowl of hot water and menthol sometimes and a towel draped over. Like the TV, such memories are largely in black and white, but I always remember the crisp and shiny greenness of the holly. I suppose there was nothing that unusual going on, apart from the absence of my parents, and I am happy to report a great kindness in the air, concealing at least for the duration of the festive period any deep-rooted woe. Father figures for me had James Stewart voices, you may like to hear, and not for example John Wayne's, though John Wayne was probably guarding the parameters of the garden at the time. And whenever the door opened and we all received a blast of cold wind from the sea and highlands, instead of rushing back inside again, sniffling and self-piteous, we would feel invigorated, reformed, and strangely grateful. Walks were regular, of course. These were often along white beaches by crashing waves on jagged dark rocks. Seabirds would fly low and slow across the tumultuous currents, occasionally turning their heads in greeting. Privately, I longed for boats on the horizon and whenever I saw one - sometimes they dropped anchor in the middle of nowhere to wait out the storm rather than risk smashing against the pier - I was right there with the people on that boat, rocking about like a present in a box, a cold. Peril. Sea. For those in.

Decoction of whole plant

The studio, or flat, has become a house of colds, but the children still kneel with a kind of non-corporate glee by the tree, their brave blue eyes glued to the wrapped presents, as if each package was a delicate conceptual masterpiece placed on the chic wooden floorboards of a snug gallery down some handsome foggy boulevard. The artist has with the children made a peppering of decorations for this tree. They hang from fledgling branches like miniature hot air balloons. Others spin gently with dual identities. The presents below are so convincing they may actually be real and not like the many dismayingly empty boxes dominating the channel i-dents on our screens. I am looking at the tree now. It has its arms open wide, though of course it really has no choice in this matter. At least it was grown in the land of some of my ancestors across the choppy sea. As I look up again, our daughter is looking at me. She has put her hair in plaits and though she has a cold she smiles with a kind of vivid and extraordinary health. The artist is sitting on the bright red sofa discussing her day on the phone. The artist's son has moved away - body-slid more like - from the gift-laden base of the tree. He was playing with some toys, also hailing from across the sea as it happens, but in the course of this sentence has moved to the doorway behind me. A small part of us all is perhaps made too aware of the enormous build-up still to be had before the climax of the festive day. It is most un-Zen-like, I am thinking. Not that I would know. (I know nothing but know I know nothing.) Just as I'm contemplating our likely healths over the next few days - though happily harnessed, I am sure, to the cheer of our children throughout - I spot one of my survival books on the shelf. I rise from the round red table and pluck the book down. I return and open it by chance on a page of remedies. Stopping bleeding. Cleansing rashes, sores, wounds. Fevers. (Could be useful if the colds don't subside.) Now, let me see. These following plants will induce perspiration to break a fever, it says. Elder: infusion of flowers and fruit. Lime: infusion of flowers. I wonder if there's anything to help write blogs. Ah, dandelions are good for constipation. No, I will settle instead for the tree.

She's an artist, she don't look back *

They say God when he wants the angels to be happy plays them Mozart and when the angels want God to be happy they play him Bach. Anyway, sometimes when the artist is working I play her Bob Dylan. Why I should be so presumptuous, I don't know. Perhaps it's something so obvious as both artists' artfulness. As for me, I was thirteen when I first listened to Dylan. I was away from home in a school in the chilly north and I think it was his poetic sensibility rather than his D,G, or A chords I sought.

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

When I listen to the lyrics now, I still think back to the times when I would scour music shops and stare at the covers as if entranced by the poetry of the idea as much as any artwork. It got to the stage that when he mentioned other poets I was their biggest fans too.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

or

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud
But there's no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

He paints with his words. I am always telling the artist this. There is a new film about him, suitably obscure I hear. It has to be a good thing when the world pays attention to Dylan, one of the few people whose lyric absorbs successfully and accommodates helpfully the complexities of the modern world.

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I'll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman's church, said my religious vows
I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows

Sometimes, if we're lucky, he may even relate to art itself.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble,
Ancient footprints are everywhere.
You can almost think that you're seein' double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece.
She promised that she'd be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.

And there is something lyrical in some of the artist's new work too, though never pedantic or literal or too trenchant. In fact just when you think you have it in your grasp it jumps out of your hand and you are left chasing it down a completely different road. Dylan is the same.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You look like the silent type."

This is immediately followed by

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

He is, of course, a consistent romantic. This is from 'Modern Times', his most recent album.

Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

I'm listening to it now.

* Bob Dylan : 'She Belongs To Me' from 'Bringing It All Back Home', 1965

Ben 10 or bust

I walked through the crowded streaming streets in the centre of the capital today and I must say it was difficult to find that many cheerful faces. It was strange because this is supposed to be a time of great cheer and it was as if a blanket of some kind of emotional diffidence had instead been draped across the day. Was it all the post-party hangovers? Spiritual inertia? The cost of everything? Dissatisfaction with relationships? Parental worry? Annual depression? Was it the rumours of imminent recession? Wave after wave of consumers passed and I felt briefly uneasy. Increasingly, I must say, I am finding far greater satisfaction in one-on-one conversations than in anything gleaned among crowds. I was saying this to a friend this afternoon as he sat opposite with two rolled-up and polythene-wrapped carpets from the desert at his feet. There was a time not so long ago when both work and social persuasions took me through some of the more crowded and chattering venues in the land. Issues of the day were being discussed at speed, or so we thought, and there were all manner of views expressed. Now, in quieter moments, I am not so sure that anything much of note was discussed by me at all. Other people may have been coming out with sparks of truth, but I was more often than not regurgitating well-worn points. Everything was something prepared earlier - not necessarily invalid, but not always original. If by ignoring such social frenzies now I am missing out on anything and in-so-doing creating a kind of vacuum, it is a vacuum more than satisfactorily filled by thought, by contemplation, by art. Indeed art is the great and obvious cure to much of our culture's artlessness. At one point today I stood on an escalator in a toy shop, one of the largest toy shops in the land, and as I was going up, others opposite were going down, and I smiled and nodded at one or two of the faces looking back at me, but on each occasion people looked swiftly away, invariably down. Furthermore no one was saying a word and it all felt inappropriately eerie. Even some of the children looked frightened by the sheer assault of all these toys. Why is it, I wondered, that we spend so much time wearing our so-called despair on our sleeve? Are people in fact trying to tell us all something the whole time? Or was I wrong not to get with the programme myself and show I was rankled they didn't have the Ben 10 toy bus I was looking for?

Verbal Catch-up With The Visualist

I haven't spoken to you directly here for a while ... how are you feeling?
Fine. I felt rather fragmented this week with all the little things I had to do. School shows to attend. Mural to finish. Dealing with framing, which I still haven't done yet. Getting presents for the children. Making cards. What I really need now are a couple of full days of concentrated work to get my balance again. I desperately want to finish this latest piece.
I watched you listening to the feminist art campaigners the Guerrilla Girls online earlier. What were you thinking about when you were listening to them?
Again, I've rather lost sight of things this week. Art has not been at the forefront of my brain this week at all. It's nice to be reminded of ideas. But what I've really found interesting this week is the way life at our children's school is such a large part of the community.
Where would you say your work is now that it wasn't a year or so ago?
I feel much more concerned that I'm on a journey with it now and that there's a lot more to do with it now. I'm really just at the beginning of it all. And I might actually have something here to look at. It's taken me a year to realise that.
Do you learn about yourself when you do your work?
I don't know about that ... I'm not really that interested in finding out about myself in that way.
Are you still looking forward to the gallerist's visit to see your work in the new year?
Oh definitely. Yes.
How about your take on the art world? Has that changed at all recently?
No, but I did quite like listening to what the Guerrilla Girls were talking about. I have to remember I'm on a bit of a mission with my work. I mustn't get swayed on this. I do now think that what I am doing is quite unique. But I don't want to sound arrogant.
Apart from an exhibition, what would you change most if you could?
I'd have more space to do my work.
And, finally, what have you seen recently that you've found inspiring?
'Pan's Labyrinth' ... the film.

Number Eleven

I rise from the table and walk to the bookshelf to the left of the fireplace, as the children fall asleep in the other room. I have to look hard for it at first but there on the third shelf, between a friend's dizzyingly analytical book on the law and structure of the international banking system, and a propagandist book on Croatia I picked up there during the war, is the illustrated literary journal received several years ago from across the ocean. On the cover of this particular copy an F/A-18 Hornet appears through a burst of cloud caused by the plane's breaking of the sound barrier. Inside, however, on the very first page, before the contributors' notes, is part of what I am looking for. It is one of several pieces done by the artist, in this first instance the clenched fist of our daughter, then a baby of about three months old. It was part of a large collection of single images done by the artist shortly after giving birth for the very first time. The original is flesh-coloured and life-like; this is in black and white. It is thumb-sized on the page, with a large white background. The original drawing of the fist was about one square foot. The children are now asleep and the artist returns to the living room. It has been a long day and both children were in school performances. I pick up the journal again and flick through the pages in search of another image. There they are. They are part of a series in the journal given the title of our daughter's name. The first image is of her unoccupied white sleep-suit. The second, again with its own page, is the smallest of several Russian dolls, given as it happens to our daughter by the man responsible for curating the various art projects in the journal. The third image is that fist again. The fourth image is a small toy with a neck like a giraffe. The final image is of the artist's nipple. I am sure I have mentioned this image before. A bead of her milk is to the left. I close the book again and remember the pleasure in seeing the artist doing these images for the first time. They said to me, I know I am a mother but I am still an artist.

The Artist's Son

I have 10 small seasonal cards in front of me made by our 5-year-old son.
1) A head and face. Female. Fat lips, not unlike a dog turd. A flat head, with a fringe of hair covering two round knotted eyes. If the head is thinking, it is thinking about tropical fish, over-fed guppies probably. Also, long locks hang either side, like a pair of crutches carrying just the head.
48mm x 36mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
2) A head and face. Female. A wider head, with a single line successfully denoting a smile. The hair is even curlier than the smile. This time the falling locks either side are like two toned legs walking the head. If it is going somewhere, it is to win. The eyes are almost perfect thick dots.
40mm x 53 mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
3) A torso and head. Male. The figure is large and in a birdcage. The mouth is frowning. The hands are clenched into fists. There is only a smattering of hair on the head. The eyes are slight. If it is done for effect, it is very successful.
38mm x 52mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
4) A head and face. Sex indeterminate. The head is like a potato and has no neck. The lips are clown-like, satirical even. The hair is black and two flaps of yet more hair hang like springer spaniel ears. The eyes are two circles with two dots. If it is in fact a potato, and not a head, it is precariously balanced and about to bounce to the floor.
66mm x 54mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
5) A head and face. Male. A simple attempt at a circle, the resultant coil not unlike a light bulb. The smile is a thin black line running from left to right like a clothes line. The hair is curious - one part suggests thick hair and another baldness. If this character's life is empty, at least it is not unhappy.
39mm x 51mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
6) Blank.
38mm x 51mm. Folded red card. 2007.
7) A head and face. Sex indeterminate. Possibly extra-terrestrial. Either side are two cat's ears. In these, towards the tips, are parked the eyes. The eyes are wide open. They are either comic or unable to blink, and therefore watering heavily. The hair is like two quickly drawn rivers. The mouth is horizontal and houses two fangs. The neck may be thin and the shoulders dropped, but this is most definitely a trained killer.
49mm x 52mm. Very black ink on folded red paper. 2007.
8) A star. The star sits in the middle. It is surrounded by trails of neat scratched lines. At a distance the star looks like a busy dove of peace. Light fills the room when you look at this.
49mm x 50mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
9) A head and face. Round, like a thumb-squashed piece of gum. The eyes are large and totally black, giving the impression of round sunglasses. Each ear has a large black dot in the middle, suggesting they are badly pierced. The mouth is part-smile, part-frown. The hair is like a soldier's hair on leave and at the bar. There is a hint of a double-chin, but no malice.
39mm x 51mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
10) A girl. A body. She is smiling. Her arms are open wide. I think she is dancing. Her legs are like tassels. There is music. She looks like the 5-year-old artist's 8-year-old sister.
50mm x 50mm. Black ink on folded red card. 2007.
They are all for his friends.

Ground Control

Some days - like this blog - are abstract. Sometimes you just want to relax. You release the cord connected to the capsule and you float, you simply float away, with only the earthlight to guide you. I used to float away for days, weeks, months. I called it travel but in some ways it was also introspection. I don't do that kind of thing so much now, though I will be on my travels again soon. A child's imagination is just as epic as any crenellated landscape. At one point today I am sat in the bath with an article stood on my chest like a windbreaker. It is something written about the war zone and it is getting wet. Also, my mind keeps wandering still, each thought like a grasshopper on a hot thin lawn. For the record, the three others are affectionately sat like the three monkeys on the bright red sofa watching a film. I am thinking about how I used to like writing long words on the sand with a firm stick of seaweed. Now, I am thinking about filming, directing, editing. It is curious. I have never seen the artist look so relaxed. And yet I know this is in part because she is charging her batteries for the new year onslaught. Maybe every single moment is an adventure. I like the idea of the wise man knowing nothing. When people talk about this or that landscape - political, social, creative, otherwise - being full of uncertainty, I still sometimes wonder what it is exactly that they are trying to say. Isn't everything, but our love, if we are lucky, uncertain? Our children are very excited at present about the coming festivities and it is impossible not to enjoy being caught in the slipstream of such fervour. It is enough to make you want to reconnect with the cord again. It is enough to make you want to unplug the bath water, rise from the bath, and grab a towel. But what of the article I was reading, which is now flat on the floor? What about the accompanying skewed wet images of young soldiers in uniform still shooting and being shot at? I cannot leave them behind. It is called the burden of empathy. I bend down and pick up the wet pages, almost unpeeling them, and marvel, perhaps a little guiltily, at the three figures still on the bright red sofa watching their film. Later, when the children are in bed and the artist is alone on the sofa, I listen with headphones to a song. It is about a man whose girlfriend is away. She is fighting in the war zone. The times surely are a-changing.

The Dinner Party

We had the pleasure of some well bonded new friends around for a supper of roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, peas, beans and horseradish sauce this evening. There were thirty-five or so candles awaiting them, each flickering with contentment as they entered the flat from the cold. Our friends have a daughter only slightly older than our own - they attend the same school - and soon the two girls wandered down the corridors of an imagined adulthood, musing on the particulars of their adult world, while our 5-year-old son squatted like a rebel by a mountain of cushions, looking sharp as a needle on a tree in his aunty-designed peach-red pirate shirt. Aside from the genuine pleasantries and compassionate vibes flying around the room, what was of particular interest to me was the artist showing her work. Both parents are teachers as well as artists and it was welcomed by the artist therefore to have the chance to receive some in-depth analysis, especially when you remember that pretty soon after the upcoming festive period has ended, there will emerge through the last remaining cooking fumes of excess a gallerist of young but high repute coming to see the work. I remained pretty much silent throughout the viewing session and always enjoy listening to other people's takes on the artist's work. It is especially good when people look at the work without any need for biography. In other words, when the work is simply taken for what it is, and it withstands what I will clumsily call critical prurience, it is then that you know the work is as good to others as it is to yourself. So, from that point of view at least, it was good to see the work out from its temporary sanctuary by the door, allowed to breathe within people's eyeshot again in other words. It remains true that the more I see this work, the more convinced I am of its merit and worth. Why, it may even be good enough to give these very light words true weight one day.

A Doll's House

I feel like a cheap gift rattling about inside an expensive cracker on the train home from the centre of the capital. I have art materials for the artist and have just paid our rent. Now I am sitting at the red-covered round table in our living room. The artist herself returns from dropping off our daughter at a nearby friend's house and as she shuts the door her cheeks are flush with cold. I hand her a plate of food and watch as she slowly eats. She offers sympathy for a friend whose marriage is not so much on the rocks as scattered in small pieces on the sand. A few more tides and it will be washed away completely. It has been an inter-faith disaster as it happens. Marriage is a challenge at the best of times but when religion competes, as well, you are doomed are you not? Even those of us who rise to the challenge do not always win. Our son meanwhile is sitting on the bright red sofa like a comfortable plus, thankfully. He has been allowed to watch an art programme for 5-year-olds. Handmade flamingos occupy centre-screen. As he rubs his eyes, I ask some questions.
Do you like it when your sister's at a sleepover party and you're on your own?
Yeah.
Why?
You get to watch anything you want.
Do you want to be an artist when you grow up?
No.
Why not?
Don't know.
There must be a reason.
There's not a reason.
Why?
Oh dad, I like this.
But why don't you want to be an artist?
Dad, I like this programme.
What's the programme?
This. (pointing.) Look.
When the programme ends, our son collapses into his mother's arms. He has a yellow toy in one hand, a gift from me, for being on his own tonight, and a channel-changer in the other. Actually, I am thinking, it is unfair of me to interrogate him. So I will stop. Besides, he is not in the mood and would rather inspect his new toy, or contemplate toys in general. The artist rises from the sofa, leaving him to it, and sits at the table with me. I must show her the travel piece written by a friend of mine in which he describes with gentle attendance a profound encounter with someone in an oasis town parked in the middle of a famous desert. Just as I am about to hand it to her, she in fact hands me a tiny framed picture - oh, it must be only 3 centimetres wide. It is of a boat on a lake by mountains and is part of a gift for someone's daughter who has a doll's house. I look at it and wonder if the doll will realise quite how lucky it is. Our son looks up.
Do you think the doll will like them?
Yeah.

Freeze

The artist's parents - a good trip - have left and the sister is now to stay one night. (It is like one of those holiday photographs sprung to life again in sudden adulthood.) The central heating in the meantime has shut down and I am sat at home with the two children now wrapped up in a kind of Dickensian spirit to counter the cold. The fact the artist is out with her sister is a good thing. Both are working mothers and deserve their space. The fact some of us have colds already is not a good thing. However, the children enjoy it when there is just me. Not as much, but enjoy all the same. I tend to spoil them. We bond. A shameless bond. I draw the line only with sweets and encourage creativity. My idea of what creative is however bears its own reflection and no one else's. It stretches for example from refusing to let the 5-year-old play killing games instead of chasing games on the computer, to allowing the 8-year-old to copy my signature as if researching some kind of genetic sub-text. Our optimism gets the better of us - I suppose because we are those kinds of people - and we keep trying the central heating over and over again. This includes turning on the so-called hot tap in the bathroom sink and parking a protruding finger beneath the flow and closing one's eyes in hope. Only it seems to get colder and colder. It also includes that classic switch-it-all-off and switch-it-all-on-again malarkey. It's enough to freeze your words off. There were no plumbers available, you see. Not unless one was prepared to pay the earth. (It is the coldest night of the year.) No, we will simply have to wait until the morning. (Keep the faith.) I came back from town a few hours ago and am still wandering the flat with a scarf round my neck. Occasionally I look up at some of the artist's work and feel a kind of warmth. (Hang on a minute.) I rub the little people's backs. (I don't believe it: it's come on again.) We're chilling.

Praise For Elation

I have just come in from listening to 145 schools and well over 5000 children, possibly 7000, singing a medley of songs in one arena, as part of an attempt to raise money for a children's charity, at the same time as encouraging young children to sing, and enjoy singing. I was there with the artist, our 5-year-old boy, and the artist's affectionately astute parents. One of the participants was our daughter. It took a while to spot her among the thousands of white-topped singers, but eventually our binoculars were trained on her 8-year-old frame, dancing with her peers on the far side of the vast space, her voice running like a thin stream into a wide river of voices, the chasm between like a giant gulp of breath between each line of a song. It had been a day of childhoods, in that we began pushing through sunlit mist across slippery grass for an indoor tour through paintings of naval adventure, painting as reportage, beauty discovered, high seas instead of high teas, salt in wounds, shivering timbers, young boys aged twelve travelling the world for the very first time. One oil painting depicted exotic women with tattoos on their buttocks: ample inspiration perhaps for sea-legged pubescence. Later, a nourishing few miles later, the artist's father played a DVD of freshly compiled and edited photographs from the artist's childhood: the family's travelsome holidays together. A lone camper van cuts through Lovat green hills. Ivory white beaches and turquoise seas. Unphotographed midgies. The skirl of pipes as soundtrack. Adventure. Nature. No schlock. The holiday as a concept. And there in the middle of it all, as if the only people on the planet, was the artist with her mother and father and younger sister and brother and beloved dog. Everybody there. Also, you could feel the strain of hormones forcing their way through untapped veins. You could sense the thoughts running like colour on film. And the eyes. The artist's eyes. You could see something there. They were beginning to scrutinise. They were glimmering. These were finding shape, form, contour, contrast, meaning. In a way, the innocence has proved abiding, but not inhibiting, and by no means unflowering, and is now passing on, successfully, from mother to daughter, from artist to artist perhaps. An unpompous choir of talents. Pencil lines meet songlines. That kind of sing.

Travel as an art in itself

I received a reply today from a friend who lives across the ocean. He had been on his travels and was on his way back home. There was something of the quietude of the desert in his words, however briefly were they put. There is something about travel, I was also thinking, after closing down his message, that opens the mind in a way nothing else can. Well, maybe nothing other than art, good art, that is, religion, for all I know, and enlightened bereavement. The spirit of adventure after all is rather like the spirit of the artist. At least in my book. One thing however that I do not have much in common with this artist, the artist of the blog, is that she did not as a young woman maybe do quite as much travelling at that age as I did, and instead journeyed into and through and with her work. While I was spitting sand from my mouth, she was cracking pastel sticks and inching back towards the paper again with a pencil in her mouth. While I was experiencing the runs in stupefyingly hot third world outhouses, she was working on her craft. While I was wasting time, but never the moment, she was getting better and better at what she now does so exquisitely. One time when she made up for this relative reticence on the travel front was when she flew alone to see her sister on the other side of the world. I was working on an eccentric and only very marginally ground-breaking project involving cyber-scanned heads and facial motion capture, and I was at the time, to be frank, knackered. It was like our roles had been reversed. I would collapse at night, exhausted, thinking of this person I knew getting up and starting their day at exactly the same time. While she gorged on spontaneous travel, I was chipping away in my own way at the craggy face of capitalism. No, there is a kind of epic space lurking in everyone's psyche I believe, one which maybe only through travel can be recognised in terms of scale for the epic space it is. I hate to sound pious but we live increasingly in a culture of unexpanding horizons. We delude ourselves that through globalisation we are experiencing a kind of worldliness, togetherness, but we are not. We are growing smaller and smaller as individuals and not just as a people. Even our networks and newspapers are too frightened now to have a point of view, presumably for fear of alienating half their viewers or readers. No, I imagine my friend returning home from the rumours of sand feels a bigger man than when he left. It's how I imagine the artist wants people to feel after looking at her new body of work. Mind-opened and not just open-minded.

Shuffle on this mural wall

I am going back to the war zone in a host of weeks. I have just received confirmation. But I will leave it at that. It can sit there in the background like a new character in a play who doesn't really say anything but has, you feel, a great deal of thought. In the meantime life as a man married to an artist looking for a show continues and this is what I am here to concentrate on. Indeed I breathe what lungs of support I can every day into the body artistic. With admiration comes I hope encouragement. (With this artist I do watch.) I watched her disappear into the cold grey day today in order to work further on her volunteered mural at our children's under-funded but cheerful primary school for example. I shook my head at the window and really wanted a gallery of people to witness this. I saw the mural for myself later when I went to the school to pick up the children and the artist passed me, shivering on her way back home, happy enough, relieved a gallerist is coming to see her work in the new year. It looked magnificent. It is a signifant and generous gesture. It is like Julian Opie meets Michael Craig Martin meets the artist. Instead of just being the generous gesture it is, it also now holds it own very much as a genuine work of art. It is like the acceptable face of socialism. It is like the good side to conservatism. It is all things to all children and yet entirely original. Just the parade of them all, the long and the short and the tall, all the different children, in different poses, stretching along the great white wall as you enter the playground, is like watching angels play. Nor is at all self-conscious. I was there to take the children to the dentist. Bombarded by dental questions on our way down the hill, I marvelled at both child's tenacity and fact-finding skills. Once inside the actual surgery for example my five-year-old son pointed to the fire extinguishers and asked what they were. When I told him what they were, he then pointed to the running man figure in the fire exit sign and asked me what happened to the people having their teeth fixed when there's a fire. Later I sat with them as they were lowered one by one into the high-tech dental chair where their little mouths were lit and picked and toiled away at. They were very brave and I think admired the specifics of dental work. Just like they admire their mother when she comes up with her amazingly intricate details. The artist is in the detail.

Everything Connects

Sometimes I am afraid to admit to the artist my connections with the issues of the day. Privately I like to string together playful sequences of these connections, even end them exactly where I began. Take this morning for example. A typical morning on a normal sort of day for me. The second most powerful religious leader in the land was on TV. (A man I've mentioned before.) My eldest sister knows him. (He was the person I was hoping to swim with after the poignant reunion with my five sisters.) The interview as it happens was being conducted by an old school friend of mine. Someone with whom I acted in several plays and exchanged bad poetry. At one point during the interview the religious leader took off his dog collar and clipped it into pieces with a giant pair of scissors, stating it was in protest against Zimbabwean misruler Robert Mugabe. (I will make an exception and mention him by name.) Now Mugabe from 1958-1960 taught at Apowa Secondary School in the relatively small town of Takoradi in western Ghana, and I happened to turn up there many years later after crossing the Ivorian border. I was met there by a man who knew west Africa like the back of his conscience and who once played in a band with the then future and now former prime minister, the one before the one refusing these past few days to meet with Mugabe. Now this man, as well introducing me to tribal elders and palm wine, also introduced me while there to a focus-puller, and I bumped into this former focus puller again with his wife in the public swimming pool two or three weeks ago. In between exchanging splashed sundries about our children, I asked the man's wife how her own film work was going, as I remembered she dabbled. She mentioned that she was doing something with a well known singer and told me the name. I had a connection with this singer. She had her portrait once done by the artist. I may be afraid to admit to the artist my connections with the issues of the day sometimes. But I still enjoy stringing together playful sequences and back.

“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain” *

'I'm stressed,' she said. Important people were coming to see her work. I slipped away with the children into the rain. It is important for people to see the artist without the baggage of her family. The clouds were dark, low, heavy, dated - like a thousand Avro Vulcans. The light was mean. But the children like it when I take them swimming. Anything to be in water. If we were on a ship and it started listing they'd be jumping up and down with joy. (Actually they're doing that now.) The rain was so heavy it was flattening. Even the contents of the fox-raided green bins looked washed and presentable, so thorough the downpour. But we love it when it rains. It takes us away from the urban. Wet heads face music. Tall trees sway with epicist wisdom and a kind of humour meets strength as floppy feet slap on the freshened slabstones. Anyway, we raced to the bus and jumped aboard and slipped down the hill like a tickled trout before arriving at the public swimming pool. The children were in their element. Gills appeared. Fins formed. 'I wonder how mummy's getting on,' said our daughter, slipping away again like a mermaid. The son meanwhile tried to make sense of the warping effect of water on his legs. (He likes what he does not understand.) I stared into space. I looked too serious apparently. It was just then that I realised I had jumped into the pool with the mobile phone in my pocket. What an idiot. Amazingly it started vibrating again an hour or so later when I was in the middle of an eye-test. I couldn't answer it. I was too busy grappling with the letters forming and fading in front of me. The children watched this spectacle from the wings. I was impressed the phone had survived. A machine blew a puff of air into my eyes to measure their internal pressure. These eyes. A small torch is flashed in my eyes to determine how well my pupils react. This apparently helps reveal any possible neurological problems. Eyes. What eyes have seen. We returned to the flat. The visit for the artist had gone well. 'I'm not stressed,' she said. A fish popped out of our son's mouth.
* Mark Twain 1835-1910

The liberating principle of being lighthearted

The artist has been adding the finishing touches to the piece on the wall to the right. It is the dotting of the eyes. There is often a thankful gasp of comedy to the last few moments on a piece. It is the artist's excitement about being liberated from the anxiety that seems to come along with all of the pieces done by the artist. Come to think of it, the artist was like this when I proposed to her too. Before I had said anything, she began giggling. Marriage is no masterpiece but it had to be ready. Her cheeks were red, the river was gushing, and she kept turning towards me, with this deliberately foolish but always winning, no doubt nervous, smile. I didn't know what I was doing either. The children on the other hand have been pretty much non-plussed about the almost finished piece today. This morning I could hear them swish past it without much ado, and this evening when our daughter returned from her gym class I think she was more interested in draining from her mind the last dregs of a whole week of school than in anything to do with anyone else. With just a smile she puts everything into perspective. It's funny: I could have written a serious account of the day - I was going to write at some length about a great man we both knew who died last week. (He deserves a book not a few sentences in a blog.) But I began this entry as I now intend to finish it, which is to say by ending today's writing fray by hunting out the warmest moment of the day. We both for example had numerous errands to do separately this morning and I think enjoyed our independence. The artist had the mobile phone this time and a friend of mine, an increasing war zone specialist as it happens, happened to phone just as she was having her first ever massage from a Brazilian woman. (Very funny: I liked that.) Just now she has walked past the nearly finished piece with our son in her arms. He had fallen asleep with a smile on the sofa. She didn't look at the piece as she passed but you could tell from her expression she was not too anxious about it. This is good. Anxiety is the engine of much industry round these parts. Best to leave it out of today's blog.

My Own Waiting Game

Well, the artist continues with her diligent and focused mission to find a new gallery and have with her enough art for an exhibition, while I continue to urge her along like a quietly gesticulating and gum-chewing fan in the bleachers. However I am more than aware of my own projects as I monitor the horizon for facts. Reticently I wonder how much longer I can wait on the organisations dangling in front of me the prospect of work. It's frustrating, but I am keeping my cool. I feel sometimes like a deep-sea fisherman refusing to return to port until the net is full. These are projects I have been told are robust probabilities and not just polite possibilities. So why do I feel like I should be doing a great deal more to speed them along? Is this some kind of inadequate male thing? A frustrated hunter's instinct? A tangled work ethic? I have already done enough meetings to stop an entire conflict. There is one role in particular I want. Of course, too much enthusiasm can be mistaken for impatience, and impatience with arrogance, and arrogance ... well, you've no chance with that. Some of my prospects are by-products of the pretty unusual desire these days which is to make some kind of valid contribution to the world by the way. Unfortunately this does not make any of them materialise any faster. I remain on standby. A sentry to luck. I know some of them will deem a blog impossible. Anyway, the artist still has her appointment in the new year to see the woman gallerist she liked so much. This has settled her spirit and should enable a smooth passage through the festive period. The artist's ex-boyfriend meanwhile continues to feature in the newspapers. I wonder if he'll come out of the experience any the wiser. He has already confused one or two of the major issues of the day with his own work, I have also noticed. At least the children have it right. They were taken by their school to a pantomime today. When I asked them what they thought of it, our daughter said she didn't like it much and our son said that he did. 'It wasn't like mummy's work,' said our daughter. 'I liked the scary bits,' said our son. I smiled. 'It's good to be scared,' he added, looking me in the eye.

The Sound of Now

I hear what I think are the children whispering to each other in their bunk-beds at a time when they know they should be going to sleep. It is the boy's voice I hear, his energy coiled like an inductor or electromagnet attracting only insomnia. The artist is lying in the bath and if I listen carefully enough to her I think I can hear her turning the pages of whatever it is she is reading, a novel perhaps, or magazine. I can also hear the cars and buses on the major road outside, their drive muffled only slightly by the thin wall of trees. The fridge is making a noise, too, as the refrigerant is pumped through the coils of tubing at the rear. Earlier, all I could hear was the sound of the artist's materials enjoying the surface of paper on board, a sound interjected every now and then by the dissatisfied sigh of the artist, or her attempt to hunt opinion. A motorbike rips past. It could be riderless for all I know. Where we lived before, which was just next door, the young man's motorbike was always being stolen. A large truck would pull up, usually at about four or five in the morning apparently, and crack the code and with several people hoist the machine into their vehicle and spirit their hot-wheeled booty away. I can still hear whispering. My curiosity gets the better of me and I step across the wooden floorboards and peer like a nurse into a ward of whispers. It is only our son who is whispering, as our daughter is asleep. (I can hear the reassuring filling and emptying of her 8 year old lungs.) When I ask our son what it is he is doing he looks up at me from the thick shopping catalogue on the bed and says, 'I'm ticking what I want.' Bunk-bed shopping: it's like window shopping only you can't shout about it. On my way back to the laptop I can hear the central heating. It is a slow hum and how I imagine the sound of monotony to be. I listen to my fingers tapping the keys again. It is the sound of a galloping horse whose hooves have been made tiny, and replaced with leather padding. Silently, most silently, I look across at the artist's two pieces on the wall. The figures within each stare back. On this night of many sounds they are the non-conformists. One of them looks at me with precisely the kind of perseverance we need in order to ensure the work is shown. On cue, the artist reappears, bathed and dried and wanting to make some tea. Moments later, I can hear the water in the kettle begin to boil. 'I'm hot,' says our son.

The Buffer Zone

Today the artist has been looking after our daughter as the last globules of our daughter's cold evaporates into thin air and the excuse to stay at home begins to run out. The artist has also been leaping from piece to piece on the wall like a grasshopper from blade to blade of grass. In fact the flash of light from the nearly completed piece on the right is now beginning to come out on the piece to the left. (Art as an ecosystem surely.) Its glow, like the cold doing the neighbourhood rounds, is infectious. Meanwhile I have been out hunting, as in the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find work, and one of the advantages of today's hunt was in seeing an old friend again. Isn't it gratifying when those you have always liked appear to be doing well and yet still uphold the notions of truth you all clutched so handsomely when young? We discussed children - his are much older - and the 'abyss', which he warned with an experienced smile confronts many a boy aged thirteen. 'And three-quarters,' he added. He kindly bought lunch and listened to my underdeveloped ideas as our waitress ensured we were replete. I was more interested in my companion than I was in myself. It wasn't that we were trying catch up on everything; it was more that we were tackling the present with a kind of renewed vigour. At one point later over coffee as my host stared out at the tiny principality of green in front of his office, we discussed the absence of the buffer-zone between you and death when your parents die and you are still very much a child, which is to say 'pre-abyss'. I was still thinking about this on the underground train later when I saw an elderly woman who immediately reminded me of someone. She looked lost but was putting on a brave face and like the person she was reminding me of, she grinned perseveringly and was well presented. Eventually, readjusting her white-knuckle grip on her handbag, she discovered she was on the wrong train. She licked her lips, nervously. (Her accent was from the north and you could tell she was a long way from home.) When the man she was asking directions from told her to get out at the next station, and left it rather brutally at that, I took my cue and stepped alongside her and ushered her with a smile to the correct train. She reminded me of the aunt who with my grandmother tried to bring me up without the buffer-zone.

Win some, not winsome

The artist's last boyfriend before me won what a leading white-bearded actor tonight from across the ocean described rather grandly as the world's greatest art prize by ripping open the purple envelope with Zeus-like non-grace and announcing the artist's ex-boyfriend by name. The artist was sitting next to me during all this and I registered and indeed admired her response: she was genuinely pleased for him. The last time he was nominated - and did not win - the artist sat back as a guest at his table. I was watching it all on a small black and white TV alone at our flat. The TV has changed and we are still together. No prizes for that, but we feel like winners all the same. No one really makes art to win prizes but this one is rated highly - it was rated highly then and is rated highly now - though some of it has been glazed with a kind of sugar-coated slebbiness (as in celebrity). The prize itself - named after a painter of all things - used to be for artists under 40 but is now for artists under 50. Quite generously, tonight's winner said it should simply be for artists with a pulse. As a man, it must be said, the prize-winner has always been uncomfortable around me. As an artist, however, he has often impressed, though much of his work inhabits the world of ideas only, and can as a result be like watching someone trying very hard not to dirty their hands. I think the awkwardness is genuine, however, and may in fact be part of its appeal. I also believe the man to be a true outsider, uncomfortable in his skin, and one who sets himself apart, unusually so, from the clannish principles behind the art world. This does not mean I do not think some of the work is either too obscure or yet more one-line ideas executed by others at times. But they did spend a lot of time together, the artist and the prize-winner, and when you are both visual artists in a relationship it must be very difficult. I bumped into him the other day by the railway station I use most frequently in the centre of the capital. I wrote about it that day. He even came to our wedding, which was good of him, though he was as uncomfortable with me then as he was at the station. Still, social graces alone do not a good artist make. And I warmly congratulate him, albeit anonymously, on his award.

A(lphabet)bstract Art(iculation)ist

A is for Artist:
She nears the end of her latest piece
B is for Boy:
Wonders never cease
C is a Girl's Name:
A daughter, grand-daughter, cousin and niece
D for Deploy:
Awaiting release
E is Everlasting:
Large sky, vast heath
F for Family:
A strength defying belief
G is a Girl:
Brushing her teeth
H is for Honey:
Bees Relief
I is for Ego:
Me without grief
J is for She:
And her masterpiece
K is for Kinship:
And is the bees knees
L is for Lovely:
Like meadows, like leas
M is for Money:
Poverty sees
N is for None:
But no self-pities
O is for Oh Please:
Sorry for ditty
P is for Pun:
Though not so witty
Q is Quite Simple:
I know quite bitty
R is for Wry:
From city to city
S is for Silly:
But always quite natty
T is for Try:
Even when batty
U are Still Reading:
Sitting pretty
V is V Good:
Ardour real gritty
W is Why:
Love from the nitty
X and YZ:
Alphabet City

Here we go again or do we?

Let me paint the picture first. The artist is standing by the mounted board screwed to the wall to my right while working away at the surface - top left-hand corner: intricately shadowed light on a tall flat wall - with a stiff neck and concentrated mind. The artist's son who is on the floor is for some reason sticking a plastic giraffe's neck between the two short plastic hind legs of his toy elephant, while remaining crouched behind the bright red sofa like a cowboy by a rock. The daughter meanwhile has a cold, bless her, and is sitting thoughtfully on the sofa watching TV having just served everyone uncomplainingly with bowls of hand-scooped ice cream. Anyway, I've just had my first whiff of what I suddenly realise is now fast approaching us. It came in the mildly predictable shape of a TV commercial advertising a familiarly coloured and not exactly unfamous tin of sweets. (I would open such a tin myself as a boy each year and hand it around the room always beginning with my grandmother.) Both children looked at me eagerly. (I am presently typing away at the round table.) Let there be tin, they seemed to be saying. Let there be tin. Now, to be honest, I've always looked upon this approaching time of year as something other people enjoy. Not as a spoilsport. Not as some cynic. Or killjoy. Simply as someone who as a child was always made aware each year of that thankfully uncommon gap where parents really should be. This time however, a few moments ago, that first whiff of the year felt different. I realised I didn't want to be like a gap, too. Not there in spirit in other words. It felt like I had made in seconds that leap from my own kind of caramelised reflection and deference for my parents, into the full blast of just how it should be for our children. Exciting. Special. Gift-laden. Warm. As I listen to the artist's hand still working away at the board, I even forget I was angry with her earlier for being honest enough to have expressed her frustration rather than bottling it in. Now I just want to make this for the artist and the children a great time of year. While the artist has always known how to go about this, I am still learning. So they may have to be patient with me. However, the key I think is to tone down the personal commemorations and get on with the show. (It's still too commercial, though.)

Her Life In A Column

I have a copy of a weekly 950-word column in front of me written by a high-profile contemporary female artist who knows the artist quite well. In fact she replied to the artist's request a year or so ago to meet up, but failed to follow through in the end, though perhaps through no fault of her own. Anyway, as well as soaking up some rays on the other side of the world, the person is now a millionaire. And some. I cut to the chase on this only because she is part of that new breed of artists whose claim to fame is always the great money they are making and never the great art. This is not necessarily their fault and may well grate them as much as it does us. But you imagine they will have a relatively stress-free time reading their bills. Besides, millionaire self-pity next to pages of bombed children does not an icon make. According to the female columnist-artist, I was the first person to write about her in a national newspaper. In her column today she talks chiefly about alcohol, sweat, blood and benders. Her mugshot looks down at you with a kind of unwitting pomposity, especially when you know she's essentially a kind person but locked inside a piece of rolling rolling-stock. Confessionalisms can be quite arresting. To some degree I suppose I am doing one here. But when someone is unhappy and the more unhappy they are the more successful they become, you cannot help but see where the graph is going and fear for the worst. It must also be difficult for the artist of this blog to be working hard without complaint, then read the complaints of an artist in the spotlight. At least the blogger's wife will have the satisfaction of having found a kind of contentment through her children when she exhibits. And will not in her work have been overexposed in public during depths of despair.

Meditatio

A white candle burns by the empty fireplace. A desert lamp leans like a cold ceramic tower to the right of the broken music box on the floor. The candlelight reflected on the white gloss paint next to the fireplace flickers like a burning lighthouse. I hear only silence within the hollow of the unplayed acoustic guitar that comes all the way from China. I sneeze, and the dust particles on the blinds stick their hands up and say it was them. A message flashes up. The so-called anti-spyware device on the computer says it has zapped 19 spyware items. Only because the items are peppered with words such as trade and click and ad and serving do I appreciate their demise. My calf muscles stiffen. The book from my dying sister is on the table. I have not written to her yet. A second lamp meanwhile looks up at me from the wooden floorboards to my left. My son's toy police badge sits on the shelf below the Eliot, Sassoon, Plath, Auden and Hughes books. I think briefly and warmly about the land across the ocean. I think about the month drawing to an end, and I think about money. I think about the art. I hear the artist's voice as she reads a story to the children in another room, and even the cars outside seem to be listening. I hear the dishwasher and smell what I find out are the phosphates, nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, enzymes, perfume, geraniol, hexyl cinnamal and oxygen-based bleaching agent of the dishwasher tablets. (I nearly place the box of tablets back in the fridge after checking the ingredients.) The TV is turned off. I am wondering why I am having trouble finding certain websites. As I await news on a possible job, travel, position, hope, in my mind I am tapping my fingers. At least I am not idle. At least I am looking, however independently, at the big picture with fresh eyes every day. At least if I am running in circles they are at the crack of dawn. I feel like some tea, a perfect cup of full luxurious tea. The candle by the fire meanwhile flickers like a ghost, and I think about my dead parents. Then I think about music. No, I don't think about music, I feel about music, I imagine music, I almost hear music. The artist has had a good day. She has met with the young woman with the gallery and the woman is coming to see the work in the flesh. The candlelight, if I am not mistaken, applauds.

From the moon to diplomacy

On a night when despite the light pollution the sky is clear and the moon is bright, and with my hopes held high like a plate on a pool cue and my mood ambitious, it seems only right I should be attending a screening later about those few brave men who have landed on the moon. (As I alight from the train, I remember the two trainee astronauts I met in the lusty south of the country across the ocean one time and thought were Buddhist monks.) One of the astronauts in the film stared to camera and recalled peering like a child out from the capsule, and how everything he knew, everyone he loved, everything he had ever been brought up to see as his world, he could now hide, conceal, block out, with his thumb. He could hold it out and make it all disappear - it was that small, that fragile, like an unsmudged smudge. It was obvious to another astronaut - like an epiphany, he said, a moment of ecstasy - that when he stared at the moon, the earth, and the sun, he knew, he just knew, he said, there was a major spiritual power out there responsible for all this. Not one of those religions we've created for ourselves in order to make our own kind of sense of the world, but a serious, all-knowing, immense, omnipresent tribal elder of a spiritual power. (Travelling home alone, I was thinking they were all like tribal elders now, these men of the moon, these wacky, far-sighted elders.) They had deep space in their eyes, the big picture. There was nothing small, dull, trivialist, consumerist, or just plain vain about them. In fact I was still thinking about them like this as I rocked and rocketed alone through the underworld on a silver train to my next destination, a talk given by a slightly different tribal elder, a shrewd and cunning man, but an elder all the same. He was talking about the war zone and special relationships, one special relationship in particular. (I thought of my own murmering.) I suppose if I had more time I could knit these two experiences - the men of the moon and the man of the world - into the one jumper. He was candid, unpublished, and at times shone the torch of experience and illuminated all manner of detail. Of his own people, correctly or incorrectly, he described them as poor on vision but good on pragmatics. (The opposite of the artist, I was thinking, who is good on vision but poor on pragmatics.) Later, as I placed all the different pieces together again in my mind, someone stared threateningly at me at the last station. I gently ignored them and stared at the moon, immediately transported. None of them along the line ...

The Messenger Is Massage

Today the artist saw the woman and artist she shared a studio with all those years ago. I gather they were both apprehensive, or excited, about seeing each other again, but it must be said the artist came back looking revitalised, enervated, full of ambition, citing the galleries she now wanted to visit and openings she wished to attend. I always compare it to staring down a tunnel of time when you see an old friend again after a long period of time - in a flash, life speeds up, in the artist's case this time by as much as eight years. According to the artist, her old friend, who looked well apparently, knew exactly where the work was coming from, to use that well-worn genealogical sounding phrase so popular with the art world, and its tangential bloggers. Out of four especially close female artists, it transpires that only one has had children - the artist of this blog. Interesting. Anyway, the artist also has a visit on Thursday to a young gallerist in the capital, someone recommended by my friend the art database guru, all of which of course is like art to my eyes, music to my ears. When you work so long and hard in a kind of vacuum, which is to say a place without immediate gratification, as the artist has done, self-doubt always looms large, or lurks behind hope, like a meddler in the soul. That's it: it lurks. It waits until you are at peace with the world and then attacks you. No, as the friend is someone who has known the artist's work for longer than me, I was more than delighted to hear about the success of their meeting. I was also thrilled it was a serious one-to-one - a long, frank, and intellectual discussion about the work itself, in other words. Furthermore it was something done without me gazing irrelevantly into the conversation. I like not being there. If people ever ask what it's like being married to an artist, I sometimes state, perhaps too clumsily, that it's great to know there is a huge part of the artist's life that has nothing to do with me whatsoever, or at least to know there is a place that is the artist's place, the artist's expression, the artist's world. While the very existence of this blog may suggest otherwise, it is hugely important to me that I can keep a kind of melodic distance from the opera itself, especially when it comes to content. (The artist would have it no other way anyway.) I am merely the messenger, remember. But these are front row seats.

Never try to clean a parakeet cage with a vacuum cleaner

We were bumbling down a nearby lane this morning when we spotted a parakeet in one of the trees. Though they do not hail from these parts, we host a great number of parakeets in this capital. Some of them work very hard. Some of them make an incredible noise. Others flit about silently and at night. I came across two yesterday. They seemed to be working all day long, probably for very little, while the owners of the tree were away I believe. Anyway, we stared up at this one parakeet, its elaborate strangeness, the emerald green feathers, ring-neck and red beak. It seemed strange that something so exotic could survive the clumsiness of our cold winters. We have since discovered online they came here originally from the foothills of the Himalayas - we like foothills - and there are well over 30,000 rushing about the capital. Parakeets of course are not the only foreign invaders in this land. We have the Chinese mitten crab, for example, as well as the more familiar grey squirrel. (Bless 'em all, the long and the short and the tall ...) Non-native species, in other words. Whatever that means. Birds, like humans, often take flight. They even say the Celts hail from Vedic India. No, we will grow accustomed to the parakeet. Successful integration, I believe, is key. It will also help of course if they don't change the culture too much, especially of our schools, and push them to 'breaking point'. Some parakeets have already developed good relations with the crows and magpies, I hear. This has got to be a good thing. I gather some have even stopped feeding themselves with their claws, using their beaks instead, just like everyone else. Unfortunately some people will always resent non-native species. (This is ignorance as much as prejudice.) As long as the parakeets don't cause too much harm to the ecosystem, or attack the other birds, I don't see too much of a problem. No, the parakeets, I suspect, are here to stay. They've already colonised the nearby cemetery.

The Artist, The Work and The Bunk-bed

It has been a working weekend for the artist. The fruits of her labour shine from the wall. The artist for a large part of the afternoon even wore a thick black mark across one cheek. It looked sufficiently warrior-like for one so determined to win the battle. Likewise, the artist's son. His painted space rocket - blues and pinks - won the sculptural stakes all right. The sculptor himself has been drawing and playing computer games since, even laying his head on the floor while looking up at the plastic pirate ship he so enjoys sailing through the straits of his imagination. The artist's daughter meanwhile came swimming with me. She was so excited by the prospect she affected the breaststroke across the park. (She likes to spend most of her time in the deep end these days and I marvel at her determination.) In order to get to the pool, we had to pass the station we used when I lived with the artist in a nearby flat. Even then she was a figure of industry, working through flurries of success and visual rechargings. She was working by day at her studio and by night as a secretary. There are already interesting tangents in the artist's career. This evening a well known singer recently recovered from breast cancer was on TV. The artist's daughter didn't know that her mother had done a portrait of her. 'You never told me,' she complained to the artist. I took the large pink book bearing an image of the artist's portrait from the shelf. 'Why didn't you tell me?' repeated the daughter. I will tell you. The artist never blows her own trumpet. She finds the idea vulgar. She will never waste energy telling the world what she has done in the past when she believes she still has so much to do in the future. (I will tell the world.) She will not rest on her laurels. Presently, she is reading a story to the children. Let me stop a moment to listen to what she is reading. It sounds like Russian at first. (I've just been watching a documentary with a lot of Russian in it with subtitles. Is that why?) Anyway, I have to go through in the end. They are all on the top bunk. (Remarkably, not our bed this time.) She is reading them C.S. Lewis. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I leave them listening to how the ancient, mysterious prophecy is fulfilled and the children help Aslan save Narnia from the evil White Witch. Then I return to my laptop and write this all down.

A Short Walk In The Urban Mush

I prepared to pick up the artist's daughter from a party. She looked fabulous when she left and I was hoping she was having a great time. The artist's son meanwhile had already built his space rocket and was about to begin painting. It stood in the middle of the room like a souped-up grandfather clock. As for the artist, she was approaching her work when I pulled shut the door and left. I buttoned up my coat and turned up my collar and headed like a pilgrim into the soft drizzle. The tarmac outside was covered in damp brown leaves and I gently kicked them away. The placing of the new paving stones underfoot looked rushed and slightly inferior. A bonus-based deadline? At the lights, a maniac driver insisted on revving up his engine threateningly, but I sensibly declined the opportunity to educate. The artist's daughter meanwhile was at a party about a mile away and I decided to walk an unfamiliar route there, threading my way through largely residential streets. I was the only person walking. (Even without rain, it is like this.) Most people in the city drive and as a result find pavements superfluous. I see them every day. They rush from their heavily-locked and often reinforced front doors into their stubbornly-appointed cars, and heaven forbid if they have to converse with a human without one. I passed a large house where peacocks once roamed the garden. Now, there's just barbed wire. I walked down a street full of For Sale and To Let signs and made my way to a busy main road again. Everyone in their cars looked dead this time and stared straight ahead, catching the eye of a pedestrian obviously tantamount to an invitation to murder. But when I reached our daughter's party I was met with a barrage of smiling children's faces and my heart immediately lifted. Child surely is the father of man, I was thinking. Without them we are nowhere. But the girl giving the party, I also remembered, had just changed schools because of bullying at the last one. She is only 8-years-old. Anyway, I asked our daughter how the party was as we headed back up the road together. 'Fine,' she smiled, skipping. 'Has he made his rocket yet?' I smiled broadly and placed my hand on her shoulder.

Don't wait to make your son a great man - make him a great boy *

The artist's son lies asleep in the lower bunk. Sometimes it is as if we are on a ship and our destination is undetermined, though I am happy to report we are fully capable of imagining it to be a beautiful tropical island. Meanwhile, the cars outside, like modern day cockerels, though numbed, status-like, and submissive, continue to announce the working day. The son stirs, but nods off again. He is lying on his back and looks like a tourist on a beach, catching the rays of his own sunny sleep. His head is like a pineapple on a plate. Afloat in outer sleep, it is rested on an anti-allergy space rocket pillow while the likes of Jupiter and Mars and Mercury orbit the surface of the duvet cover. He stirs again, opens his eyes, looks the day up and down, like a stranger. His hair is pointing skyward, like one of those great cartoon characters after they have stuck their hand in an electricity power point. Anyway, several moments of apprehension are monitored on his face before they develop into meditation. 'Go away,' he says to me when I stare down at him, like a face in a Lucien Freud painting. Puffing his cheeks, he pulls the duvet cover back over again. (I must say: he has a wonderful inner strength and is not easily swayed.) When he does rise he makes his way to the sitting room like a mountaineer slightly bored with the descent. His shoulders are dropped only for the cameras and his cheeks are deliberately loose, as the need to be alone is expressed in 5-year-old Garbo-like eyes. He slumps on the bright red sofa with a sigh. A character he has grown fond of on TV soon spirits him away. (We have thought about this, but have decided an exposure to imagination is OK at this time of day.) The character is Ben 10, who is Ben Tennyson - nice poetic touch there, I thought. It is about him and his cousin Gwen and grandfather Max. Ben has a watch called an Omnitrix which gives him the ability to transform into a variety of alien lifeforms. This he sometimes does with mischief. The artist's son has one. Anyway, the programme ends and the realities of the day begin in earnest. Passing the artist's two works on the wall after breakfast, he brushes his teeth and dresses, his hair still sticking up as if in shock. He says he wants to build a rocket this weekend. And I bet he does.
* Anonymous

The Artist as Mother

The artist as mother in this instance is the biological and artistic parent of two offspring. The artist gestated her children as normal, which as we know is called first an embryo, and then a foetus, but unlike many mothers, she also made tangential works of art about it. Each successful gestation occurred as expected in the artist's uterus, from conception until the foetus was thankfully sufficiently developed to be born. Nothing unusual there. We were lucky. And I have always considered this person to be a conceptual artist anyway. She went into labour and gave birth twice. Not unusual. I saw both, though just in the nick of time in the case of the latter. (I have been to all her recent openings.) Once the children were born, the artist produced milk - in a process we know as lactation - to feed both children. But when they were born, she also produced art - in a process called magical realism - to feed the mind. Historically, mothers have always fulfilled the primary role in the raising of children, but since the late 20th century, the role of the father in child care has been given greater prominence, certainly in most Western countries, though perhaps less so in cultures to be found in the war zone. No, the artist is special for many reasons, but perhaps especially because she has managed to combine both a fulfillment of the primary role and a fulfillment of the creative one. Currently, with advances in reproducing technologies, the function of a figurative artist can be split between single pieces and mass production of, say, prints, digital images, films, etc. Artists get very excited about all this digital doo-dah. Currently, however, with advances in reproductive technologies, biological motherhood can be split between the genetic mother (who provides the ovum) and the gestational mother (who carries the pregnancy), and in theory neither might be the social mother (the one who brings up the child). This is perhaps the more remarkable. This can perhaps put art in its place. (GM art one day?) No, the mother plays an important role in a child's childhood, and the artist plays an important role in a culture's art. Combined, you are missing only one thing. The artist's husband. Whoever thought of that?

The only way to have a friend is to be one *

The artist walked to the bookcase, her two latest works screwed into the wall to her immediate right. Anyway, on a black and white patterned shelf with the likes of Martin Amis - wrongly accused of racism by the way - and Carol Shields and Isabel Allende and Laurence Sterne and Gilles Neret's Erotica Universalis staring back, she plucks the Philips phone from its stand and taps in the numbers of a very old friend. She wanted at last to speak to the artist I bumped into on the day I went for my long walk. This is a woman she has known for many years but has not seen for some time. They went to art college together. She threw a party with the artist and a third friend one time and cursed when the artist turned up late in a taxi from the TV studio where she was recording a children's art programme. The taxi was filled with flowers for the party and this was the artist's contribution. They shared a studio together, followed each other's serious progress. I remember cooking some fish for her and remember her boyfriend at the time falling asleep on the sofa with an uneaten trout on a plate on his lap. He was a complex man: I think he was pretending. I can even remember the trout's mirrored cooked face. That said, this old friend, a successful artist in her own right now, in many ways behaved more maturely than the artist's other art school friends. Furthermore there is a residue of experience from their times together which I have always felt the artist should be taking some kind of more calibrated advantage of. Also, when I bumped into this person at the station, she was with a number of other female figures from the art world. I've probably said this before but they struck me as precisely people useful to the artist. I don't know, maybe the men in the art world, the male curators or gallerists, just don't get the work yet. Maybe the artist needs therefore some good old fashioned girl power. The artist certainly seemed energised after the phone call and it transpires they have much in common still and are in fact meeting next week. It seems this friend understood where the new work was coming from immediately. And that was just from the conversation. (The artist also heard about one or two other contemporaries. Interaction. Information. These, too, are all-important.) No, the artist of this blog is held in high regard by her contemporaries. I know this from conversations I have had with some of the most high profile female artists in the world. (Strange, but true: you would know the names.) The artist must not be afraid to tap into this world. Everyone does it. (Though I know the artist is not like everyone else.) The truth is: the artist has an audience-in-waiting. Step on up, I say. Step on up.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)