Riders in the storm

The artist takes a rightful breather, burying her head inside a 600-page novel like a head of corn inside a giant balloon. The mood of the news is not good; it is local and dark, like the weather, and packed like (an) unexploded bomb(s). Soft and relentless rain on the windows creates the right sort of feel in a movie but in real life just makes you restless. The artist's daughter has the right idea - watching TV with the artist's son - though with too many angry voices for something so well meaning. I admit to the idea of the ideal taking a day off. I also admit to the reality that a creative environment is not always a flourishing one and that sticks in the mud cannot always be sidestepped. But there is reward to a creative household. This last piece the artist has been working on can thrill like a walk in the woods. There is a kind of paranormal light across it. It plays yet never deceives. There must be two thousand leaves in the image, one or two hundred broadleaved trees and shrubs. As I write, it remains screwed like a statement to the wall. The density of the medium means its presence has no doubt, but because all the scattered newspapers protecting the floor have been swept up and binned, and all signs of work temporarily removed, the piece sits within the domestic landscape like a cross-armed stalwart, a permanent member. It is a part of our lives - we are having a relationship - but soon it will be gone.

The Blogger's Wife

How are you feeling right now?
Responsible.
Is there anything I can get you?
The children to bed.
OK, when was your first impulse to draw?
Probably when I was around four: it stopped my tantrums.
What to you is the purpose of art?
For me it's a way of helping to understand the world we live in.
What is your advice to other artists?
I wouldn't contemplate giving advice, art's something terribly personal.
What is your idea of summer?
An idealised view of my own childhood, such as closed curtains in the bedroom when it's still light outside.
How important is criticism?
I hate it.
What do you hope to bring to others through your art?
A celebration of the gentleness in life.
Can art make a difference?
Of course.

A man hasn't got a corner on virtue just because his shoes are shined

After supergluing the heel of my right boot, I take a journey into the city with the artist, a city of four world heritage sights and over 300 languages, a city of 15 shooting and stabbing victims aged between 14 and 19 in the past six months, a city of music impresarios and suicide bombers. A city - it almost seems frivolous now - of the artist and artist's husband. We hit the chewing-gummed streets. (It never used to be like this: not this good.) Crucial art supplies, parked and perky on clean regimental surfaces, are purchased. (Final touches, before the assault.) Then, across the road in a witty woman's shoe shop, by a shelf of improbably high heels, the nation's second most famous children's author is spotted, and told by the artist how much the artist's daughter loves her work, so the author draws something for the daughter, a face, innocently unaware of the artist's own work, but somehow connected. (Unexpected mission accomplished.) We snatch a hushed, vigilant moment together at the national gallery - the eye, the eye, soft breaths on the neck - looking at an exhibition of 17th century artistic freedom, presumably like the sockless man in bright, almost sculpted, pink lace-up shoes in eggshell-blue trousers I later see outside. And then it's the real world again, coffee with a friend bombed back from Beirut, another walk on foot, fashionistas hand in hand bumping into mirrors, pickpockets lighting expensive cigarettes, hyper-intelligent spinsters dashing in the sun. And, heading back, a man, by the station, scabs on either cheek, a man, broken, bashed, with no shoes.

Art: the handover

There has been a handover taking place, lots of aerial shots of speeding limousines and out-riders slicing through the leafier parts of a capital. In a moment - perhaps one of those moments we measure our lives by - power has shifted from one pair of hands to another. Above all, we are reminded of change, of flux. Leaves remain on the trees but the familiar is gone, and a stranger now stands in the doorway. But to an artist a handover means something else entirely. For them it can be when weeks or months of industry culminate in a finished piece of work and the artist if lucky makes a sale and the work in an instant is released - a stranger itself - into a new home. And because this artist goes to such lengths, and in such detail, and uses something so close to her as subject matter, she is often asked how she can bear such a handover, bear to surrender something so special. Well, this is not a problem, I have noticed, and not only because of a need for funds, but also her training and discipline. Besides, she has never bogged herself down with an over-possessive nature. (Even when it comes to an errant husband.) I bought a knife sharpener the other day. A sharp knife is like a sharp mind, I was thinking, as the shopkeeper wrapped it up. Well, the artist is like that. Sharp. Sharpened. Sharpening. She is not a sentimentalist, not your meek slave. If the work is personal and people feel awkward about it, presumably preferring long-distance lust or macabre re-invention instead, then they should get over it, grow up. What is so terrible about art these days that it has to shy away from simple human emotion, as if it somehow contravenes a kind of masonic vow of commerce which all artists seem to have to make these days? Art - I hope, I wish - does not have to be just a tool of fashion. Art - and long live the handover - should be ungovernable.

Tramplers beware

Blogs are nothing new; I realise that. I even have a young poet in my book pretending not to know what a blog is, so convinced is he of their omnipresent triteness. But, let's be honest, life's blood can run through them just about forever. It's not like the factory lights get killed and the printers all go home. Words still spin from the ethereal presses, continents still chatter, 24-10, as somebody said. A friend across the ocean for example responded today by wanting to mention this articulated search for a show for my wife to a gallerist. Even though far-fetched, could, I wondered, through some kind of keyed-in fate, a show after time be offered? Is this what you call a garden? Are seeds at this moment - as I write, as you read - being planted? Or just by saying it am I doing the planting? Or, as sometimes I fear, are we all as a people just tramplers, the world's best tramplers, as we flatten our way through a field of bulbs and continue our march to nowhere? My eyes flash right now from the intregrity of the artist's work to the mangled debris in Iraq and the two somehow understand each other. One may be peaceful, the other in deepest despair, but humanity and devotion in great art will never do injustice to suffering. And this, I believe, is one of this particular artist's great strengths. It is not politics. It is not religion. It is not bristling muscle. It is simply one person's response to that unexplained world within, that undiscovered realm, whose very lack of dogma says it all.

The quiet exhibitionist

The necessary process for an artist, any artist, of showing work to someone in order to get an exhibition is a difficult one, especially when the artist is coming out of a self-chosen period of hands-on mothering and wrestling with work at the same time. The world has changed, though the work is timeless. So many of the better galleries - places where a good artist might want to show - imagine themselves as already sorted, count their money with a kind of inelegant relish, while having a well tuned, slightly over-orchestrated, line of defence, presumably in order to rebuff with an ostentatious flourish any incoming artists. I feel for them. It's a painful process watching them drop like flies, especially up close, and one I've seen on both sides of the ocean. Besides, social confidence is not always an artist's strength. And today's habit of crushing something if it is insufficiently robust in presentation is - in my opinion - a mistake. But at least the few people allowed to see the work have responded impressively. One major art world figure shown examples responded brilliantly. As one of the world's foremost collectors, they had their office email two galleries - chosen as ideal venues by the artist - and recommended the galleries view the work immediately. But what did the artist get after making contact with the galleries following the collector's emails? Not so much as an acknowledgement - and that without them even seeing the work. (One suggested the collector never got in touch with galleries about artists, insinuating it a lie.) Still, their loss. Their mistake. Onwards.

Interview with the Artist

When were you happiest?
My first night in hospital with each of the children after giving birth to them.
What is your earliest memory?
Lining up in an orderly fashion all my toys over me in bed.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Aung San Suu Kyi, because of her humanity.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Envy.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Excessive consumerism.
What is your most treasured possession?
My art.
What would your super power be?
To be invisible.
What makes you depressed?
Frustration with my work.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
More space.
Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Sylvia Plath, Rachel Cusk, Lionel Shriver, Alain de Botton, Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen, you.
What is the worst job you've ever done?
Working in a well known law firm as a receptionist.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
The power of love.

You take the high brow and I'll take the low brow

Once upon a time - a time when hip was hop and art was smart - the artist in question was invited to present a popular TV series teaching children how to paint or draw or simply make things. This came about shortly after art school, a place considered high-brow and studiously post-modern, and at a time when the artist was represented already by a good gallery. By accepting, the artist in an instant travelled from one world to another - let us say from the high-brow to the low. The high - with its grimly trendy courtiers and ice-cold templates - continued bowing its head into interminably long essays written largely by Frenchmen, occasionally popping up again at soap operatic art openings, while the low rather charmingly opened out into a beautiful world full of children's faces, paint-splattered living rooms, as the artist laughed and smiled and played her way into the hearts of literally millions of little people, persuading them all to muck in, get down, be creative, and splash expressions across the room. Now, rather intriguingly, these two worlds have crystalized again, this time in the context of a growing body of new work: work, on many levels, about childhood; work, tangentially, in and out of discussion here - work, let's be frank, the artist hopes one day to exhibit. And this blog here, of course, is to chart, in part, the journey.

Draught(wo)manship

The art world today is a confusing place. Usually when a high-profile figure is bathing in the news - they never feature; they always bathe - the story is freckled with words like 'fame', 'money', 'bad boy', or 'bad girl'. Seldom is an epic sweep of creative majesty acknowledged instead, or life as hard labour made good by art discussed as one of the creative world's mainstays. For years I thought I was simply missing something, that in the ideas of people like Derrida and Baudrillard there was a kind of lofty, intellectual justification for the abandonment of skill in the name of semiotics, and I just did not get it. Painting or drawing for example was absurd apparently, surplus to requirement, certainly in a world peppered with easily accessed imagery. In time, more and more well-known artists grabbed the limelight doing exactly that - work without any personal investment of their skill, or even labour. No, art became something only other people did for you, which is not to decry some of the more genuinely gifted moments of conceptualism. In some cases, a kind of master and slave mentality developed. Artists became neo-colonialists. 'Oh, I've an idea,' they might quip, then get a load of frustrated other artists to do the work for them. Years ago, I made a film, an ugly documentary, about this fact. I never thought then it would continue to burn with such relevance. Now, however, when hands-off artists are interviewed on TV, each, one by one, comes out with the fact they only moved from doing the work themselves - from painting, or drawing - not because they were drunk, say, on the power of alternatives, not because of forward-thinking ideas, post-modernism and the like: but, no, simply because they could not paint, could not draw, or did not have faith in their draught(wo)manship. They are negativity's children.

Working Space

The space where we live is small but adequate. It is a flat off a busy road, set back just far enough to create a kind of barrier between you and the traffic. (I can hear it now.) The artist works in the main room, an open-plan affair with one large red sofa, a round table, floorboards, books, a TV with news bleeding in from Iraq, and an atmosphere of industry, irritability, and hope. As I have said before, the artist gave up her studio some years ago in order to spend more time with the children. As a result, there is this extraordinary coexistence in the room between an artist's and child's sensibility, not so much an atelier as playground. As for the hours, they vary but can go on late, however much interspersed with child-caring tasks and general emotional wear and tear. As I am in the room frequently at present, though I am on standby to go abroad, I feel closer to the process than usual. Also, much discussion about the work can be had. We can try things out like http://www.resonancefm.com/. I can read out sections from a book I'm attempting to write. We can glory, no doubt prematurely, in the fact that despite my adventurism and nocturnal past, we are closer than before. All the while, the piece the artist is working on builds and builds. There is much layering, intense detail, and this develops slowly, like a well-honed argument ultimately delivered with warm conviction.

Portrait of the artist as a young blog

Yesterday I was walking in the sunlight through one of the city's leafier parks with a very good friend. As well as discussing Yonkers-born author Richard Yates, motherhood, the world's mass bruises, we talked animatedly about the artist, and discussed various aspects of art, including portraiture. I was reminded in the course of the conversation - as we passed veiled women, diplomats, government employees, hyper-active school children, and appreciative tourists - of my own modest history of having a portrait done, though none were commissioned by me, I hasten to add. Anyway, the first portrait came about when a young photographer asked to 'do' me in his squat, which is now a major police station, and where he took these slightly over-devoted - I thought - photographs of me. I see his name everywhere now and still think with a guarded smile whenever I do. I actually saw him in the flesh years later. His profile - on the back of a portrait of Princess Diana - was massive. He pretended not to know me. Anyway, the second portrait was a very delicate gouache done by a man who is now a production designer. I was made to wear a thin-striped jean jacket, I seem to remember. Funnily enough, it was done in the same building where Princess Diana lived when courting Prince Charles. I don't know where that one is now, either. The third portrait was a sculpture done by a muscular devotee of art as an extension of might. He 'did' my friend in the park, too, by strange coincidence. (Neither of us have our heads now, as a matter of fact: they are both across the ocean, we believe.) But the most precious portrait done of me ... came in the form of several portraits-as-one by the artist. They were of us both, in fact. You see - what am I trying to tell you? - we are united at times even in her work.

The drill drills on

One thing about this single gush of blogged thought running like a river alongside my life at the moment is that I do not mean it or wish it to be some kind of glorification of an ideal. Art hurts, basically. It can suck, too. Or, as CS Lewis once said, it doesn't matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap, the drill drills on. Today, for example, I saw and felt the artist in this room as she agonized over what she was and was not doing and what she knew she still had to do. And because I was in the same room, this mood of frustration inevitably tried to ensnare me. It was like being spun in a dryer. But the artist, this artist, my wife, my partner, is not lazy. Her work when completed is as time-honoured and thorough as a tropical canal. It is just that she is incredibly hard on herself. But all great artists are self-loathing zealots at times. Some of the art-loving world meanwhile celebrate celebrity when it thinks it discussing art. Light-thinking stowaways on board the art-plane rabbit on about truth when what they really mean is cash. But just you wait until the wheels open and their bodies of work come tumbling out of the aircraft and end up flattened and eventually ignored on the runway. This will be the moment when the artist unpeels herself from her low self-esteem and walks into marble-floored greatness.

The object of their love

She gave up her studio to be with her children, the artist I married, and to the children it must seem strange when friends say they do not have an artist as a mother, as I imagine nothing is more natural to their seven year-old and four year-old selves than the object of their love, their mother, standing by the wall creating.

It is st(art)ing to work

I can hear her behind me. First there are the feet. They move across the wooden floorboards. The short heels drag. The soles twist. A different sound is the work itself. First a kind of enforced dabbling, some dabbing, some smoothing, gentle scratches, the odd scrape. Then the feet kick in again as the artist steps back and presumably reviews - I can't bear to look - her work. Relief descends on the room as the artist is not dabbling, dabbing, scratching, or scraping within, but is committing herself, outwardly and with progress. It is st(art)ing to work.

Picasso in the drawer

No work from the artist today. No practical work, anyway. A cold desert wind blows like a mistaken lack of talent through the face of her labour instead. Work within will not have rested. I am sure of that. Only on the outside is inertia. It did get me thinking, though. When was the first time I became aware of art? What first directed me towards this captivated sideline? It could have been when I was five. There was a bureau-style desk in my grandmother's house in the far north, and in one of the three wide bottom drawers, a book, an encyclopaedia, lay there, waiting as if only for me. It was as if the drawer had been built especially for such a book, as if the book represented not exactly evil but something contentious and troublesome. Something artistic, even. Anyway, I opened the book and found inside it, somewhere in the middle, one or two large reproductions of Picasso's earlier Cubist work - art existing in its own right and not just as representation, the blurb probably said - and these images immediately unsettled me: they gave swiftly internalised heebie-jeebies. They frightened. They shook. In fact I slammed the book shut as if I had glimpsed my first pornography - lewdly compelling images of carnal self-destruction - and not visual releases from the imitation of reality. I think I slammed the desk drawer shut and didn't go back to it for weeks. But I did in the end. And again. Now, I view this kind of work not exactly regularly but with a kind of respectful nostalgia. And how will I feel about this artist's work when it is done? I am the artist's husband after all. Will images be found and drawers slammed shut? I think I know already how I will feel. Elated.

Like gagged spectators on the riverbank

Today has been a different kind of day. You see, the ideal slips from time to time. It is not all poetic roses and prosperous heights, you know. It slips and the neck grows a rash. There are the irrational tics, the slumping on bed, the twisting of soles. If you watch closely, whatever the artist is doing, he or she is always accompanied by thoughts, sometimes dark thoughts, which follow them around like kids in a playground. Only these thoughts are meaner and tougher than any normal kid. At times, they are even like murderous stowaways. But this, we must preserve, is also what we must call art, and it may very well serve us well, that is to say importantly, that is to say we who try so hard to be there for the artist, to remember this. No, today has been different. True, but different. Some love was exchanged but there was an overflow of torment and self-doubt on the part of the artist, too. At one point I saw the eyes of a child and at another the deep grazing of senior wisdom. Of course, we must not interfere too much with any of this: the process of self-reconciliation has need too much for integrity. Besides, we are not the artists. No, we must let it all grow, even fail and rise up again at times, of its own accord. But we can urge it on, we must urge it on, quietly, internally, like gagged spectators on the riverbank, willing and willing the artist on against a backdrop of cultural blindness and spiritual amnesia as he or she cuts through the water like a bloodied but wilful salmon.

You do not know what you are missing

So this is it: the moment I commit to words my attempt to reveal something I consider special. Please don't get me wrong, it is not my art. It is someone else's. In fact they do not even know I am writing about them or their art. And it will not be easy, this journey. But I know it is important. Because it is important for me and the artist. It is what binds us together. This is what it is like, I am beginning to learn, being the husband or wife or partner of the artist. We watch from the sidelines and feel all the anguish. We feel the blows of perceived failure as if delivered to our very selves. And yet we must remain positive. We of all people. We, the friends of the artist. When lucky enough to find it we must defend the greatness from the insecurity. So, dear reader, there I suppose we have it. Some of the work I will show you one fine day is done, but much of it still being done. On the artist's behalf I am only warming you up. She is sleeping right now, the artist, her head deep into the pillow. As the room grows quiet, I peer through the dim lighting at the wall and see it. There. Her work. Intricate. True. Brave. You do not know what you are missing.