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.