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.