What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

An itchy, important, frustrating day. Another period away from the artist and a meeting with someone different again: another person who knows his war-zones. It was tea this time, in a tall light room with ornate furnishings. It was like a film-set, a scene from a French period piece, with English undertones. There we were, in the middle of it all, two white cups, two white saucers, a tea-pot and tea-strainer, two uneaten biscuits, and two people talking about conflict, post-conflict, and the issues of aid. His own particular expertise was in picking up the pieces and, though I was frustrated, I felt emboldened by his company. I spoke to the artist before returning and when I got back she was hovering by the piece on the wall. To be frank, she looked intimidated by the amount of work she still has to do. It is not all ardour and loyalty in this household. There can be moments of domestic tension, especially when the subject of the artist's work is raised. (The same place where the artist gets her strength is the same place where she also gets her frustration.) Anyway, the issues she has are now being worked on as I write this blog. I can hear that familiar dabbing and stabbing. There is no rest in this house. We are always striving. It is not helped by the fact the children are still awake and we are all in one room. But, and I must try to remember this, diligence is not explained by success alone. We may not have our rewards, but we most certainly have our creative and functioning aspirations. As I peer over the brow of the day, I can see the next excitement, too. It comes in the shape of three family birthdays in the next six days, including the two children's birthdays. There are always birthdays. Even in the war-zones. But ours are ours.

The Shots Of A Man Who Was Shot

I left the artist and took a thoughtful trip across the capital today to listen to a necessary talk given to 30 or so people by a man who also works in images. Only he is not an artist. And his images are from when he was helicoptered into a lofty war-zone and three months ago helicoptered - seriously wounded - out again. (The bullet ripped through his spleen, lower left abdomen, colon, stomach, and left again in a hurry through two exit points.) I was there for some general info but came away with a great deal more. It was immediately atmospheric, almost fetching. The lights came down and the images were projected between him and an amiable man with a military background. The commentary was lucid and informative and unusually frank. Indeed, he talked with a kind of enlightened intimacy, especially about being shot. (His unit was responding to support another unit that had been ambushed.) You could say that what I find lacking in some contemporary art - humanity, courage, etc - I can see in an abundance in this man's work. It was like going on a journey with him, and you had in the course of this journey become his eyes, excuse, light-meter, conscience. (As I understood it, all but one of the men he was with were shot.) The fact the images were black and white made it all the more surreal. I knew this part of the world and had taken black and white images there myself, though this was during a different conflict. I also appreciated the fact that - just like the man I saw yesterday - he was able to say with conviction that the presence of the soldiers there was not only largely welcomed but clearly justified. Back to the pictures. Image-wise - as I wanted to tell the artist later - I was struck by the following. There was the image of a dog adopted by troops in a mountain look-out surrounded for at least three to four months of the winter by snow. There was a shot of a bare-chested young recruit doing press-ups in the snow. There was the impossibly - strangely familiar - steep paths across which heavily armed men had to patrol. (There was the story of a 19 year-old who slipped and died.) There were simple images of their improvised living quarters - very different to the sickening number of smug lifestyle shots presently peppering the newspaper landscape. There was a picture of some bangles with engraved names of dead friends. There were the dollar-bought piles of surrendered weapons. And then there was the attack: the one that did it for him. They reckon now the sniper was from another country. The only thing the man giving the talk couldn't work out - he said - was where in the landscape was the POO. He waited. 'Point of Origin,' he smiled.

The Homecoming

I awake early. The radio is on. Ever-rolling news. (The chaos of the events unmatched by the neat re-telling.) I roll over, to the east. The artist is not there. Of course. She is in the foothills, though travelling back today, with the little people. I lie on my back and catch up on the news. The stories seem familiar. Some are. I heard them in my sleep. Indeed, in the course of the previous six hours I have probably been around the world five times. I examine the artist’s work on the wall. It will be the first thing she looks at when she arrives. (Mark my words.) Furthermore she will say it needs more work. I shower and shave. I run an errand, and speak on the phone to one of the children, then the artist, who is preparing to leave the foothills. I head into the heart of the capital aware of their imminent journey. Everything in the capital feels relaxed, though I am there to meet a man back briefly from a war-zone. He saunters in to where we are meeting. He bears a relaxed but worldly demeanour. I have seen him each time but one when he has been back. I remember when he first told me he was going out. It is interesting to register the changes, and good to note, in his case, a continued strength and respect for others. Also, you know you are in good company when the brave man plays down the risk, belittles the danger, and talks with humour. We discuss my own possible role in this field - we have had this conversation before - and I am satisfied. I bid goodbye. The sun is on our faces. And I wish him well. He flies back tomorrow. In the morning. My second appointment is with another war-zoner but this one I discover has postponed the meeting for two days. I decide instead, perhaps indulgently, to prepare for the artist and the little people’s arrival by going home and cleaning the flat – we were working hard before the foothills and left it very dirty. Why, I shock myself by buying a mop on the way. Who am I trying to impress? If it is the artist, you would shake your head at some of things I have done in the past in order - you would think – to do the opposite. The first thing I do in the flat is to open all the windows and doors. With basements, the airing of the space is essential. Anyway, when they arrive a few hours later their spirits are high and their appreciation apparent. The artist then looks at her work: ‘It needs more work,’ she says.

Diolch yn fawr iawn

I am on my own in the capital, sitting at the round red table, while the artist remains with our children and her parents in the foothills, drinking a glass of red wine. (I have just spoken to her.) There have been times before when I have been in the capital and the artist has been in the foothills. There have been occasions when I have been working crazily in order to complete a project. There have been periods when I have simply been body-surfing across the up-raised hands of the capital. Or there are times such as now - like this - when I choose to communicate clearly and directly from the red table. (Howdy.) At the end of the day, it remains this blog’s ambition to reach that moment - that premeditated instant - when the artist has her exhibition. In the meantime, it's all about reporting the ride. In this light, let me say the artist has been charging up her batteries well, though there were in the foothills the usual little people to tend with, plus an energetic and effervescent little niece. It makes this blogger happy to think of the artist charging her batteries, as the artist needs to feel fit in order to perform. She is like an athlete, after all, and needs to be, so physical is much of her particular work. Her frame of mind is important too. The brain, as we know, is like a muscle, just as the creative juices are like blood to the body of work. At the risk of over-simplification, though, what I think the artist wants more than anything right now is one more major piece behind her before getting any more people to see the work in the flesh. This is not procrastination. This is artistic choice. That said, a more direct approach by the artist may begin shortly, conceptualising further the actual show. Another idea being discussed by the artist is a public space: she has a place in mind. I must say, it remains one of the frustrating ironies of this blog that the very thing it wishes to publicise must remain anonymous, but that is how it is. That - if you like - is the deal. Besides, art is magical enough to deserve a good-luck parallel, isn't it? Art is not just about the banging of a drum. It is also about leaning your ear to the rich green earth and listening to the plates below. And that - thanks to others - is exactly what we were allowed to do in the foothills.

Onychocryptosis

A not unpleasant ingrown toenail of a day, as a kind of drawbridge comes up, a slipper slips on, and the family all stay in. (The 4-year-old sits at his grandfather's computer finding free online games while the 7-year-old watches an adult drama with her grandmother, aunt and cousin.) Somewhere in this confection is the artist, checking the skyline for change, in order she can gather those upstream images. Yesterday she tried but as the light was failing, it was too late. Tomorrow I must return alone to the capital. I have a view of my own. A kind of ice-rink of grey denotes the sky. Neat pencil lines of three electricity wires run from one bank of trees to another. The trees lining the road wait like spectators for a bike-race. A smoking tractor burns uphill. (One tree moves more than the others.) In the foreground is a spider web, stretched and laddered like a Berliner's stocking. A paperback about bravery and fanaticism lies face-down on the sill, next to an emptied cake wrapper. Ingrown toenails may develop for many reasons. Some cases are congenital - the nail is just too large for the toe. Not this one. These are active feet. These are clipped nails. But we all like a day when there's no chance of putting one's foot in it. Why, the artist may even have found her upstream images by close of play.
Onychocryptosis: ingrown toenail

Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now *

All this feels so charmingly unreal and away from life's slashing. A vehicle of eight people - five adults, three children - swerves lightly and nonchalantly down a dipping valley and along a mussel-spotted and railway-tuned coastline. Several miles later, the vehicle arrives at a gatehouse, through which it continues along a mile of sun-dappledness, at the end of which is the unreal image of a holidaying family with whom the artist shared moments of her childhood. (It is standing there waiting like a very loyal and necessarily dated toy-chest.) Furthermore, each child in this visited island of memory - that is to say, the children of the artist's childhood friends - has been the subject of a portrait by the artist. One by one, in other words, they have all featured as works in progress on our wall. (I have watched their renditions grow.) So when we stand like New England pilgrims on the sun-licked pebbles where the freshwater river meets the sea - we are 20-odd-strong by now - there is something conceptual, something so unreal, taking place. Small portraits have come to life. Two-dimensionalisms have found that third dimension. And on top of it all, perched like that final parcel of unreality, are breathing and speaking and laughing versions of themselves. I watch the artist during all this. She is flashing kind glances, recalling childhood performances, registering time's slow gnawing of skin, and thinking up those images required upstream. I smile at her and step out of this gentle memorialisation. By the house is a large garden and in that garden are apples. The apples are cooking apples. As I hold my son to one of the trees, he holds one of the apples in his hand. Suddenly it comes away. He looks at it, tries to put it back, realises it can't. Now that is real.
*From 'To A Butterfly' by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The Artist As A Muscovy Duck

A car passed on the very last stretch of road between here and a kind of wilderness. Trees crisscrossed above my head and nature oozed like sap from the sides of the hill. I was with the Artist's Parents' dog. Hang on a moment, I thought. What's that movement ahead? Whatever it was, it was parked in the middle of the road like the roadkill that got away. Just then, the car stopped and out stepped a man. He walked towards it. I didn't know if I should start walking backwards or not. It was, in fact, a Muscovy duck, though it looked more like a bald-headed eagle with a wig. In seconds, it took to the air, missing my head by only a few feet. The owner chased after it, mocking it, taunting it, angry with it - understandably frustrated - but most of all ridiculing it. 'It's a bloody pet,' he said. 'I got three of them. It's a Muscovy duck. Yuck. Mad it is. Mad as a brush.' Then he said something incorrect: 'From Russia it is.' (I since learned that Muscovys - note the ease of vernacular - were non-migratory Native Americans and had already been domesticated by various Native American cultures before Columbus arrived. Only after 1550 did the Muscovy Company, also known as the Muscovite Company, begin shipping them to Europe.) Anyway, I saw it again later. Yes, a second time. It was just standing there, alone, unclaimed, among the leaves of a tall bush. 'Do you like ducks then?' it said. As you can imagine, I was genuinely taken aback. It's not every day a duck will speak to you like that. I must say, it looked annoyed, though not with me. It looked angered with its ridiculing owner, who by now had disappeared. 'It's just that you'd like what Daffy Duck said if you like ducks,' it said. I looked at it again, shook my head, in continued disbelief. 'Go on then,' I said: 'What did Daffy Duck say then?' The Muscovy duck stood straight and without a flicker of mockery said: 'Ridicule is the burden of genius.'

Once An Artist

Part of the process in this rare separation of the artist from her art is the accompanying withdrawal on the part of the artist into a kind of silence and reflection and distance. I suppose I am secure within the relationship as I don't take it personally when along with the art I'm in some ways left behind. The broad canvas which is the atmosphere of this valley ensures the big picture, anyway. Furthermore, the rushing water, soft mist, oxygen of trees, spaces us out, obviously in more ways than one. Nature points a green finger and tells us to slow down. The water says, 'Let me do the rushing.' You can't even call it a return to full-time mothering on the part of the artist, as that's something which has never been compromised. No, it is the sleep of the just. At one stage, I offer to make tea and the artist's eyes light up at the prospect of having a warm cup brought to a warm bed, and when she nods off with it a few minutes later reading a novel about jealousy and betrayal, the cup slips from her hand and soaks all the bed sheets. She keeps apologising - for being tired, for this, for that - but has no need to. But I do know what's coming next. Our daughter knows too. And it does. As sure as this blog reaches its end. She wants to get some images upstream.

Stinging criticism

On the artist's behalf I've sometimes likened the art world to a kind of wasps' nest; I'd no idea one of my first tasks in the foothills would be actually to destroy one. A busy nest, you see, established itself under the guttering close to the top of the Artist's Parents' house. It's a building in which a local mine used to keep its explosives - for primary and secondary blasting - so it's suitably robust. This robustness doesn't extend to warding off the wasps, though - yes, those velvet ants again - with their sharp tapered abdomens and black and yellow stripes. 'Conflict resolution,' I'm told, and I'm suddenly sitting there with some extremely flammable nest destroyer foam in my hand, reading about its killing power. (If it destroys karma, I hope not mine: I've had enough stings to last a lifetime.) Anyway, I stand up and shut the upstairs window. A ladder is out of the question. I open the dining room window, the only one with reasonable access. I lean out, look up at maybe 50 wasps. (I'm doing it for the children, I tell myself.) I try my first few yellow-belly squirts, beginning with a 5-second take-that-you-beautiful-strangers-I-don't-really-want-to-be-doing-this ejaculation. They hover and turn. I fire another. This one's a God-I-hate-doing-this-to-you-I-can't-believe-I-am shot, followed by a boy-now-I've-started-I-ain't-gonna-stop kind of shot. One of them has it in for me. (Look who's talking.) Just as they're about to surround me under buzzed instructions from the aforementioned zealot - a waspy kind of word - I dash back in and slam the window shut. Phew. I stare out, still panting. One of the wasps - yep, pretty sure it's him - lands splat on the window - right in front of me: head-height - and begins its slow and long slide down the other side of the glass, leaving a tiny trail of despair. I'm sure he's trying to tell me something. (Now I really do feel bad.) Oh, no. At least 100 are gathering now... A few hours later, I peer up like a colonial officer and check the state of play. All quiet on the western front. (I wasn't trying to make an exhibition of myself, really.) Ruddy art world.

Diamonds in the sky with foothills

The artist came back late with her sister and started working again. I could hear her sighing and squeaking and tweaking after midnight as I tried to sleep: I was smiling, though. Next day, we began the sensation of travelling through a green and pleasant land on a train. A newspaper image in front of the artist of Henry Moore's sculpture 'Large Two Forms' and the artist questioning its veracity. Me, glibly saying it's early evidence of abstract exploration, really looking at the sky. The real sky. Not the sky in the colour newspaper photograph. And thinking of the curious reappearance of Russian TU-95 bombers in another newspaper photograph. Photos. Photos. They pass me by in the end. Then, a few hours later, in 6.1 Surround, a symphony of gushing water. (We've arrived in the foothills.) A butterfly, brown, sits like science in my hands. A boy - my son's cousin - pretends devotedly to make tea. A dog soaks up the years. People, close, unite. The Artist's Parents. The Artist's Children. The Artist's Sister-in-Law. I run my eyes from the sky to the horizon, soaking up the peace. Behind the ridge: a slow moving, wispy white cloud, like a white blood cell against blue sky. I look at the artist, feel good. My only struggle is with the pulp fiction in my hands about shadowy figures catching wind of murder in the skies. A good day with the artist.

An agent of change

I'm hoping the man who could be my agent is reading this. He's very good. We've not actually met in person but we do know someone in common, and he's been kind enough to email. I’m hoping the wit or conceptualism of seeing himself in the title and first sentence might help. (This will be the first page.) What I'm really sending is a copy of the first twelve chapters of my novel. It's strange: I’ve never allowed myself the luxury of imagining I deserve an agent before, which is also strange, because I care about writing, and like to think I'm onto something with the novel. Before I get carried away, I must remember I'm not the only person in this blog. I am, after all, The Artist’s Husband. She's busy, by the way. In between writing and discussions with experts on the war-zone, I've been answering questions for her about the figures in the conceptual intricacy of branches, trunks, and leaves on the wall. She'll ask, for example, if one should be darker. She'll know the answer – she's that good – but I can understand the inherent respect in having a final review. Of course all this finalisation stuff is because we are off to the foothills tomorrow. By the time you're reading this, insh'allah, we'll be by a fast-flowing stream or meandering path, peering into the distance at sheep hugging the sides of mountains. Or we'll be crouched on the carpet, enjoying a kind of ankle-height reunion with the little people. The air: I love the air there. The stature of the landscape, the humility of the people. I've mentioned this before but the little people are with their maternal grandparents there in the foothills right now. They've been there four full days. From tomorrow, we'll be there too. The artist will be arting and I'll be hoping the man who could be my agent is not feeling too bombarded.

Love is a gift

Art is so often commensurate with commerce these days – I know: in this case, it needs to be – that we forget those refined and rare moments when no money is exchanged, or wanted, whatsoever. The work becomes a gift. Though I say it myself, there were many such moments in my childhood. Even without much talent I painted regularly and was always giving paintings away, usually to a relative, a member of my grandmother’s hotel staff, or a friend. The artist does this to this day. Every time she visits her parents in the foothills, the night before returning to the capital she will make something poignant and leave it unannounced – however predictably now - under a pillow or on a bed. This is done with no less commitment than anything in her professional life. Similarly, the t-shirts she’s been doing. They are gifts from the artist. They are not for sale. (One very grateful Belarusian mother asked politely for an extra one the other day for her mother.) There are now so many of these uniquely illustrated t-shirts round these parts – so many mothers bearing the artist’s unmistakeable imprint or hand - that a kind of local forest has sprouted. I see them frequently. At least two a week. I try to photograph them all, though pointing a camera at people’s breasts is not done unselfconsciously. I love the idea of a generous artist. I remember a man in a lushly fertile land one day spending hours painting this beautiful though conventional picture of some olive trees and later simply giving it away. (Well, he handed it to an admiring stranger on the steps of the church from where he’d been working.) A real gift.

Information is not knowledge*

We are all led to believe that there is so little time in the world. Even for us today every spare moment is spent working or absorbing information. The work has been well documented. The information on the other hand comes largely through the radio. I manage to read an article in the bath but it’s through what's basically scoured wire services followed by mechanically reproduced audio sound that we gather most of our information. (Certainly today: on a Sunday.) What precisely is the information today? Well, there’s the thorny dispute over the toll of a country’s injured in a war. (It strikes me that anyone who lays themselves open to attack while protecting the interests of their country should feel the country by them.) The question is, are they protecting their country's interests or someone else’s? (I like to think the former.) Some of the other information is less noxious. There’s the one about young people enjoying themselves too much and it all getting out of hand. There’s the possibility of a snap election. (Snap? Is that a house of cards?) How about the human chains of environmental activists? (Daisy chains?) Or the actor leaving his art to a national body. (ART.) Anti-smoking talking flowerbeds? (No, really.) Toxic children’s bracelets in a country’s largest toy shop. (You’re kidding.) I'm not. A bill giving the security services of one major country the power to intercept all telephone calls, internet traffic and emails made by citizens of another: arguably their closest allies. (Not something like this, surely.) Young tombstoners. There's a phrase. (People for kicks throwing themselves off cliffs.) How about the perpetual rise of the yob? (That’s going to run and run.) Or – BIG - the bleak, ferocious, but still winnable war. (It won't go away.) I like the one about the great man of many parts who for over seventy years worked without a smidge of cynicism. Oh. There’s more on the dead princess. Here’s one I like: six hundred naked volunteers on a shrinking glacier. (ART.) Drugs and alcohol abuse in the stately world of opera. (ART?) There’s so much and it’s all coming at you. It’s like racing through a hail of bullets. Don't you think how much better it would be, sometimes, if it was all made up? (ART.)
*Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The Burrowers

We have filled the day with work. It is like walking for miles down a long dark tunnel. After the first mile or so you begin to think about the men or women who made the tunnel. You admire their persistence and realise you are in fact admiring yourself. You do not think this a good thing and your modesty shuts you down for a while. Then instead of counting the miles you start counting the strides: you go all macro. There is a scent in the air, which you cannot identify, and you hope it is not the stench of failure. This does not matter as your only task now is to keep on walking. You think big again and see the route of the tunnel in your head like a slice-diagram of a train-map done by a brilliant twelve-year-old. It’s only after another twenty miles or so that you begin to realise there is in fact another track, a second one, running alongside you. This is the track belonging to the artist. You nod and feel the same sense of relief the 51st Highland Division must have felt in the North African desert when after days of isolation in a vast and lonely place they suddenly caught sight of their first German soldiers. You continue. There is still much to do. The other track is no longer relevant as you tighten your chest and march purely on willpower. You know you have come far but also you know you must go further. Is this the work ethic? Is this blind faith? You start groping for tunnel quotes. ‘Carve a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.’ That’s one. (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Or how about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s strange line, ‘Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?’ Anyway, before you know it you are emerging cautiously from the tunnel. But where is the artist? Is she still down there?

A mother's children are portraits of herself

This morning before the city awoke fully the artist did not have to pull her son towards her after he crept into her bed a good half an hour before she knew she would be getting up. This morning the artist did not have to get the two cereal bowls filled with the right cereal for the children to eat, or leave them watching TV on the bright red sofa while she quickly tidied their room. This morning she did not have to squeeze the toothpaste onto the toothbrushes, or find the right top, right trousers, right shoes. She did not have to unbolt the back door for them to race into the garden, or push them on the swing, or play a game with them, or quell a minor disturbance. This lunchtime there was no lunch she had to prepare for them and no long walk to share with them to the park later with the bicycles or with the scooters. This afternoon she did not have to feel guilty because she was probably working too hard on her own work at the cost of spending some quality time with the children. She did not have to worry about changing a pair of socks because the other pair had got wet. She did not have to lay out the drawing books on the table and select an image for them to draw. She did not have to worry about her daughter watching episode after episode of her favourite TV series. She did not have to be concerned about her 4 year old spending too long on the computer. This evening she did not have to worry about them not eating enough greens and she was not made anxious by the idea they were probably staying up too late. No, today, as the children were away, the artist simply worked.

White light and black dress

A sharp light has replaced the dark clouds. It is a light as sharp as a freezer-chilled cloudy lemonade sapping the inside-cheeks and supped between sentences. Or like a shard of glass in a glinting sun in a grassy glen. On my way back to the flat today I was struck by the darkness of the clouds and the long-distance jellyfish tendrils of rain coming this way, enough to stop and take a photograph. By the time I had the image framed in the small camera-monitor the wall of rain was like a giant trawled net and I was about to be caught in it. Now, though, sitting at the round table next to the large red sofa, I can see only sun. The children have gone, so a couple of lights have gone out there, but there is light by and large in the capital. That said, I’ve just been reading a recent report on terrorism by a man they call a specialist. I remember meeting this man one Saturday night across the ocean in an over-heated apartment in the middle of the city’s main island. The report was topical and factual. It is a shame so much of what we read about conflict today is opinion. I am no great expert but it seems we are given only these scraps of opinion to run with and as a result get nowhere, or flag before we reach the first camp. Facts, alas, are what we need. This is perhaps why I like art so much. Opinion is allowed substance there and cracks can be smoothed or exposed. The wounds bleed but seldom kill. Talking of conflict, my 4 year old son has left Cyber Archfiend – one of his Konami trading cards - next to my laptop. Cyber Archfiend looks like a warrior louse. Not even the strongest of creams or combs could kill him, you feel. I better place him by the postcard I received this morning from a dear travelling friend in the north coast of the hot continent. The postcard can be Cyber Archfiend’s magic carpet. They can fly off together while the son is away. The artist wore a beautiful black dress this evening by the way.

Since my babies left me

With humour and exactitude the artist prepares the children for their trip tomorrow with their grandmother and cousin. They are taking a supposedly whizzing and skilfully leaning train out of the congested capital. They will snake from the self-inflated constriction and across the bottle green land into what we shall call the fast-flowing foothills. There they will stay by the tall and handsome mountains where the buzzards fly. (I have the honour of feeling like an African chief when I write the above. Or an Iroquois in deerskin breechcloths.) I can remember the times before we had any children and the artist showing the same amount of care and attention to her art whenever the work would go off – usually via the framers - for an exhibition somewhere. Children, though, represent themselves and the artist knows this fact. They are their own titles. They have their own themes, their own movements. Even the way they carry themselves is about them and nobody else. And it is a kind of freedom. Freedom. There's a word. We hear it less and less these days but even with my limited experience I know it to be real. I have crossed from one place with freedom into one without and the difference is uncanny and very real. As the children shunt along the tracks tomorrow to their vacational prosperity in the hills I shall be here with the artist in the fumbling metropolis delighted they have such freedom. And it all comes back to art. Art for example is freedom. I can remember a gentle old man, the father of an old girlfriend, replying to a card I once sent him. The card was Japanese and bore the image of a bird taking flight. We did not know it at the time but my girlfriend’s father was dying. He wrote back. ‘Such freedom,’ he said of the bird. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. No, the children will be enjoying their freedom with their grandparents and it shall be interesting watching the working artist in their huge absence over the next few days.

Lateral Thinking Quiz

Artists do not require lateral thinking. This for me is one of their attractions. As it happens, I was given a list of 22 lateral questions to answer today. Here are some, though heavily tweaked by me for the attempted benefit of the aforementioned artists.

1. Why can’t an artist living in downtown New York, who is a very good painter, technically as well, especially with acrylic on canvas, and who loves his work dearly, to the point of obsession, be buried in London?

2. If a plane carrying a bunch of chattering and over-perfumed artists and art dealers to the Basel Art Fair with a well experienced pilot at the controls and on a beautiful clear day crashed on the Italian/Swiss border, where would you bury the survivors?

3. An artist lives on the tenth floor of a block of flats and every morning she takes the lift down to the ground floor – admiring some of the graffiti on her way - and goes to her studio. In the evening, often covered in paint, she gets into the lift again, and, if there is someone else in the lift she goes back to her floor directly. Otherwise, she goes to the eighth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to her flat. How do you explain this?

4. How many birthdays does a typical female artist have?

5. A collector has 15 Joseph Albers paintings – the man who introduced theory to modern art. Anyway, all but 8 of the paintings owned by the collector are destroyed in a terrible blaze in a warehouse in Europe. How many Joseph Albers paintings does the collector have left?

6. An artist wanted to get away from it all because he claimed he had had enough of his fellow man, and he built a rectangular studio, each side of the studio having a southern view. He spotted a bear one day – though he was not a wildlife artist. What colour was the bear?

7. If you were a really poor Dutch artist who painted oils and you really wanted to do some work and you were alone in a deserted studio at night, and there was an oil lamp, a candle and firewood and you only had a match, which would you light first?

If you get more than 50% of these correct you are obviously strong on your artists and could make a very good artist’s husband or wife. If you know them already, then I apologise. Call it, if you will, collateral damage.

You can't wake a person who is pretending to sleep

The artist turns the volume down on the TV in the corner of the room and walks deliberately slowly to where the children should be sleeping, only they are not sleeping because they are in our bed and think this all very funny. The artist continues however at a deliberately slow pace, trying as she approaches the bed to induce in their still budding minds a sense of 'sleepfulness'. As she stands by the door – I make it sound more grand than it is - she turns the light down, only slightly, and lies on the bed beside them, because they have asked her to. There are now one or two giggles rising like little eruptions from their mouths as they try to come to terms with the fact they've just won the How To Get Mummy Into The Bedroom With Us While We Pretend To Sleep game. The laughter continues and I take this opportunity to examine the artist's work done today. It is like reading a fresh newspaper. It is full of information. The artist has worked on the contrast. Even in the half-light it pops out at you and readily convinces. The medium assists greatly with this dimensionalisation - if one can use such a phrase. I also like the live and dead nature, as if the dead somehow is still living. Something I remember as a child when puffins would dive into the sea and break their necks when the wrong wave came along, and float on their backs dead but with these beautiful multi-coloured beaks screaming out, ‘I’m alive! I’m alive! Look at the colours of my beak! I’m alive!’ I place an ear towards the room where the children are still pretending. It is very quiet. Either they are deeply convincing or really are asleep. Hang on, I know. It’s happened before. I know what it is. The artist has fallen asleep. (Unfortunately I am wrong: fifteen minutes later, the artist is back drawing at the table and the daughter still awake.) The work on the table is different to the work on the wall. It is tiny. The need to get our dear daughter to sleep however grows vast.

Where it could be worse

I had a dream last night that there was a massive financial crash, which is not impossible, and that the owners of the previous property where we lived, a rented basement flat, were flabbergasted to discover that unlike everywhere else in the crumbling economy their property had enhanced in value by virtue of the fact some nationally recognised important works of art had been done there by the artist. Arrogant, I know, but credit where you can dream it. It got me thinking about art’s ability generally to enhance the value on something other than itself. Such occurrences exist. I saw it across the ocean in the city of scraped skies where an entire area resembling Beirut was flooded with small galleries and these in turn led to a kind of landlord-happy gentrification. I saw glimpses of it this side with a famous art world figure whose life was ransacked by AIDS but whose relationship with art remained as a kind of ennobling lifeline. Elsewhere, you get instances such as what you imagine happened to sculptor and novelist Jimmy Boyle with the personal liberation you assume took place in Scotland’s Barlinnie Prison. Also, there was the reformed old man from Ireland who once said to me, 'I used to piss on trees. Now I paint them.' It is like travelling by moonlight instead of in darkness. Clearly art has an extraordinary array of redemptive powers. The luck is in finding them, or allowing them to find you. It leads us indirectly back again to previous mention here of Hitler not getting into art school and the potential century-saving salvation missed there. And an artist with a lot of money can be a creative force for the good. They tell me. No, thanks to the dream, what I can enjoy today about art's tangential influence on that which surrounds it is the idea that something is being valued here, and not - to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's better line - just priced.

We're all working on a summer holiday

I had wished to make a relaxed trawl of an interview with the artist about the implications of being a mother working at home while the children have their school summer holidays. Well, what better answer than the fact the artist is now too busy working? I don’t know how she does it … well, I do actually. It’s called industriousness. An absence of sloth. Activity. I don’t mean to suck romance from the bite too much but there is not a lot of laughter from the grafter right now - not when there's work to do. Nor is this mania or obsession. It is mission. The children, meanwhile, having just come back with us from an Olympian tour of the park, watch their grandfather’s work instead, a primary coloured sunlit DVD about a previous summer holiday, the two children’s birthdays to be precise, while the artist returns to her well measured working of the paper on board screwed to the living room wall behind me, creating in the process a kind of figurement of sense, while all around the little bones grow and the little brains yield more and more. Another thing: we walk just about everywhere - we don’t have a car - so physical exercise and therefore physical fatigue in this house is commonplace. A good thing, mind, even if it does double the effort required for the artist to continue working. Actually you can tell children who spend too much time in cars and not enough time walking or cycling. They look stiff, their hips in particular, and they do not like anything agile. Or is it our state schools and their lack of large grassy playing areas because they have sold the land to the private schools next door? (Where you can't play anyway in case you fall and break a bone and the parents sue.) Who knows what some of the little people will be like as adults. Mobility and disability frames by their forties? The artist's father has a rapt audience with his film. Maybe that's how you deal with them when their mother is an artist and father writing this down: you have a grandfather who makes films you can watch over and over. (They smile at their on-screen grandmother.) Bed, children. It’s getting late. (Dad.) You should be in bed by now. (Oh yeah.)

Landscape gardening

We are all lone figures in landscape. I am. The artist is. It is a lasting image, too. Our two children feature quite literally as such. The man in our imagination across the frozen ploughed field is chilling. The bereaved woman along the beach makes us friendly. The man on the moon is quite baffling. The hooded dictator is hidden. In real terms you can remain unpainted all your life, but there you are in fact, just like everyone else, bestriding the open space of your time on this earth in this image called life. Alone. (A self-portrait, sometimes.) Lone figures in landscape are everywhere. They are in a way what unite us. Three hours after we met, the artist became a lone figure in a landscape – well, on a dance-floor – while everyone else, except for me perhaps, went through a kind of lyrical self-erasure. Fourteen hours later, the artist had become a lone figure among trees - factually – by walking in front as we searched for a freshly collapsed old oak tree and found it. There was the photo I took of the artist in dappled sunlight where a month later I would propose. There was her large art piece of the daughter staring like a solitary icon with her back turned from a grassy cliff into a vibrant blue sea. There were all the strangers the artist excecuted, or drew, individually, one by one, walking, often in pain, through parkland. There is this image in my head now of the artist walking slowly and with unusual fragility across pebbles by an Alpine lake. There is the artist as a lone figure in a landscape of red sofa watching the dramatisation of an English mother and writer's work. There is the picture she has of me walking for what felt like days up and down a pathway alongside an urban river. There are yet more images out there, too - the world’s most famous terrorist limping down a slate-strewn mountainside. The football hero smiling back from a background of clipped green. Or how about the TV talking head in front of a knocked-focus of dereliction? An angel on a landscape of cloud? A man in a Robert Frost poem? Bart Simpson? A nude in a bed of flowers? When people ask what kind of work the artist does, I see them against their background wondering what I'm talking about. People. Come on. It's universal.

Two arts beating as one

We are not dissimilar. Furthermore - as the first sentence suggests - two negatives can make a positive. Running parallel to the artist’s documented journey towards an exhibition is my own attempt at getting the first part of a book I’ve been trying to write into the hands of an agent. (My central character, I can tell you, is having a bizarre time.) Anyway, like the artist, I also just require some luck. Meanwhile it’s not uncommon to have us wage our separate wars of expression within just a few meters of one another. There is no sectarianism and we are generous neighbours. Occasionally the odd comment is lobbed over but we are much more truth and reconciliation than tar and feathers. Our heads even tilt forward simultaneously when we work, fertile expressions travel each face, and we are interrupted regularly and equally by the little people and their own expressions – a joint exhibition of tirelessness and provocation. No, the only real difference between what I do and what the artist does is physical. The artist for example spends much of her time on her feet while I just sit there like a member of some obscure congregation. It is now just a question of never giving up. Just when I am closing in, though, I must spend two or three days on something else. Still, variety is the life of spice, as we must future our tells.

Curriculum vitae

I've just been looking at a print-out of the artist’s CV. It’s strange reading about a visual artist without any of the visuals. (This of course is one of the deliberate challenges of the blog.) But work when fresh must always try to be seen in the flesh first. I must say: examining the CV is like peering at a beautiful and detailed map. (I am much less modest about the artist than the artist is.) All the rivers are there. Important place names. One or two borders. The occasional former country. Some new ones. Starting from the top, there's the artist’s name typed in Century Schoolbook. She uses her maiden name. A good name. Sharp: nice and curt. Yet: feminine. Then the place of birth. Not too detailed, rural sounding, rural enough to conjure up a pastoral image. The date of birth is absent, though never necessary when exhibition dates feature. (The artist started young.) Education is next. Two colleges. A foundation course, not described as such, and a degree at a well known art school. Next, the solo exhibitions. I count an impressive eleven, starting in the UK and ending to date in Italy. (Belgium, Germany, and Austria come in between.) Then we've the group exhibitions, a sizeable twenty-three. This resembles a list of north European concert venues, though New York, Florida, and the Czech Republic also feature. Then: publications. (I note the absence of 'The Artist's Husband'.) There are seventeen publications in all, including a major political journal, a national newspaper magazine, and a well meaning literary organ. No, the profile is good - a beautiful nose, you could say - and rounded off with eight major collections. Just now, thinking over it all again, my eye returns to the top. Solo exhibitions. I try visualising what comes next. I can see the work. I can see much of the work. (You know what I think about that.) I just can’t picture the venue yet.

Fly low, fly slow

Maybe it was the war parallels I wrote about yesterday but I’ve just received a phone call from someone about a new possible war-zone posting for me. It was like lying on my back on the deck of a cruise ship and suddenly feeling a shot across my chest. I told the artist about it and like to think she understood. It's not entirely out of the blue. But whenever faint possibilities become real possibilities, the heart always misses a beat. The artist went quiet after I told her. She had just returned from picking up the children and I think what she really wanted to do was revisit the large new piece on the wall, the one she's been working so hard on. Instead she entered the small open kitchen and I followed her through. She was already sitting on the stool and staring at the table with her head bowed, which isn't really her style. 'Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear,' Marcus Aurelius said. I wonder if it's true. The money's good and we need it. It would mean working out of an airfield, with twenty-one days on and ten days off, and I'd be in pretty good hands. At least my son is grinning, however preposterously. My daughter doesn't know yet and if I don't go, she won't. The artist is no longer in the kitchen and is back working, by the way. She knows well her husband's contradictions. (Artists have a way of understanding these things.) I wonder how I would view her journey towards an exhibition should I go? She wouldn't be too alone. The artist’s sister is here again and sleeping on the large red sofa. (Her brother and family came at the weekend.) No, the artist's family are close and it's a source of some comfort, though never an excuse, to know this strength. 'Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you,' Aldous Huxley said. Maybe it's just a wake-up call.

Shopping for the Artist

Self-evidently I am a fan of the artist. But I am also a fan of life. This life thing is often tested, though: as perhaps it should be. In the heart of the capital for example I see two military Chinook helicopters cross the sky, following the course of the river. They splutter with perhaps necessary gusto. I see eagle-eyed police with MP5s (machine guns) slung over their shoulders, waiting by a main railway station. I step past a building where I know major suspects are questioned and a pub once destroyed by a different type of terrorist. After passing a newspaper vendor selling images of a bio-security breach, I make it to the art shop. Therein, tools to all manner of expressed conflict are available, and the counter where I buy them is made of stainless steel. It is where I imagine T.S. Eliot’s 'patient' - the evening - 'etherised upon a table’. Anyway, opposite as I exit the shop is a club owned by people who also bought the house of a famous poet who drank himself to death and turned it into a drinking establishment. I wait for the speeding police van to pass and cross by some roadside flowers. A mother berates a boy with a small toy gun. I still have some reference images when they are ready to collect for the artist. An old man with a philosopher's face next to the developers leafs through a bin. While waiting for the images I drink coffee opposite an old Victorian workhouse. A young woman in the queue, I notice, quickly pops in her mouth a famous antidepressant – I see the packet - and downs it with designer water. Just then, my mobile phone rings. It is the artist. I am asked how I am. Not bad, I say. Not bad.

The sights and sounds of the ups and downs

I have been in the garden brushing away the flies, ladybirds, and wasps, while the artist works on a kind of dream rendition indoors. Trying to write with the children playing is not difficult when compared to some people's distractions in the world, and in truth I can hear the traffic more than the children, motorbikes mostly, and await with well-honed foreboding the sound of a high-speed crash. This is not unfamiliar territory. It is perhaps the same with the Middle East, Persian Gulf, North Africa and Central Asia. We all hear something. We know the situation is bad. And some of us fear it will get much worse. Also, with a kind of well-honed foreboding we await the sound of a high-speed crash. (Nuclear? No, we dismiss.) Which is why as well as writing I have also been reading a book today by a man I met on a number of occasions and with whom I once gave uncredited advice. His latest volume covers one of the countries in the present fragmentation, the strongest perhaps, and though I have only just begun it I can see already the problem I have with my own ignorance. I can never for example seem to grasp fully why things have to fall apart. Over two thousand years ago these people were the most sophisticated on the planet. Renowned for their rectitude and wisdom, they were hunters, poets, and musicians. Indeed for a while they would use art rather than weaponry as their principal means of persuasion. So what went wrong? Did the flies, ladybirds, and wasps get too much for them in the end? Were they obliged to withdraw indoors? Today once again we have some of the so-called most sophisticated people on the planet, on both sides some might argue, people famously keen - again, on both sides - on rectitude, thinking they have the answer, and maybe some of them do. But what can you really do when you hear a motorbike drive too fast? What can you do when you see a wasp on someone’s nose? Warn them? Strike out and risk being bitten yourself? Or, like a woman I met on a two-masted brigantine once, keep calm until it passes? I have a friend who would know. He is cleverer than me and writes about insects well. Hang on. Wait. Another motorbike. (A beat.) Phew. No. It’s OK. (Actually I thought there was a wasp, too.) Wait a moment, shall I just go inside and listen to the news instead?

Or better still be my winding wheel

I love the lyric. I love the ballad. As a form of expression there are few things more pleasing to me in the rich firmament which is art than a fine narrative in a good song. It is my equivalent of a good cellar. It was a pleasure therefore to light eleven candles last night and sit with the artist on our bright red sofa and watch in the flickering light as a young American balladeer sitting in a line of five musicians went through his repertoire of love songs mostly. The televised concert was in an old church and the atmosphere there was attentive though faintly self-conscious. We on the other hand felt like we had travelled the entire way on the sofa, speeding across the river in it, taking sharp lefts and sharp rights, holding on to the arms in the process, until driving at speed down the aisle and parking in the middle at the front. Outside the church, we noticed, as the musicians tuned up, a tall tree, an ash perhaps, was sensitively lit, and through the ornate church window from the inside we could see the foliage blowing in the wind. Marred only by the occasional cut to some songless celebrity, we watched in communal awe as that rare sight these days - a romantic – took centre-stage. A romantic. Someone in other words who chooses what sometimes turns out to be the broken road of dashed hopes rather than becomes jaded. And yet there was a thankful lightness of touch to some of the songs, a fluffiness within the darker moments. There was one song about unrequited love. But he laughed at himself. One song had his life as a blue hotel. Another saw the singer marrying the wrong member of a family. Another, my favourite perhaps, had the singer with a broken arm just wanting to come home, wherever that was. I particularly remember the singer's pianist looking up like a shy and gifted pupil at a prize-giving ceremony. No, it was good to hear good words in song. Songs are inherently different to the visual arts and yet a good one will always paint its setting well and chart its journey with an expressionistic flourish. I don’t know if it is just me but I find a lot of the music today which masquerades itself as sensitive and poetic in fact fairly humdrum, as if the singer cannot have felt the depths of experience littered in the lyric. (There have been in the past other exceptions to the sofa singer: the man from Hibbing springs to mind.) And yet there we were, parked on our bright red sofa like we’re at some drive-in movie, listening to a young balladeer and believing every word.

The Artist as a Mama

I have been thinking about respect in the context of the artist today. The artist is definitely one of those people with a refined and at times delighted respect for others, as long as you do not take advantage of her time, which is precious to her. I have also been thinking that the artist has probably spent much of hers listening to others rather than holding court, probably even knowing in advance the ends of some people's sentences, though out of respect never finishing them. I have also been feeling sure this respect has something to do with her upbringing. Her parents have a very strong respect for others. No, the artist does well unto others, which is why I find myself so protective of her today. (I have not always been this protective.) What I am saying is that being an artist and working at home today - self-employed basically - seems to go by unnoticed as a vocation by some, as if art when it really comes down to it is just some kind of hobby. Some of the other mothers are precisely the opposite and pick up on this problem of perception, going so far as to offer kindly to take the children off the artist's hands, so that she can get on with work. But it riles me that the artist as a mother is treated by others with what I consider insufficient respect. I can remember being with the artist at a so-called power dinner with some people who clearly considered themselves very important. At one stage during the conversation, as we all self-consciously dipped into a vast plate of one chopped radish, the artist explained what she did and how she worked at home and how her children were often her subject matter. After a silence - it was like the silence of the damned - one of the women guests said, dismissively, 'Oh lots of my friends do crafty things like that.' This person was an artist too. But she was not a mother. (You cannot be both, she was probably thinking. You have to be one or the other.) It also riles me that these are often so-called feminists saying or feeling such things. I am increasingly thinking that when I introduce the artist's work to people, I should not only tell them immediately that the artist works at home, and that she is a mother, but also that they might like to consider leaving their irony at the door, certainly as far as content is concerned, as this work will not be an experience like any other. Here in the artist's work for example she shows this thing some call, we call, respect. It is an old concept but one I suspect the artist believes has legs. We should maybe all try it. I know I should. I am told it works wonders on the soul.

Live with intention. Walk to the edge.

It is night and I have just walked up a large hill. The sky was a kind of muddy purple and the trees lining the road gave off a whiff of summer. I was with a friend and we were admiring both the buildings and the people in them. A couple we passed in one house were sitting on their large sofa as if gleefully awaiting anyone who passed. They each had I think a glass in their hand. Furthermore he was bare chested and she was wearing what looked at a glance like a fluorescent pink tutu, though again we were walking pretty fast, even if the windows were studiously uncurtained and tailored for people like us. I suppose they were making an exhibition of themselves. Anyway, we passed a larger building which once had been a gallery and I remembered being there with the artist one Saturday or Sunday before we had children. Now it stood like an effigy of its former self, closed but lit. We continued and the scent in the air was evocative of so many things. Rome. Lahore. Sekondi-Takoradi. Savannah. I think it was the sense of people already in their beds which encouraged this voyeuristic respect, and I remember thinking as we crossed the road that I should look upon this walk later as reportable. As we reached a fork in the road I bade goodbye to my friend and we wished our families well and I continued my way up to the artist. On the last stretch I walked down a long and half-lit path for pedestrians only and saw at the far end a brief burst of flame which flickered and eventually disappeared. As I walked on I began to realise what it was and passed the person halfway. The person in question had obviously been lighting a huge joint as I was now walking straight through a thick cloud of smoke and I think I was still coughing when I arrived home and greeted the artist. She, bless, had just finished working.

A grace of sense

A better day for the artist. The large piece is beginning to shine and take shape. The artist as a result is more cheerful and a sense of relief as well as progress has seized the day. Indeed, the artist’s son is replicating this new work on a large piece of white paper taken from his drawing book, and the artist’s daughter is staring at it with a kind of settled admiration. Also, the sun has been shining most of the day and this of course makes a huge difference, especially after so much sobbing rain. It has burned a hole, you could say, through our negativity. It is something of a cliché that when people look at where an artist works they ask about or mention the light, as if artists are the only true custodians of such a phenomena, but the same applies to us all when it comes to natural sunlight. It is our emotional photosynthesis. 'It shouldn't actually be pale,' interjects the artist's son to the artist's daughter. Hang on, the artist's daughter is now replicating the artist’s latest work, too. Fresh from her bath she has returned to the grime of artistic endeavour. The artist’s son already has a large dark mark across his face and now the daughter has dirty hands again. ‘I’m not going to finish mine,’ the artist’s son says. ‘Ever.’ In fact there are three people now all around me doing exactly the same piece, and I suppose by writing down this, I am too. We are the four quartets.