A round of claws for the artist please

A natural frustration has descended on the house and I can only assume it is something to do with the absence of any gallery progress. Not that they have been blitzed by either the artist or the artist’s husband with examples of the work – and maybe that is the problem. That said, gallerists even at the best of times don’t exactly endear themselves. I have mentioned previously their disappearing trick when it comes to incoming artists. Some are fantastic, I have said, but others are indeed like trickster absentees. For example the gallerist whom the artist emailed, as promised, recently - well, a month ago - about coming to see her work in person hasn’t even had the courtesy to reply. And they were the ones who in the first place on the back of some colour reproductions invited the artist to be in a group show. So what is going on here? Apart from anything else, though I do not wish to be misconstrued as threatening, an artist is a sensitive being. An artist is often an artist because it is impossible for them to be anything else. They require kid gloves. Yes, they are fragile. Yes, they can break. No, it does matter. And if they are talented they can deserve this unusual degree of protection, though without it they can also perish on the vine. I remember one person when I was twenty-two jumping to their death in a fast-flowing river because of rejection. Not that their circumstances were comparable with the artist's. But manners - and their importances - do run deep. I should know: I have failed before myself. Or is it nothing to do with art or artists? Is it simply a fact that grace and sensitivity has been sucked from the fabric of our culture? Are manners no longer seen as the management of emotion but the bane of commercial progress? Certainly people today seem to care only about moolah, lolly, greenbacks, doe, spondoolies. Mind you, that’s probably why they are rich and we are not. Still - bringing the blog back home again - the artist will reach her mountain top. I can promise you that. (We can't afford to disbelieve this fact.) But we will not apply the normal rules of engagement here. Oh no. The artist might just show you up.

"When the past no longer illustrates the future, the spirit walks in darkness" *

It is a curious thing seeing people again for the very first time in years. Crudely speaking, it is like peering down a tunnel of time, taking a moment of history, so-to-speak, and smash-cutting with it to the present. I did it twice today and on both occasions it must be said I was energised. (Maybe I was just lucky with the people.) It gets you thinking, though. It is almost as if the excitement comes from the fact that everything that has happened - to both parties - since you last saw a person is somehow crammed into that split second when you do see them again. You register - in an instant - each developed or developing line on the face, every subliminal piece of code in the other person’s make-up, a kind of glimmer of unexplored facts in the eyes, and a tantalising hint of wisdom. Perhaps, I have since been thinking, this is what it will be like with some of the artist's work. Hers is after all work about carefully selecting and freezing a moment, aesthetically compartmentalising it, giving it a kind of immortality, and positioning it in order to transcend time with it. At some point or another with the work the present will bump into its past again. In a sense it illustrates the difference between the idea and the reality and explains art's triumph over mere thought. My comment about the tunnel of time for example may be interesting to me but it is still only a thought. The artist’s work on the other hand makes an actual statement, a time-honoured commitment, a kind of conquest, even if years later looking at it again may be like peering down that tunnel of time. *Alexis de Tocqueville

Phone An Artist

I remember - in the foothills of our relationship - being in a medieval town surrounded from the land and sea by formerly friendly neighbours who were now enemy forces, and though this town was not your traditional frontline there was an armoury of dispiritedness – bloody hatreds, wretched breakdowns, twisted animosity, and the like. I’d spent the day touring a tortuous sequence of large and deserted buildings, hotels mostly, shells, which smelt of human excrement, anger, and in the corners of some rooms urine-doused fires. The people who let me speak to them would look fearfully over their shoulders the whole time and chain-smoke non-filtered cigarettes from nervously crumpled packs. Fear was everywhere and was contagious. The faintest of unfamiliar sounds were met with frozen looks and mass-migratory thoughts. It was hot, too, and I remember tugging my shirt between my thumb and index finger from my sweating chest. In the distance was a bombed-out radio tower, broken like a toy, and on the floor were spent cartridges, and on the broken tables were lavish and unused dinner menus printed in several languages. By one desultory wall close to where I was staying, I remember a hospital doctor waiting in the sun to hand a list of desperately needed medical supplies, and when I walked the cobbled streets, sinister figures appeared from nowhere, offering to take me back to their flats where the flickering darkness had me convinced I would be murdered. And the dogs, the dogs. I had never seen so many strays before, some of them pedigrees, whose wealthy owners had fled across the sea with cash and gold on high-powered speed boats. Conscripted soldiers were everywhere, too, bruised and back from the real frontline, and I will always remember, always, one young man in a large trench coat despite the heat with this look in his eyes – the look – which said he was a good man but had done some butchery and could not live with himself anymore. I could not take it, either, and went to a public phone exchange where I waited in a queue to phone out. Eventually I made my call. It was to the artist. I burst into tears.

Fly low, fly slow, know nothing and know you don't know

The artist worked on a larger piece today attached to the sitting room wall while the children prepared to join me for a walk. Hey, it's the weekend and we needed adventure – a user-friendly version - so we wished the artist well, gave a kind of wide but affectionate berth, and made our chatty way past the one-person double-locked travelling cars, the camera-pocked smile-shy buses, the impossibly hi-tech bicycles, and the slightly lopsided police van. We were headed for that mass of green in the middle of our urban romp. Anyway, the girl had a smile and the boy an old pair of binoculars, a rare leftover from my childhood. (I used to sit with the binoculars by the sea and watch the coasters running the feeder route and struggling through the water.) My son clearly enjoyed their maritime presence around his little shoulders as he stared from the bridge of his four small years. ‘Did you take them with you when you were little?’ asked our daughter. ‘When I was allowed,’ I smiled. We were surrounded by starlings, pigeons, sparrows, warblers, song thrushes, and woodpeckers, but I think the boy with the binoculars looked better suited for the gannets, guillemots, cormorants, and kittiwakes of his father's childhood. ‘Have you ever seen a plane crash?’ he asked, taking this flight thing a step further, or higher. ‘No,’ I said. (I had to think about it.) 'Not in person.' Anyway, we continued through the lines of sweet (Spanish) chestnut trees and time-honoured oaks and reached a secluded and vibrantly coloured flower garden and I was thinking that whenever I see bright colours it reminds me of the artist. ‘No!’ said my son. There was panic in his eyes. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ he said. (Was that man, the so-called psychic, correct when he said our son had a talent for atmospheres?) I tried calming him and remembered somewhere in the ether hearing that the flower garden was used for anti-aircraft guns when years ago the city was bombed regularly from the air, and that some of the trees – for all I know those two over there - were cut back to ensure a good field of fire. Do you think that people had been blown out of the sky from here, or was he just a creature of habit who didn't like going a different route? Back home again, the artist was continuing her assault on the new large piece and we spread the financial and holiday sections of the newspaper across the plastic table outside and set about doing our own art. My son began with a landscape, while my daughter painted an imaginary person. Half an hour later, we were still at it. When we met up with the artist she said she was excited about the piece, and for one brief and beautiful moment we didn't know which piece she was talking about. Hers? Mine? His? Hers? There were so many.

When even the crickets hesitate

I am tired tonight. I do not feel like words. This is perhaps why we have images. Only I do not want images either. Not tonight. No, I will watch the artist instead. She is at the same table with some of her work, which she moves like weather symbols on a small map. I love watching her work. There is nothing self-conscious about it. She is sharpening a pencil for example into a tin and I hear the shavings fall. Her head is bowed and I cannot see her face. Her nose is running. She has hay-fever. The TV is talking to itself about drunken astronauts. I smile at this lunacy. I met two astronauts. They stood in the corner of the room drinking mineral water. They had shaved heads and I thought they were Buddhist monks. Shush. Right now the artist is putting pencil to paper. There is something satisfying about watching a sharpened pencil give meaning to paper. The artist sneezes, careful not to spray her work, and resumes what she is doing. I can hear the pencil this time. Listen. How would you describe that sound? It’s like the tiniest paw of the tiniest animal making a little path. No, the artist definitely has hay-fever. Perhaps she is allergic to art. That would be something. An artist allergic to art. Perhaps, tonight, I was allergic to writing. Bless you. Excuse me.

Interview with the Art(1st)

Can you name a moment when a contemporary artist has really inspired you?
Yes, it was when I had our first child and I went to a gallery and was trying to find something I could relate to, and I saw this piece by Mary Kelly about her little boy starting nursery. It was her recording of his words and daily life. She was quite obsessively documenting his first days, and I just thought ... it's so brave, so radical, so heart-felt. It made me think this kind of art really is important. It's part of life and I'd rarely seen it so succinctly put. By contrast I remember some really unbeautiful photographs of women having just given birth strapped up with sanitary towels and blood dribbling everywhere and it was like they were trying to make it look like a bloody battle. The Mary Kelly work ... it was just so much more profound than that.
What is the principal theme of your work?
I suppose nurturing. Yes, nurturing. A kind of motherhood. I see my work as inherently feminist, though.
Are these themes under-represented today?
Well ... (laugh) ... I think my version is.
Would you like your children to be artists?
I wouldn’t be able to stop them.
Do you think artists need to go to art school?
Yes. I think they do. Definitely. It’s a way of questioning things. A way of learning to deal with things like criticism. You do have to be answerable to your work sometimes, and to your influences. But if it’s a great time, it can also be a very difficult time. I was pretty much left in a studio and just told to get on with it, which is better than it sounds because you then did something you really believed in. Quite a few people were having nervous breakdowns around the place, though, and there wasn’t much back-up for things like that, not much of a safety-net.
What is your favourite work of art?
Oh, I know exactly what it is ... it's this. (swiftly producing postcard bearing image of The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly by Thomas Gainsborough.) It symbolises to me a kind of complete innocence, a wonderful spontaneity. The older girl is slightly protective of the younger one and ... it's just the peachiness of the skin, the translucence, and the way the older one is holding back and more informed. I really love the way the dresses are painted and the linking of hands and the light travelling across. Oh and the fact we know now one of them had such a problematic life later on. And of course the whole thing's quite manufactured, very staged. The butterfly. He painted a dead one. No, the whole thing, it's ... really joyous to me.

The wind blows out the candles and kindles fire

Two bright red candles burn in the fireplace. They burn like a need to reflect. Traffic smokes past, computer systems jam, glass breaks, and people promised love are killed by the hour. The candle holders were a gift. They were a gift from a friend who obviously knew a thing or two about reflection. They are tall and gallant like friendship and made of pewter. From where I sit the two flames pierce the gloaming like cat’s eyes, and in the corner of the room to the right is the artist with a glass of wine in her hand. (For some reason her shadow is moving more than her body.) On the sofa meanwhile is our son and he is watching his sister stand too close to the candles with her long hair in her mouth and a plaster on her knee. I watch as my daughter, unprompted, moves out of harm’s way. It is late and I enjoy these moments of reflection. I am also thinking we have pretty much forgotten as a culture how to reflect well. Sadly, I think we imagine we no longer have time. A central premise for art I always thought was reflection. Maybe the solution lies there. Anyway, the artist’s sister has come to stay for the night again and I am watching the scene like a movie, or piece of art, as she sits with us and talks. Above the fireplace is a small ink drawing of a mother and child, and tiny rose petals form the illusion of a frame. I like it when the light is low like this in this room. It reminds me of being young again and pretending to understand. (No change there.) On the crammed bookcase are nine tea-lights. They, too, are burning and flickering like golden white ghosts. I place a mint in my mouth and continue writing. Not that I've been burning the candle at both ends this time, but I've miles to go before I sleep.

They paint things differently there

I am thinking of another country, a vast and bleak landscape, while the artist works until midnight. I was in this country to meet a powerful man. Listening presently to the artist’s breathing, I remember the low-lying mist and tall pine trees, the whiff of decadence and smell of gas. The man I was there to meet loved Hegel. He also ran one of the largest banks in the world. (‘I've got so much to do,’ says the artist.) He believed in cancelling Third World debt and reorganising the world’s financial system. I was small fry and happened to know a young woman who knew him well. I wanted to make a film, something inexpensive, unusually intimate, using a hand-held camera and natural sound. I knew getting him to agree to be the subject matter was a long shot but I was a determined young man. Anyway, word soon came from his honour-bound secretary that we could meet. I was to travel one morning to his home 25 kilometers outside the city and drive with him back to the bank. I phoned my young friend to register my delight. Each subsequent confirmation however was swiftly cancelled. The man must have visited four countries while I waited in a hotel close to his headquarters, where floors of financial acumen sported swathes of art. (The artist is still working behind me and I hear her industry.) The philosopher-banker even bought a bank while I waited and eventually I was informed we could meet in precisely two days – same plan, same route. I put my feet up and ordered a drink but the following morning I was woken by a young banker imploring me to wake up. ‘He’s dead!’ he kept shouting down the phone. ‘Dead, dead, dead!’ I leaped out of bed and raced to the bank’s headquarters and I remember still dressing while I ran. The young banker was right. The very same three-car convoy I was to travel in was hit by a roadside bomb hidden in the saddle bag on a children’s bicycle. The philospher-banker's legs were blown off and the poor man bled to death. (‘I’m done,’ says the artist, life-affirmingly, as I revel once more in the present tense.)

Sneak Preview, the 100 Extras

The artist is walking with our two children in the rain. They are off to visit a recently separated mother and her three beautiful children. I rise from the round table and take a look at the four small black ink drawings on thick white squares of paper blue-tacked to the sitting room wall. These weren’t meant for the planned exhibition but are rapidly earning a place. With typical understatement the artist wants to do 100, a great deal of work when each is so detailed yet never larger than the palm of your hand. I’m listening to the rain spraying the traffic while thinking each image politically charged and refreshingly non-ironic. They have respect. Inching my way along visually, I feel I’ve never really looked at them before. One is of a mother pulling by the hand her eight year old son with a schoolbag across one shoulder like a bandolier. Both have the bottoms of their jeans folded in a certain way and are rushing somewhere mysterious. The next is an equally small but intimate ensemble piece with two mothers, five children, and one pram - the heads of everyone never larger than a pinkie nail and one face like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, only shrunken to a smile. The third is a mother crouched by a child’s shoe, very tensely tying a lace while a second child looks on knottedly. The last piece, possibly my favourite, is a miniature sweep of a young people’s comely comradeship as one mother and six children this time – each about six or seven years old - walk away like they're playing the leads in The Usual Suspects. I sit back down at the table both impressed and frustrated and write this down. Am I doing enough to get the work out there? When I think of the artist now with our two children in the rain they are in black and white and blue-tacked to the wall and magnificent in all their subtle detail, but how I want to see them framed now and in a line of one hundred accompanying the much larger pieces still waiting undiscovered in the hall.

Sound Bites, Yellowjackets, and Velvet Ants

The artist was stung by a wasp today and I had this vague memory of the father I never knew sucking venom out of a sting like a snake-bite once, but that was impossible to verify so I verbally soothed and sat the artist down on the bright red sofa, checking for no bad reactions, low blood pressure, or welling to such a degree it blocked the air from getting into the lungs. I should probably have removed any remaining ‘stingers’ in the skin with soap and water. Stingers? A long way from the 10kg ‘Stingers’ with a distance range of 8km provided unwittingly to certain members of what became the Taliban*, but risky enough I suppose. (Some medical opinion even recommends scraping out the stingers with a credit card so there may be some connection, though I'm told this kind of stinger - the so-called velvet ant or yellowjacket variety - is only present in females and derives from a sex organ.) Anyway, I tried ice cubes in a plastic bag wrapped in a red and white cotton tea towel, but that wasn't enough, though I think the artist admired the inventiveness. (Even with a spear in her heart she’d find a way to be polite about the carving.) I used cream in the end and gave the artist some space to read a novel about an early-twentieth-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. And to think her sister only a few days ago asked if we knew what was good for wasp stings. (‘Vinegar,’ she beamed.) I even meant to get some today. A WASP. I had to cross an ocean and read about people like James Ellroy to discover it meant a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as well. Anyway, throughout the afternoon I kept checking – no rash, no breathing problems, nothing to worry about there. Then I remembered I was stung by a wasp on the eye-lid once and even shared a different kind of sting with the artist one hot summer when a large and gelatinous jellyfish wrapped its long tentacles round us in the water. I actually felt good afterwards. (It was some hit.) The artist felt bad. We weren’t married at the time and I think I saw it as some kind of pagan symbol of our unity. I'm stung if I know what the wasp means. *now unusable due to the deterioration of the battery and electronics and systems

"Every child is an artist ... the problem is how to remain one"*

The artist’s son is 4. He is a political artist because he challenges perceptions. He is already drawing cunning shapes first thing in the morning and adjudging them worthy of his wall and would consider any attempt at preventing such expression dictatorial and narrow-minded. His most recent major piece is vaguely reminscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat from the period before the famous New York Times Magazine cover in 1985. He shares the same nervous line, the fashioned letters, that melodic hint of something tribal, almost voodoo. The 4 year-old is also informed by a kind of patrician sensitivity and upon rising - in what he by now of course sees as his studio - he squints through the window at the day's light as if guaging which of his moods to use. This morning for example the artist’s dear sister was in residence - well, sleeping on the sofa - so he waited until she was fully awake before exploring - with a kind of artistic irreverence - the edges of what he could or could not do. The serious work began later, I seem to remember, with an installation. This consisted of a plastic brown treasure chest transformed into a kind of budding lagoon with a convincing palm tree erected in the middle. A man wearing something similar to armour was introduced and given a feminine stance. Still dissatisfied - not uncommon among artists - a toy Daimler Chrysler made in China and used by the artist under licence was pitched on a large pile of plastic bodies - in homage I suspect to the Chapman brothers and their own tipped hats in Hell. (There was another sculpture with cleverly shaped perfect skulls from the bogeys in his nose but they ... gone.) This was followed by collecting some bric-à-brac and in particular a so-called Hot Wheels motorbike valued at less than one unit of the national currency. Upon re-entering the flat - not quite Christ's re-entry into Jerusalem, but you get the picture - the young visualist was then observed shaking his head at a picture on TV of a man in shorts carrying a woman through at least two feet of water with a swan in the background. Which left us still with the day’s masterpiece, a Chemi-Sealed Beral Mirado 3B pencil drawing of the aforementioned Hot Wheels motorbike in the end - ‘See this,’ he said, absorbed, ‘the car goes down here … see that line … and shoots through the fire circle!’ Indeed, all that is now left is for the artist's son to inspire the artist’s husband to write it all down, but that he would probably find too political. *Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

School's Out Forever

Today against a conscientious backdrop of the artist drawing a kind of viral cornucopia of elegant and spidery images on absolutely everything - cards and T-shirts and frames and books - which are then meticulously wrapped in simple brown paper and taken generously as end-of-term gifts to teachers and helpers alike at our local under-funded primary school, I work briefly, possibly indulgently, on a small chapter where shortly after the Soviet withdrawal a former Afghan warlord complains to the British miles away in Jordan - with a kind of clumsy assertiveness - about American training and funding of Saudis in his own back yard, reminding me in the process that even with the ingenuity or inventiveness of art or craft, though in my case inadequately written words, there’s still no real match to reality, especially where issues such as Afghanistan are concerned, where truth really is stranger than fiction. But maybe that’s why I like the artist so much. Her work is locked in a kind of super-reality in which everything is true and yet certain characteristics of the so-called truth are mixed with stridently and beautifully provided alternatives. Let’s not be too unrealistic, she seems to be saying with some of her well worked pieces, but we don’t need to look at the world this way when for example we can look at it like that. In fiction – something I really don’t have much experience of – you can’t just rewrite the facts, can you? Not casually; not when it comes to real deaths, surely. Or maybe I'm just showing my inexperience. Anyway, in a culture where solutions groan, I like to think of the artist here lending a kind of grave optimism to proceedings, though I sometimes fear my own hunger for things like news – though I am not really a journalist either - has been counter-productive to a purer form of imagination on her part, arrogant though it seems for me to think I can impose myself anyway on someone so attractively independent. At least I know the teachers and helpers at the local primary school are taken care of with T-shirts and the like now. Maybe one can concentrate on the Afghan. I hope he survives. I really do. In his defence, he didn’t ask to be invaded by the Soviets. Anyway, the artist is now placing our 7 year-old daughter’s long blonde hair into sixteen plaits. See what I mean? Relentless. Creative. Real to the end.

My kind of town

Obviously I'm no real authority on art and do remember a lighter side, in particular sitting at the front desk of one of the galleries I worked in across the ocean having been told by my flavour-of-the-wall gallery boss that a group of academics were coming in shortly and would I do the cause of great art a service by giving a brief talk. ‘A talk?' I said. 'On what?’ (I’d just been in a war and was confused as hell.) ‘Oh, the history of the place, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But it’s only about six months old this gallery,’ I said. She smiled knowingly. Anyway, half an hour of obviously important history later, the door squeaked open and this erudite long face looked round and said Pee-wee Herman-style: ‘We’re here!’ I brushed aside my wheeled executive chair like a small pet and immediately shepherded everyone in. Oh there must have been at least twelve of them and I stood in the middle of the gallery nodding like a priest as they looked round before launching into a long and winding road of freshly bottled information about the gallery, gentrification, new collectors, visual rather than literary culture. Sometimes in mid-sentence I’d hang there like a fish in the middle of a fish-tank with its mouth wide open taking in the bubbles. On occasion the odd pair of eyes would prop me up as I randomly sparked my campfire thoughts about this movement and that movement, and when it came to the artists themselves I did my best to raise high the roof-beam, carpenters. Anyway, each person came up to me afterwards and firmly shook my hand. ‘Much more than we imagined,’ said one. ‘Exceeded our highest expectations,’ said another. I must admit I was chuffed. I sat down satisfied and alone at the front desk and had just placed my hands behind my head when the door opened. ‘Excuse me,’ said this person. 'Can I help you?' I said. ‘We’re here for the talk,’ he replied. God knows who those first people were.

Art on a sleeve

Lying in bed together with the foxes, maybe even rats, rustling ungovernably through the last of the weeds on the other side of the window, the artist has a panic attack about her work. Anguish rises from the propped-up pillow like a burning cactus and all reason in the room is suddenly smoked out. The artist’s lot, I am thinking, can be an unhappy one, and being an artist is not just about getting a show, though this counts high enough on my list to hang a regime of hope upon it. No, it’s about maintaining the right environment to work in, too, and I don't know how good I am at that. The children in the other room meanwhile snore on like little seraphs in their bunk beds, their growing-pain drawings blue-tacked joyously to the wall. As I remember it now, the boy actually falls out of the bottom bunk, rendering the artist momentarily obsolete as she rushes out of bed and sweeps him up like a mother. (Not that the idea of an artist and mother is an incompatible one in this household: not with this one's art.) Moments later, the whole flat is creaking, as if sharing in the family’s general aches and pains. This entry wouldn't be complete without mention also of the additional financial pressures tapping at the window like a character out of a zipped up Dickens novel. Don't get me wrong: we are trying as nobly as possible to find a creative way out and proudly and foolishly are nailing our futures – and for all I know our children’s futures too - to a creative mast, yes, in a world full of shark-like submarines. Later in the long night, I hear sirens speed past and think sleeplessly of the word liberation. I turn quietly to the artist. She is asleep now and her anguish settled. Tiny snores from the next room are my only accompaniment as I brush her cheeks and place one palm briefly on her shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. As she sleeps on, I can just about make out a smile. Don’t stop, I'm thinking. Dream on, dear artist. Please don’t stop. I find myself beside you.

Pimping iron

I popped into two good galleries today with detailed matte photocopies of the artist’s work in my rucksack. On my way to the first one, I bumped into the best man of the only art collector in my family, a mathematician banker making a killing in Moscow. (I feel like the poor relation.) Rather creepily I’d actually thought about his best man the night before, and, no, the relative does not collect the artist, preferring a kind of ice-age modernism instead. Anyway, the first gallery was showing an unusual homage to the gallerist’s late mother with a heady trawl through at least sixty years of abstract art. Not the artist’s thing really but laced nonetheless with a kind of irrefutable pedigree. The mother’s death was also commemorated in an insightful essay at the front desk, which I surprised myself by reading in its entirety. But the place to me was infused with more than one death as I knew both mother and son through a close friend of mine who died on his kitchen floor aged 46 from a brain aneurysm and who was found the following morning by his 11 year-old son. (I've been trickled back to a number of deceased friends lately.) In fact, I'd taken the lift to the two floors of the gallery thinking only of this friend when what I should have been thinking about was obtaining for the artist an exhibition. As it transpired, the artist would not have minded – she would not have minded anyway – as the gallerist was away and we know the need for a kind of continued respect for the dead, just like we know the hopelessness of leaving photocopies. As for the next carefully selected space, which was pinned like a white dress behind an orange cordon of road-works, not only was the madam of the venue absent but the aesthetic immediately grated. Besides, as she wasn't there, it seemed inappropriate to bang the drum too loudly. (It is not easy retaining a kind of tasteful allure about the artist's work at the same time as wanting people to notice it.) One of the tensions of this blog is its inherent frustration at knowing something few others at this stage know, namely the artist's work. Best to keep the powder dry with some of these gallery people, though, until the right moment. If the person you want to speak to is not there, come back when they are. Keep it personal.

Oh What A Lovely Art

The artist had a tooth taken out today. Her mouth exhibited a bloody rout. Years ago I introduced the artist to a legendary figure who once exhibited a group of bloody war artists in a large townhouse across the ocean and with me the day before draped massive green camouflage netting all the way down from the fourth floor to the ground. It was the forerunner to a later and more grand show - which I never saw - before his very sad and premature death one Christmas day in Paris. I had a Scottish-Nigerian friend make a cassette of second world war speeches and songs for him which played throughout the wild opening party of this first exhibition. Surreal Eighties cocktails were drunk to the sound of Churchill denouncing 'Corporal Hitler' and Eisenhower talking about the bazooka, jeep, and atomic bomb. Vera Lynn came into it, too. Meanwhile throughout the townhouse tiny watercolours peppered the slightly camp walls with glimpses of hell as painted by people painfully unsuited to the slitting of throats. The artist here in fact once briefly contemplated being an official war artist but felt that journalism and photography covered the subject amply, which I believe to be true. There was a time though when artists were the only visual war reporters, just like when the painters of the American frontier were the only means for the settlers to see what lay ahead. (How the artist and her husband could do with their equivalent now.) Talking of art and war, it was the aforementioned townhouse curator who told me of a possibly true and certainly artistic incident in the second world war when the British built a fake bomb factory close to a real one and how the Luftwaffe one night dropped a rubber bomb on it. (And if true, what a wonderful jewel in an otherwise ghastly crown of thorns.) Why, even 21 SAS in the UK are to a select few known also as the Artists Rifles. But, it must be said again, the TV screen today with all its compressed news from Iraq and Afghanistan burns in the corner of the room with a kind of endless artlessness and all creative thought goes out the window. What will we have next in this light? The Basel War Fair? We've already had the suicide artist. Don't you just hate it? It's like pulling teeth.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

It's my thirty-third daily blog in a row and though I remain excited today about art I'm as tired as a dirty blind in an unused window overlooking a dead-end street. I want to interview the little people about their artist mother again, I want to keep pushing the idea of creative commitment forward, but the 4 year-old is on the laptop tearing through an imaginary landscape and the 7 year-old is watching an adult country drama on TV. The artist meanwhile is slumped like a hard week's scoop of dreams on the bright red sofa.
I try anyway:
Do you think being an artist is like any other job?
GIRL (7): That doesn't make sense, daddy. Don't write that, though. (Studiously squinting at screen) And don't write what I just said then. (A beat) And don't write what I just said then too.
Do you not want to talk about your mother and her art today?
GIRL: (bored) It's just that I'm watching TV.
BOY(4): It just is. (tapping keyboard on computer) What?
ARTIST: Why don't you write about the day that nobody wanted to talk about art?
OK.
I respect everyone's wishes and as it's a Sunday explore in my head the not so fluffy theme of art and spirituality, a subject raised by our host at lunch earlier when he got me thinking that some of what I rage against when talking about the artist's art can be a kind of spiritual frustration, as if something sacred within art is sometimes abused in the big bad world by the notion of art as only commodity. And yet some of what is made today can in fact be compelling, interesting, and unique, and for me to link art only with a complaint about money is absurd. I know: maybe I need to clean those blinds, use that window, and open that dead-end street a little bit more.

Scold the front page

The art world is like a newspaper. It needs a story. It is tabloid by nature. The knickers really matter. The private jet. The number of security men. The banality. Art? What on earth is art? The superficial pedigree of the company the high-profile artist keeps is far more important to the machine invented to follow it than any lit-fest or brain-vain genius. Glib-celeb, that's the new fool by the whirlpool. You can even have a perfectly good artist today whose work bleeds a kind of melancholic significance but whose every story written about them will deliberately ignore the painful subtle truths for the smirk of the sex and regurgitate and concentrate on the cheekily 'sordid' or wackily 'dysfunctional', thereby turning even a potential moment of genuine high art into an easy-story portrayal of trashy low life. It's almost as if no one is listening or watching any more. We have become deaf and blind at the same time. The only thing we can say now is nothing. Anyway, it was on the back of all this that the artist this morning had a sudden loss of nerve and a real moment of doubt swept into the flat and encircled the artist's head like some thin black line of smoke rendered in a visual effects factory. And there was nothing one could say to wave away the pain. In an instant, an earlier piece of work was retrieved from the fourteen others leaning against the wall by the door. This was given its own space briefly in the living room and was aesthetically revisited, challenged, and tried. Instead of the large amount of time spent on all the work being the reason the work is so good, it was now being used as a cosh to beat the artist up with. And it was a good six or so hours later before the situation resolved itself when a golden animator and literary angel visited and saw the work with fresh eyes. In a flash, a kind of self-worth was re-established on the part of the artist and confidence broke like a news story throughout the entire flat.

Everything connects

A number of years ago I took the artist to another country, a flat land with tall manners - the land of my paternal grandfather - and immediately upon hearing there was an artist in their midst, this relative of mine, an elderly man with a pipe in his teeth and a glint in his eye, snatched the artist by the hand and took her on a tour of some of the paintings on his small but fertile wall, pausing to share the stare with her so-to-speak. Memory plays tricks, has an artistic sensibility, a twisted shrine, but I do have clear in my mind this one painting of a silhouette of tall trees, skeletal, leafless branches, and a full halo of a moon glowing back at you like a blob of white metal. The two of them beneath this painting were spellbound and it was like watching someone arrive. Then: another time in the flatlands, a few years later, I watched the artist's pure delight at a museum near the capital and the breaking of the waves - culture was the thing and the culture of this country was a marriage of elegance and practicality, which I noticed the artist more than identify with, even caress like a finger on unfixed pastel. Somewhere in the mix, the artist created and worked on portraits of the entire family from this land, the very family belonging to the man, now dead, with the pipe and glint. Over a dozen faces - fourteen, maybe fifteen - stared down at me from the wall and this time it was as if I had arrived. It was like the slamming of salt and the slapping of water from one side of a sea to another. Respect. Anyway, the son of the pipe and the glint came across that very sea yesterday - for long boat read plane - and came today to see the artist and her work. All he was missing was the pipe. He had the glint, to look with. And the work, to look at. We were coasting.

Beside yourself

I watch the small fingers contorted over the paper, the hard black pencil sharpened, the rustle of paper, the hair a shield from everything else, the pauperish but longstanding wedding ring, the knuckles hardened by industry, the cardigan tightly buttoned, the aura of contented and emotionally self-reliant activity. I've been lucky enough to watch a number of artists work. To remember but a few, there was the boy at school whose pen leaked like an engine and whose characters gesticulated across the paper like wannabe Shakespearian actors. There were the Iranian twins beside whom I stood and watched a formidable way with women as well as paper and how a month or so before the revolution they drew like sad young prophets. There was the gallant Mexican from Saltillo falsely imprisoned because his girlfriend's father didn't approve of his daughter's triste with an artist and whose entire world was turned into a comic-drawn reality. There was the sex-change daughter of a baptist minister helping set up an installation who always smiled when you tried to disturb her. There was the southern belle who worked twice as hard as any man and three times as well as most. There was the tall Englishman with perfect teeth and miles to go before he slept. There was the Argentinian, the Austrian, the famous Portuguese woman, the female twin, the Brazilian, the Canadian, who never knew he was an artist: I have watched a few, I have been a witness. I have seen their habits, tics, and idiosyncratic manoeuvres. On a good day, watching an artist work is like watching a river flow. On a bad day, it's like watching watching watching. But watching this one, the one a few feet away from me now at the table, the one presently scratching her shoulder, is like watching your child who is your parent giving birth to herself.

The truth of the new is never on the news

Why did you wake up this morning feeling so anxious?
Ah. I feel I'm not getting enough done in my work. Not making enough in-roads.
How much is that to do with the fact you've just finished a large piece?
Probably quite a lot actually.
What is that you are doing?
I'm trying out a very, very small picture to see if it will work. (An aside) I seem to be getting smaller and smaller rather than bigger and bigger, which would be good but no one's going to be interested anyway.
What is it with you and detail?
I think it's all the children's stories I liked when I was little. Stories like this guy (pointing to the E.H. Shephard Decorations in the A.A. Milne book Now We Are Six picked up in a second-hand bookshop), or Milly, Molly, Mandy, Arthur Rackham, or illustrated Hans Christian Anderson books.
Do you think this love of detail is made all the more interesting with your conceptual background?
You can't ... it makes me more aware of the whole package ... I don't really want to explain myself ... (head bowed and working) ... in a way most art is conceptual ... you start with an idea ... I don't know ... actually, I don't really give a toss ... except I feel quite convinced by this piece ... though I might not tomorrow ... anyway, I'm experimenting.
What do you think it's like for someone to be married to an artist?
Probably horrible. But maybe it's quite good because if you have your own thing going on like I do then you're less likely to try and control the other person. But it's good for everyone to have expression.
What is going through your mind as you work?
Just doing the drawing. Trying to get the drawing right. (a smile) This seems to be working at last. (serious again) But you never know.

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit

Today I have just helped the artist email a gallerist at a gallery where the artist has been invited to exhibit in a group show, though no dates have been confirmed and the art world is as fickle as a tampered barometer. The artist's plan is to explore the idea of a solo exhibition there too. The gallerist, a pleasant man with serious manners, has been shown a number of reproductions of the new work - plus slides and transparencies from previous exhibitions - and in an eccentric kind of way is impressed. But most of the artists he represents are abstract and this would be a departure for him. Anyway, the idea is to persuade him to visit where the artist works, her home basically, and this is never easy. Gallerists are like self-styled agoraphobics, even the nice ones. They never like to leave their galleries. Not unless there is a sale involved. Here it will be different, very. Beforehand, the artist will clear away all domestic and myth-sucking items such as the children's laundry, some toys, felt pens, their impressively competing sketchbooks, my jackets, and take the aforementioned gallerist on a kind of whirling tour around a room emptied of people, as the debris and energy of the artist's mothering manages to chime with the courage of her art and all the while the work leans against the walls in a large circle. The side of the room with the fireplace for example can be the east wing and the area behind leading into the kitchen the west. I will be hiding, a million miles away. I am not asked to hide but hate with confidence the idea of being the overbearing figure at the shoulder of a prospective ally. (More exciting I hide in the wardrobe, no?) No, it wouldn't work and I actively discourage it. Better not get too big for my blog, either.

The artist in need of a fixative

Without a work-in-progress, the artist looks lost today: an artist stripped bare. This will no doubt change in a day or so when the role - like the work-rate - returns and a new piece on the wall becomes reality again. In the meantime, to observe an artist not working, certainly in this instance, is rather like watching a freed animal, an exotic species, missing the explicit and reassuring boundaries of the cage. We parted early this morning and I was left as a result wondering what the world must be like for an artist without his or her art. Is it a kind of air rage, when all the passenger needs is a cigarette? Is it Hitler not getting into art school? Is it about the recharging of batteries? A time for important and physically inactive reflection? But then I was thinking, we can all be artists but without the art. In fact thinking in this light suddenly makes the world a more bearable place. The shaved heads next to you on the platform or the headphoned death-mask in front of you on the train or the thin dress alongside you on the pavement are all of a sudden fellow creatives. Architecture is reinterpreted by traffic wardens. Creative tensions are felt by public servants. Clouds are read by widows. Was it ever thus? Yesterday I passed a wedding party in a famous public park exploding with flowers and could have sworn I saw a large white butterfly emerge from the bride's vast white wedding dress and fly off. Was not that a kind of zen-like work of art? How about the cluster of black-coated musicians squeezed together in an over-tight bandstand tuning their instruments while everyone else wore light bright shorts and tops? Delighted by this passing indulgence, I returned home only to find the real artist looking anxious. Was it a craving already to do more work? She will be climbing up the (gallery) walls next.

My favourite artist

Through the doorway to my left are fifteen completed works of art encased in bubble-wrap and dabbed in white masking-tape. They lean against the wall and assume a kind of threatening pose when you enter the flat. To be frank, they also represent yet another part of our lives which is vulnerable and unprotected. Before the next piece is begun - the wall where the artist works is bare today - she will doubtless take stock. Of the completed works, I believe she is happy with nine of them. (She is too hard on herself, especially when you consider months have been spent on some: this is perhaps why the work is so good.) Fortunately there are some good-quality reproductions of at least nine of the pieces in a transparent plastic folder in my rucksack next to some notes on a particular war zone and a mysterious pair of socks. And because it now falls to me to introduce people to the work, which you could argue I am doing right now, and though I am not a natural salesman, especially when it comes to door-stepping gallerists, cornering collectors, or sounding out critics, I do not for a moment resent the artist her professional shyness. Apart from anything else, it would go against the grain of her essential humility to be pushy now. It seems central to who she is to be who she is, and that person is relatively private and without pretence. She has a kind of point. Why come this far and lie at the very end?

Gaudy yellow rackets and maroon foam balls

The artist stands fetchingly on a short plastic shiny blue stool in order to reach the parts other artists cannot reach: today is the last day for this piece. Every inch is under scrutiny. Among the newspapers on the floor is a large photograph of boys playing in a flooded part of Kolkata (Calcutta). But the only thing falling today is dust from the artist's materials. I spend most of the afternoon keeping a distance and playing a crude form of tennis with the little people. At one stage I pick up the gaudy yellow racket and hit the perky maroon foam ball so high into the blue sky it seems to go on and up forever, higher and higher, above the dark-green foliage and ivy-strangled linden tree, above the flat belonging to the depressed young couple and their need for three cars, above the charming Irish man and woman in their sixties, above the shy young man's flat at the top, and higher still, as if towards the passing white cloud, so high in the end my daughter says out loud that she thinks she's having a dream, but then, just then, as if woken from the dream, the now not so perky maroon foam ball admits defeats, admits to a kind of homesickness, and returns, slamming bouncily, to the grass again. I really thought I was having a dream, she repeats. I return inside to tell the artist what our daughter said and write it down. But the artist is working and in some kind of dream herself. I've discussed completion before but never the enduring habit of artists to dream. Art and its execution is like time out, like Kurt Vonnegut's mirrors or 'leaks' in Breakfast of Champions. Just like my daughter's take on the ever-rising perky maroon foam ball.

Water in the desert

I was with an Eritrean refugee. Four of his brothers had recently been beheaded. He didn't know a soul. Everything to him was alien and unreal. Only days earlier he had been granted political asylum and this was supposed to be the celebration. He was short, my companion, so small and studiously unobtrusive that most of the other people in the bar couldn't actually see him. Half-familiar faces kept nodding at me almost sympathetically as if I was alone and therefore in need of company. I kept pointing downwards, to them as though towards some mysterious bladder complaint. They didn't get it. (The bar was extremely crowded.) Later I kept sticking an arm out to prevent the passing traffic from knocking my companion over. But though he was short in stature, let me tell you, he was towering in spirit. He also said to me that night that he was superstitious and that my helping him would bring me luck. The windows were open and people were flightily discussing art. Their world and his seemed painfully apart. We spoke of the desert and I told him how a Bedouin soldier once told me after firing off a few innocent rounds in the desert with me that the moon was sad that night and how when I asked why the moon was sad he said it was sad because he - the moon - had come from neighbouring Saudi Arabia. (This was during the run-up to Gulf War One and the Saudis were hosting over 500,000 American-led allies.) My Eritrean companion drank whisky - which he said his religion forbade but integration required - and again he said I would be lucky. Across the bar and through the crowds at that moment sat a dark-haired and attractive woman on a stool looking at me. I excused myself momentarily and bravely asked what the woman did. She looked at me a while and said she was an artist.

Inter(child)view

What is it like having an artist as a mother?
GIRL (7): Great. Wonderful. (Slurp of chocolate mousse.) It's very rare to have an artist as a mum.
BOY (4): Yes. (Giggles.) Yes.
Yes what?
BOY: I like watching her work.
Which is your favourite piece?
GIRL: I haven't got one. (Shake of hair.) I like all of them equally. But you can't like them more than I do. They're 'extravagant'. They're 'exquisite'. Please say that.
BOY: Pictures.
Pictures?
BOY: Weird houses.
Weird houses?
BOY: On my wall.
Do either of you want to be an artist when you grow up?
GIRL: I don't want to be rude or anything. I really do like art. But I want to be something else. Like something sporty. Like a footballer or a gymnast. Or travelling round the world with my best friend.
BOY: No. I don't. (Scratch of head.) I don't want to be an artist.
Why?
BOY: Because I don't, I just don't. I just want to be something else.
Like what?
BOY: Like ... I'm thinking ... like ... oh nothing.
Do you think it's hard being an artist?
GIRL: Yes. Probably. But I bet it's very fun too.
BOY: Yeah.
Yeah what?
BOY: It just is.
GIRL: Can we have another question please?
What's it like being in your mother's art?
GIRL: It's really nice to think we are a part of it.
BOY: Quite weird.

While all about you are losing theirs

There have been times when I have not always been there for the artist, and I would hate for this blog to have me as squeaky-clean, or indeed any marriage as perfect. Sometimes I have arrived home not only long after the birds have begun to sing but also long after they have put their voices away again. (I have been sufficiently AWOL to deserve the sobriquet of Invisible Man.) Throughout, however, and this is my point, the artist has never shirked from her work. This dedication is almost as extraordinary as her patience with me. This is thankfully represented in the kind of work the artist does, too, which is to say long and for all I know painful work that can only be done with unmatchable stamina, because there are no short cuts to be had here and so many high standards. (Sometimes I have seen her bent over her work with her fingers almost claw-like as they graft away late into the night.) Of course, such well crafted work is not always what a quick-fire art world wants but I like to think dedication can have its rewards. It means for example that much of the recent work about to be touted for a show has not been seen before. It is without the disruptive oxygen of a premature audience - like so much work these days - and is literally without peer. And if for a number of years the artist has been building up this fresh body of work without so much as a flash of commercial spotlight, it may very well be her dedication to you, dear viewer, not necessarily to me, which keeps her going.

Artists: from a long line

The late Dave the Grave, I'll call him, was a great artist, one of those many great artists belonging to my wife's tribe - the tribe of artists - I met before we met. This was across the ocean in the land of plenty on an ancient piece of rock. A new confederacy of artists had gathered on the island and my hugely significant job was to label slides for them. Outside, a collector's noun of limousines splintered the ungentrified streets, dumping short men in real estate and tall women in furs, all of whom smouldered with cheque books: greenbacks in order to buy into this gifted confederacy. As a little fish, my work also entailed sitting in the front of some of these shrines where the deals with the artists were done, in these places called the places where the artists would show, and Dave the Grave was right up there, and not just because he was so tall. I saw more money in cash than I had ever seen in my life one time when he sold a piece of work. Anyway, in this one place where I spent a good year of my life working he would lumber in with his yawning and grimacing and over-rubbed face and his general long-boned and bashed-about uncomfortableness. Sit down, I'd say, chill, and he'd stretch out like a giant accordion in the deep low ledge often painted in turquoise between the floor and window. It would be an absolute miracle once he settled, because so much effort had been applied in getting that long railway-carriage body into position. Then, more often than not, he would be still, very still indeed, as if some kind of mysterious trance had nabbed him. His hands would be wrapped around one knee which he rocked and rocked and rocked. And then he'd say something, usually along the lines of how he couldn't actually remember what it was he was going to say. But he was a great artist, the late great Dave the Grave. Oh yes. I'd usually get through about five or six more pages of slides - each dutifully labelled in tiny black handwriting - before he'd come to life again and then while I was holding to the light a slide of his work - maybe of some amazingly shamanistic comment on the old world and new - he'd say: Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. And then he'd drop his head again, the leg would stop rocking, and he'd be gone. I'm history, he'd say. It's only recently I realised the quote was Kahlil Gibran's.

Another one smites the rust

The most recent piece of art is nearly finished: I know this because there are increasing moments now when I am in the room and the artist is stepped back. Arms are folded in greater confidence, too, and the head tilted with increasing patience as completion nears and fear subsides. Of course, a blemish or imperfection in the work is spotted regularly and the piece is swiftly attacked with a kind of last-minute benign intolerance, but I have witnessed it before and know it always to be good. I first saw it in a former studio belonging to the artist in an old school building, now an achingly trendy block of flats. It was so cold the artist had a hot water bottle strapped to her waist like some kind of physical manifestation of a phantom pregnancy. I saw it again as she worked all the hours in a day towards an efficient corner in the Cologne Art Fair. I saw it another time while she prepared for a solo exhibition by Lake Constance in Austria, and then for another show in a woman's gallery across the Alps in Milan. I saw it on the top floor of an empty old hotel building in Northumberland overlooking an inky blue sea as she finished 'doing' a Danish family. I saw it in the foothills of Snowdonia one cold and crisp winter when it was indeed ourselves that were being done. (Have I got your lips right? How about your smile?) Outside of this home-spun realm, I have seen it with exhausted feature film directors when they finish films, too. (Let's see that one more time, they say with a kind of prepared finality.) I've seen it in the field among soldiers, alas, when they've reached that moment of obliged withdrawal. Why, I have even seen it in the act of love. It is the moment. It is the idea becoming reality. It is art having moved from the academic to the anthropological, to paraphrase and abuse what Seamus Heaney said about Ted Hughes. And I have been lucky to have witnessed this time after time, that is to say this key moment, this point of no return. If you love your child send him on his travels, they say in the east. Well, it is the same, this week, with the artist's art.

Broken news

Just as art to the artist is like an unpeelable truth, news for me is like a daily tattoo, and can be very painful. It is on everyone's watch but for some reason always feels like my watch. Sometimes when peering out at the world, it is as if the body politic and human body are one. An explosion in the north for example is like a bloodclot to the shoulder, only worse; arrests in the west are like water on the elbow, and so forth. (A feeling of doing nothing is like a kick in the balls.) This must be what it is like being an artist. Everything connects when watching the news. This must be how she feels. Henry Moore said there is no retirement for an artist, it is your way of living so there is no end to it. While this must be perversely reassuring for an artist, it is exactly how I feel watching the rollercoasters of faith steaming into each other. And knowing the enormity of the situation is like predicting the news, though there is no pleasure in anticipating outcomes. Nor is a bloggish intimation of art being like the news a means of saying art needs to be hostile or truculent. Art is a friend especially at times like this. For most people life begins and ends at home and the rest of the world doesn't exist. Furthermore the insularity of greed is punished only when obliged to admit the rest of the world exists. This is something I supect many artists have always known. Could admitting the rest of the world exists now save lives? I ask the artist. She suggests tomorrow's entry be lighter.