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.