A Work In Progress

The artist sits down opposite. She positions herself to one side on one of five wooden chairs and places a pile of papers on her lap. Shifting again, she clears a purposeful space on the table, sniffing slightly, and flattens a sheet of paper. She now opens a large Cadbury's Milk Chocolate Fingers tin containing what must amount to several handfuls of Derwent Graphic pencils. I am looking at one closely now. It says HB. Just then, our son comes running in. He is wearing his pyjamas and really should be asleep. He wants a drawing book. He wants to draw something. Instead of being reprimanded, he gets what he wants and races back to the bottom bunk to do a drawing while his big sister on the top bunk reads her Horrid Henry book. The artist now gets down to work in earnest. She is beginning a new miniature. At this point, our daughter declares in a loud but musical voice from the bedroom that she is in fact ready now to go to sleep, and the artist, still sniffling, rises from the table and walks to the bedroom, leaving the HB pencil on the table, pointing randomly north-west, and the image in a fledgling, unspent state. 'Am I a nutter doing these pieces?' she says, returning. 'Yes,' she replies, to herself. A strange radio programme is playing American music with a slow country feel and steel guitar. I am asked about now how many tiny figures might work best on the right hand side of the image. This will happen sometimes but what I say has no bearing on any final decision. (I am happy to report.) No, the artist, like all good artists, always does what she wants to do and I would expect nothing less. I look at her now. The pencil is very sharp. Her fingers are clean, too. Her wedding ring and engagement ring, modestly purchased as they were, shine prominently, like marriage, from her wedding finger. I have no ring on my hand but some paper by it, like the artist. On one page I am told of lichens and mosses. 'Soak overnight,' it reads. 'Add to stews.' The artist meanwhile is on her feet again, pouring a glass of milk for our son, in response to a spoken request I didn't even hear. Now she has to get some water for our daughter. The image, like an unfinished miracle now, still awaits its creator, who sits down in the end with a sigh, wiping her tap-wet hands on the sides of her jeans, before resuming work again. I can feel the sharpness of the lead this time, scratching the paper. Her breathing increases, too. She is getting into this. With any luck, the children will remain asleep now. (Oh-oh. Our son comes back, head bowed, but is taken back to bed.) 'What is this?' says the artist: it is George Formby on the radio. (What's he doing in this blog?) A light flickers from the children's bedroom. The artist is off again. They are not asleep. 'Night night,' I say, making my point. Silence.

Stephen Fry

I woke up this morning without too many aches and pains in my legs from my walk and made my way cheerfully enough down to the shops with my five-year-old son by my side. He has a wonderful way of walking. He walks fast, then slow, then fast, then slow again. It goes on like this for some time. We entered the newsagents together. One of the available newspapers carried an article about Stephen Fry, I noticed. On our way towards the coffee shop, fifteen minutes later, an article fluttered in the bin. I swear. It was an article about Stephen Fry. Passing by in a green car, I'm sure, was a good friend of the artist. Now she is always going on about Stephen Fry. 'Watch QI,' she says, affectionately professing like-minded intelligence. Then, as I sat down in the cafe and looked at the newspaper more closely, I realised that on one of the TV channels there was dedicated an entire week to Stephen Fry. But hadn't another channel just done that? Didn't they do that about two or three weeks ago? I know: I never usually mention anyone by name like this in the blog. I feel slightly vulgar doing so. But I feel this need now, I really do, to report far and wide, despite my small readership, the outbreak in this one country of what I suppose we should call stephenfrytis. Or Fry Flu? Don't get me wrong. I have been lucky enough to meet this man who can no longer remain nameless on a number of occasions. He is a terribly nice man. The first time we met was at a magazine lunch and I was on my way to the Middle East. He didn't know me from Adam, which was perhaps not inappropriate given where I was going, but he was very friendly and attentive. He was to everyone. The next time we met I was coming out of a shop having purchased a kilt jacket which he remarked upon kindly and loudly. One of the last times we met was at the launch party of his directorial debut. On each occasion, it must be said, he was wonderful company. But I do not quite see why everything now has to have the Stephen Fry stamp. Bipolar. AIDS. Genealogy. IQs. Poetry. Comedy. The Novel. Royalty. Prize-giving. Apparently he has just turned fifty. I keep thinking of the woman's headstone yesterday. 1877-1977. Freida Jepson was her name by the way.

A Small Notch In The Green Belt

The artist said she missed me today. I was honoured. I left early this morning. I met a friend at the station by accident, then a friend of the artist at another. (For years, a cast of her naked breasts leaned against the wall of the artist's studio, and it was impossible - in a clean sort of way - not to remember this as she gesticulated across her coffee.) An hour later, the friend I had really come to meet - an Arabist with a military bent - was walking in front of me at a cracking pace through pure countryside. Two men and a country trail. Tall trees, as a community of branches, met overhead. Lonely tracks, searching for something, went this way and that. We were, in fact, aiming on walking for the next six hours and we were just warming up. It was amazing to think, as blackberries scraped and nettles bent, that the city was only half an hour away. (Incredible: nobody around.) We were playfully showing off by running now, probably unnecessarily, up a steep hill - which went mockingly on and on - and we encountered a harras of horses to our right, at the top by a long swooping line of pylon wires. For the next half an hour, we walked through dense forest, past dangling hawthorns, before emerging into the green damp light of a small proud field. And the only sign of human life, when it finally came, was in the form of a woman on horseback using a mobile phone. She soon galloped off. We were walking in a giant rectangle and the booklet we were using as our map enjoyed quaint phrases and signs such as 'ignore ways off' and '(!)'. Just then, a hare darted in front. (!) A sign warned of baby deer. Two pheasants took flight. More horses, these ones like shire ponies, puffed and neighed. My legs were doing well, though. I have a bad right leg at the moment but it was equal to any task, I noticed, including a regular succession of sometimes gnarled stiles, which left me thinking it was not as bad as I thought, which is a good thing. We nibbled on our dried and sliced mango nicknamed 'calf's tongue'. The damp meanwhile had turned into a sharp and biting rain and as a result my waterproof leggings justified their inclusion in my rucksack. We approached a famous old poet's cottage. Respectfully, we lowered our voices as if careful not to interrupt his train of thought, even though he has been dead 325 years. At one point I peered into the smoky windows, looking for clues, and saw a colour TV blazing back. We ate brown bread and salmon by a church. We moved on, past a wall of blackthorns, or sloes. Several miles later, we passed through a small Quaker graveyard and one of the graves bore the name of a woman and the dates of 1877-1977. Remarkable. Now, the artist and the children are in bed and I am sitting at the table with unbelievably aching legs and feet, so glad I've written this down before collapsing in a heap. Nature. I tell you.

Skateboards and Art Boards and Overlords

Our son really wants a skateboard. I left the artist with an old friend and went off to the station alone. A skateboard? He's only five. Anyway, much of the city was coming one way and I was going another. I forgot about the skateboard, though I could have done with one. I thought about salmon instead, bouncing their bloody bellies upon tooth-like jagged rocks. They, too, go one way while everything else goes another. Staring out the train window, the sun was out and the sky was blue but there was an almost nostalgic sight of the faintest of condensation rising from people's mouths at the platforms. I was also thinking about the artist. She also exudes - energy, in her case. She was receiving some new boards for her work later on, she had been working on her miniatures earlier, and she was still doing her mural. The stuff of industry, she is. Anyway, I am going on a long hike tomorrow and needed to get some new boots, my previous pair having come away at the heel. I used to know a great deal about boots. I still know, for example, that it is bad news to go for a long hike with a brand new pair but it's either that or wear some brogues which will not protect my ankles if I go over on them. What has this got to do with art? Well, I was also on my way to see an exhibition in an old brewery. The exhibition is by a man in his seventies whom I first met as long ago as 25 years. We have a pleasantly sporadic history together. Across the ocean, when I was with him on his fiftieth birthday, I developed appendicitis. It was with him I once ate lambs' tongues from a giant pan of boiled water when I went to see him one snowy January in his reconstructed castle in the land of the northern chills. Anyway, his work has taken a significant turning again. After years of impressing traditionalists with his early swing from Pop Art to formal sculpture - largely figurative, bronze sculptures - he has gone all Pop Art again, but with a savagely delivered anti-war message and a sweeping back-up of images of torture, Masonic undertones, consequences, and death. The space, it must be said, was gigantic, but the work somehow justified it. Art still talks after all, I was thinking. It was also fantastic to see him again, and to be reminded of this incredible engine he has. I spoke to one of his sons, who was there as one of his father's biggest fans, about this very point. (And to think: he once drank tea with his brother in my little flat across the ocean when he was only thirteen.) He agreed wholeheartedly: his father had one hell of an engine. I think we were all impressed, even if the work is so convinced of its anti-war stance it has to forget the true complexity of the paths still running today to and from the war zone. (Indeed, if only it was a simple case of right and wrong.) Anyway, when I came home and finally sat down on the bright red sofa, I saw our son had made a card. It was of a skateboard. A beautifully rendered diagonal of skate and board. I tell you, art really does still talk.

We Shall Overcome

We have arranged and confirmed the artist's preliminary meeting next week with the old friend who will orchestrate the follow-up encounter with the gallerist with the new white space. It is something to jolt the undoubted labour into a different kind of interaction. And this is good. The artist in the meantime stepped out into the sudden cold this morning and worked for hours in a blustering wind on the mural she is doing as a gift and significant gesture to the school our two children attend. She has been meticulous, practical, seeking advice on paints. Today as a day has turned up its collar. It has been the sort of day to wear only what a polar ice-cap can inform. The heavens have been moody, too, with various warrior seagulls gliding sideways hundreds of feet up in the air and deliberately miles from the sea. Talking of stature, I saw the mural yesterday. It is quite some piece. I think I was taken aback by the scale when I first set eyes upon it. To paraphrase J.D. Salinger again, it raises high the roof-beam, carpenter. In fact, the entire tone of the building's otherwise tawdry architecture is somehow lifted. As I write, the artist is now working on the miniatures, an action matched by our eight-year-old, who is doing an image, also small in scale, of something already done by the artist. Like mother, like daughter. Like art, like art. Our five-year-old is on the floor, checking the various angles he can look at his detailed plastic boar-drawn chariot from. He is like a small film director, a tiny Cecil B. DeMille, doing a kind of surreal bible scene. Come to think of it, what we could enjoy now are one or two sumptuous miracles. Keep the faith.

Save The Children

A controversy rages today over the attempted inclusion in a major show in a leading art museum of a piece containing child nudity and deliberate sexual provocation. Quite rightly, in my opinion, a gallery worker complained to the police about the work. Now, the gallery, as well as the artist, and the extremely well known collector, are under investigation. What the art world seem to forget in attempts to defend such things is that we have a minor being photographed naked here - with its legs apart, according to some reports - and without that minor being in a position to prevent it. Before going anywhere near the issue of what this kind of imagery might ignite in a particularly sick mind, it is exploitation anyway. (I have another gripe - that of the use of dead people in clips, presumably without their permission, such as Steve McQueen in a famous TV commercial, but here we are talking about the living.) There happens to be another artist who has been under the spotlight for this kind of thing. Years earlier she was a model on the other side of the ocean with a fashion photographer boyfriend with a rather tiresome habit of discussing pornography in a loud voice. To have heard this woman a few years ago defend what she was doing - she was photographing her children in studiously lurid poses - was, bizarrely enough, like hearing a child going on about what it's like to be an adult. I believe totally that art should be free to express itself. I believe that people should be free to express themselves. But child protection laws are in place for very good reasons and must be upheld. Of course one must defend the undefended, but this is not the same as defending the indefensible. The only good thing is that the museum may be safe from prosecution by virtue of the fact the piece had not yet been exhibited, and it was a museum employee who contacted the police. (People need their museums.) The artist and collector are different. It's sad. Children, clothed, are also the principal characters in the work of the artist of this blog, so there is a kind of clean authority on this subject here, but such a lasting anger at the exploitation at the heart of today's story. I saw the artist in question across the ocean once. It was on a wintry day and she was sitting by a table with vodka bottles. It was during the opening of a photography exhibition. I don't remember much else, except for the fact she looked unhappy. Was she a victim? Maybe she was a victim too.

The dock leaf grasps the nettle

The week has been hit running and today I have made contact about the artist meeting up with the gallerist in the heart of the capital with the new white space. My old friend, the go-between, is also helping arrange all this. All that needs happen now is confirmation of a time and a place for the artist to meet the person doing the introduction, with some recent examples of her work. This will happen some time next week and coincides happily with a rush of work on some miniatures - black ink on white paper - which accompany the larger pieces, excitingly, like a magnifying glass on some different but connected path. I am watching the work being done right now, four feet away from me, with the unusual sight of a sharp and old-fashioned nib in her hand and an opened bottle of ink. I am tapping on the keyboard deliberately gently in order not to rock the work. Also, her head is bowed and her eyes are covered by her hair. The hair is like a drape across the door to a studio. But I am happy there is a hint of progress on the long road which still lies ahead, and I can sympathise with the artist fully that it does not and will not happen overnight. It is not as if she is not doing the work. No, all she really requires now are some intelligent allies who have a great deal more power in the art world than her husband. (There is only so much I can do.) I also sympathise with the artist because the good news is always needed to outweigh the bad. That said, I have received a fresh blast of possibilities due to an important pair of eyes viewing today something or another about me which I am told has muscularised my chances of a posting. Wait a minute. The artist in the course of that second last sentence has questioningly and diffidently presented me with another small image to look at, her natural modesty preventing the work therefore from receiving immediate praise. This is what happens when you show something - which is good - guardedly and defensively - which is bad. People are put on the back foot. I must make a note of gently suggesting to the artist that she be more confident in her meeting. (Easy enough for me to say.)

A Familial Garden By Day

The artist returned with the children. They had just been to the park to do some cycling and drawing, in an age when few mothers take their children to the park to do some cycling and drawing. I had vowed to stay at home in order to attack the obstructive but friendly chaos taking root in the flat. I do the sitting room first, working from one side of the room to the other. My head as I clean is still filtering the myriad of news stories - war, politics, sport - gleaned earlier from the newspaper and Internet. I am also thinking about a friend of mine from school. He spent some of his morning interviewing on TV the most powerful man in the country, in a chummy but penetrating way. I smiled to myself when I was cleaning. I bet he wasn't visiting the skirting boards of his living room with a brush and bent back. When the artist returned they all looked just as they did yesterday after watching that film. Refreshed, in other words, and visibly revitalised. I am full of admiration. I move to the garden with the children and set about playing football with them, plus our own rather eccentric version of rugby. They grow stronger by the day. It is not even them doing the growing, it is nature's relentless and inspiring growth march. In the garden, there are other signs of this thing we call nature. The holly leaves remain a fetching dark green but their berries predict Christmas. An unidentified plant, for most of the year the colour of a dull grey cloth, is suddenly a subtle but gorgeous red. To our right, twining vines of honeysuckle adorn some wooden beams. A dead bee, examined the day before with a magnifying glass, is tipped from a green plastic chair to the grass. Sycamore seedlings lie scattered on the ground, though one is reintroduced to the air again in order to demonstrate its aerodynamic beauty. At one stage as we all wrestle with the ball a few moments later we collapse in a heap of giggles. The alien parakeets I heard screaming in the garden earlier would not have known what to make of it, sunbathing no doubt being more their thing. Later, we return indoors and as a family are all one.

Home Cinema Verite

A channel this weekend is dedicating its entire playlist to a writer whose many stories have been made into films and TV programmes. It is against this backdrop that I study the backs of three watching heads – one adult, two children – on the bright red sofa, though in this instance watching what our man wrote only the screenplay of. I watch on and listen further. The boy’s laughter is the loudest, the girl's concentration the greatest. A man on screen with a makeshift rocket on his back meanwhile squirts water from his mouth. It is a film also from the artist’s childhood, which gives the occasion an added dimension. Indeed the artist says while watching that it really has left an impression on her. This film for some reason passed me by. I think I used to avoid what I considered to be viewing clichés, or obvious events, but it was no reflection on a thing’s merit, more a need I suspect to reinstate a kind of emotional independence on proceedings, brought on by having from an early age no parents. Basically, the idea of a happy family gathered around a film or programme which everyone enjoyed was alien to me, and I think I resented the idea of too much cheerfulness lest it insulted the tragedy of my parents’ early deaths. (How warped is that.) Anyway, thankfully, this didn’t infiltrate my take on art. If anything, the idea of the artist as an independent creative tour de force was incredibly reassuring. I look across the room again. The film is finished and the three figures have dispersed satisfied from the sofa. The boy is lying on the floor with a small plastic boar-driven chariot in his hand. The girl says she is doing nothing but I know she is flicking through a shopping catalogue, just like her father used to do with his grandmother’s favourite store’s catalogue before Christmas. The artist has now returned to the bright red sofa. She is sitting to one side with an ‘unashamedly spiritual’ book on her lap. Actually, the boy is this side of the sofa now, with his dungeon of doom. I think what it is is that they are all energised. The film has stimulated them. It has given them a boost. This is my point about creativity. It is a life force.

Every kind of artist has a line of defence

It's unusual - for me, as well as the artist - when the artist has no work-in-progress on the wall. I suppose there is a mural-in-progress adorning the school wall, so it is not as if art has been sucked from the body artist completely, and we are left only with some kind of memory husk and a whiff of former glory. But there remains an interesting and subliminal connection between the artist's work and my web logging. It goes beyond the obvious, too, which is to say that of a wife who is an artist looking for an exhibition and a husband who is tangentially writing about it all. And it is like the parting of a kind of twinned intuition when the art - quite literally - is off the wall. It's good, though, to veer in separate directions like this: it's beneficial for the relationship. I disappeared into town today for example for a visit to an embassy, while the artist ran errands and made plans. The embassy I visited was the embassy of my father's father as it happens. It was in a building I have looked at and admired for some time - its strangely modern presence only tolerated on a street lined largely with older and more stuffy buildings. Interestingly, they have erected a new line of defence outside the embassy, in my opinion as much in keeping with the generally peaceful manner of the embassy's citizens as with any need, however real, for a new line of defence. Instead of adopting the concrete-ugly approach of one or two others, they had filled a dozen or so giant plant tubs with soil and concealed concrete - and indeed plants - and these now formed an extra line of defence. One only had to glide through these tall long baths of nature and might in order to climb the few steps and enter the building, but on foot. How civilized, I was thinking. How subtle and how strong. I felt at peace. There was one other visitor, also a man, sitting alone in the waiting area, quietly reading a newspaper in English. He looked Middle Eastern. I must confess, the man who came down to see me was initially bullish, vaguely hostile, and it was not how I expected to be greeted. But, in fact, this turned out to be an excellent way for us both to break the ice - our different strengths exposed from the outset, you could say - and within a minute or so we were enjoying each other's company greatly. It is interesting the different ways people greet aggression. I definitely prefer the plant-tub approach to the concrete-ugly. It is like preferring art to artifice. Mind you, some artists I've met in the past have been incredibly aggressive, too.

An edge to the boundary: one lucky hundred

The artist is out on the town, well, locally speaking, and the children are gathered by the bright red sofa like kids at a bus stop on a Saturday night. There is a kind of sugary rebelliousness in the air at home tonight. Sweets are being chewed, ostentatiously, in open mouths. Shopping catalogues are perused, water sucked from neo-athlete's bottles. The children stare into each other's eyes with a kind of imagined elderly statesmanship. I should be laying down the law, but this is a treat for them, and they deserve it, just as it is for the artist, who deserves it. Besides, I encourage this kind of thing. Treats reward. Everyone gives it a go. The artist spent most of the day working outside on her mural for the school, and there’s not much I don’t know about going out that requires me out tonight. Strangely, I don’t feel like it at all at the moment. My idea of a good night out these days is a good night in. If I have to go out, it's going to a lecture or a talk or a book launch or concert. A year ago I would have laughed at that sentence. Indeed, it would have seemed like a sentence. I would have thought I had too much work to do, or too much social networking disguised as work to do, I should say. At the moment I have a good book. (A fresh and thorough look at the seeds which germinated into the war-zone.) Have I really had my share of bars? I don't know. I certainly haven't had my share of friendship. Friendship is very important to me. You can never get enough of that. I saw a very good friend today - a father again: another boy - and I saw a very good friend yesterday. Not that I don’t have something to celebrate myself. This is my 100th daily blog in a row without succumbing to the usual trend of goofy pictures. I don’t have links. Every blog has links. If I did, I think today's would be this one. Watch it. It is kind of relevant. But it does require sound as well. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs? But I do still have a raison d’etre. And that is to see these blogs through to an exhibition for the artist, even if I am out of the country. She deserves it. The public deserve it. The art world deserves it. Just as acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances, art for the artist is truth made art. Talking of truth, the children are asleep on the sofa. The artist's finest work.

Short interview with the Artist

The Artist sits on the bright red sofa. She has finished her last piece and has not started a new one yet. She may be thinking about the mural she has volunteered to do at the local school. Or she may already be thinking about the nights slowly getting darker.
What got you started?
I just always liked drawing people.
What was your big breakthrough?
I don't know if I had a breakthrough. I don't know if I've found it yet. I'm still waiting for it. Actually, realising that drawing was just as important as painting.
Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?
It's not really a sacrifice.
Have you done anything cultural lately?
I popped into an arts centre yesterday. But I only had time to look at the books. I've just read a really good book, though. Patrick Gale's 'Notes on an Exhibition'.
Are you fashionable?
I know what I like wearing. I know what suits me.
Do you suffer for your art?
Some days. Sometimes I just wish I could switch off for a minute.
What's your favourite film?
'Fanny and Alexander' by Bergman.
What's the greatest threat to art today?
Fashion.
What advice would you give a young artist just starting out?
Keep your vision.
The Artist flicks some dust from her skirt.

Standing within the prospect of belief

Yesterday I sent a brief email about the artist to someone I have known for over twenty years. In the email I mentioned a gallery this someone knows, which happens also to be one the artist likes - basically, they have a bright white new space and the normally reticent artist wishes to approach them about the prospect of a show there. As background, the man I was emailing is someone I first met across the ocean when he was in full swing as a kind of dashing physicist-cum-artist, though I had seen him from a distance a few years earlier when as a curator and art dealer he was touring this continent with some rappish and bejewelled graffiti artists. In fact, one summer, memorably for me, I had nowhere to stay in the aforementioned manic city across the ocean and this person gave me keys to their ground-floor apartment in an old industrial building close to the water: a kind of vacant bohemian hot-spot full of stepladders, paintings, Richard Ellmann biographies, and Norwegian rats (Rattus norvegicus). The next time I heard from him, a year or so later, he was in the mountains on an entirely different continent. (Time passes. Two wars.) Then - all of a sudden - he was in this country, dabbling not in paintings but in music. Now - all change again - he is still in this country but helping run a continental wing of the largest contemporary art database in the world. I must confess, I love people who roam the planet with ungovernable relish and individualistic industry, leaping with their chameleon feet from project to project, even field to field. Their sometimes dashing natures are what grant life colour - if colour is your thing - and as a result can make life more inhabitable. A good looking man with elaborate tastes, and pinpointing manners, he is a good ally for the artist to have. This is why I am delighted to report that in his reply to me today he thought the gallerist mentioned made perfect sense for the artist and said he knew him well enough to arrange an introduction. This, with our fingers crossed, he will do when he returns to the capital, after touring the two major cities of the sometimes chilly north.

The Interim Between The Glances

It is strange how differently something will look if you do not look at it for a while. This is certainly the case with the artist's work when she has been crafting and working on a piece for weeks - if not months - and you have the habit of looking at it every day and then suddenly - boom - it is finished and you kind of deliberately ignore it, put it in your mind to one side, and a few days later - taking a long and deep breath - you look at it again. It is like a preliminary test of time. A gauge of early greatness. A frank appraisal. In the artist's case, you realise immediately the intensity of the work and are reminded of why it was you liked the work in the first place. You gaze at the trawled tension and detailed line - and resultant beauty - and come away from it both informed and - when it's really good - uncannily fulfilled. I had one such reward this afternoon when I switched on the light to help a pregnant friend of ours examine the artist's new piece - which was still on the wall - more closely. (She stepped back from it in a kind of swollen awe.) This deliberate avoidance on my part of not looking at the work for a number of days is indulgent but it is also interesting on another level - it is as if in the interim between the glances a kind of visual fermentation has been taking place. There are one or two other pieces by the artist scattered around the house and they arouse something similar. They are still slowly maturing each day, as the sun comes up and the sun goes down, and include a small portrait of an elderly and gaunt stranger - I may have mentioned him before. This piece the artist recently took out again from behind the dressing table in the bedroom and because it was still poking out afterwards, I was able to take a look at it again. It most definitely had fermented, matured, grown. It had stood the test of time. It deserved its early greatness. It had endured frank appraisal. In a way, some of the pieces now are like flowered genius.

Peace is its own reward

Peace. The colours were brighter but the sea felt the same. (HD cameras and digital colourists are made for each other.) I was sitting with the artist on the naturally bright red sofa after a hectic weekend, watching a part of the world on TV that I knew fourteen years ago. (I have mentioned it as Badenoch before.) I must admit, seeing it again took me right back there. When I was there the creative impulse of so many of the people was often directed inwards, making it difficult to source any sympathy. (Manic exteriors, like too much icing on otherwise subtle cakes, sometimes conceal deep and tragic interiors.) Furthermore, there was a kind of necessary vanity to the people - a few bright fake cherries - which I could see still existing now, in peace-time, on TV, and with that vanity while I was there, of course, came a kind of beautifully self-important disbelief that this, the war, the brutality, the precision targeting, the armed arrogances, was actually happening to them. 'Of all people,' they would sort of add. (Nor do I mean to belittle their plight back then.) Tonight, the lapping of the water, in particular, reminded me of the warped timelessness of being there and travelling around, a timelessness which now seems impossible to believe. Thankfully, the artist beside me on the sofa was able to see the bigger picture - well, bigger than my own slightly provincialised-because-I-had-been-there interpretation. She saw clearly for example the fundamental importance of any cessation of hostilities. She even reminded me - in an age of justified gloom about global security - that there are at least some recent instances of rapid turnarounds in the slit-throat-special stakes. And this, oh yes, was one. Peace.

Semiotics On A Semi-Open Day For The Semi-Closed Artists

The artist and her children arrived after a long and circuitous journey under a bright warm sun and deep blue sky. As they stepped into the revamped complex of what I later discovered to be the former site of a famous old king’s abattoir, I hung back and remembered visiting the artist when she worked in studios like this and they had their annual open studios. As my eyes finished adjusting to the change of light, the children picked up maps from the front desk of the different studios in the building and proceeded deeper into the cavernous structure like two young and happy art collectors, the youngest momentarily fanning himself with the sheet of paper bearing the different studios and artist’s names, while the eldest took it all in her 8-year-old stride. Artist’s names were pinned by some doors like tiny statements, while through the gaps of some of the other entrances you could see the occasional artist wince at the prospect of yet more people, perfect strangers, entering their most private of chambers. (Art is like an affliction to some and does not mask self-doubt.) Anyway, we stepped with continued care through the creative minefield. The atmosphere was one of expectancy and despair. I don't know, I may have been over-reacting, but I definitely felt uncomfortable, as if I shouldn’t really be there, as if the artists were only showing their work because they had been told that that is what artists do, or because it was all part of the deal of having a studio in the first place and that for at least two days every year they had to open them up to the public. The first studio we entered housed a female sculptor. I explained this dilemma of feared intrusion to her and she assured me that the artists in the building were only too happy to receive visitors or guests. She was sitting next to a shy male artist who had woken up at four in the morning and said he was tired as a consequence. (So at least it wasn’t me he was yawning at when I asked about the rats in the studios.) The second space housed a lone artist who sat like a wired crooner on a tall wooden stool by the open door as we entered. As we moved further into his space, which fanned out like a trampled wedding dress, he looked only mildly pleased to have us, and I felt as a result ‘mildly’ imprisoned. His work was large, yellowish, not even hungrily abstract, with a hint – without the strength - of the late surrealism of Matta. We moved on, up some stairs, and the sun shone through the windows, pinpointing the arrows to the next floor. (The children were carrying books and their feet slapped the stone stairs.) The next studio was friendly and another discussion began about the merit of such occasions. What was it with me?

A Man Of Few Words

I know a man whom I consider to be an artist who uses words as his tools and screenplays as his form. He has written many screenplays. He is playful yet accurate like a musketeer. He has been paid huge amounts of money for some of them, though only one has been made into a feature. Several years ago, I went out to see him in the screenplay capital of the world. I bought an economy ticket but was upgraded for no apparent reason at the main ticket desk to business class. When I reached the very last desk I was upgraded again from business class to first and flew all the way - 5456 miles - in pure and unexpected luxury. I was in a good mood when I arrived. The screenplay writer met me at the airport and drove me like a needle through the tapestry of an 8-lane freeway, eventually taking me to his house, a kind of musty writer's paradise on a hill. The yard to his house, as we pulled in at speed, was full of old Citroens and various other engine parts. These littered the ground or leaned like stilts against the stucco walls. Inside the house, his scripts were in bits, too. But he didn't half work them. (He is a tall man at the best of times and would sit in his large swivel chair explaining in a deep voice about the motivations of the protagonist.) In the kitchen, I noticed, a long line of ants marked the route in reverse to the outside world. Outside, one very early morning in that world, a coyote stared up at me like a sinister but unsuccessful hypnotist. (I couldn't sleep and was drinking some tea on the balcony.) As many as 5,000 coyotes roamed the screenplay capital of the world, I was told at breakfast. Anyway, I listened to the writer - in several sittings - read out an entire script, zooming in at certain times and zooming out again, and I loved every page of it. Occasionally, we would tear down some steep or long hill at top speed on his Triumph motorbike just to get some air, but by and large we sifted through the script. It all felt very familiar to me, this working companionship with the artist. Here - except for the coyotes - was familiar territory indeed. Now, I wonder, several years later, what is it within me that so enjoys such company? Is it the creative self-reliance of the artist? No, that can't quite be true, as the screenplay writer - unlike the painter - can be finished with their work and yet the real work - the film making - has not even begun. (This screenplay ended up in what they call 'development hell'.) Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the writer has just sent me a picture. He is sitting alone at the back of a parked van on an entirely different continent to the one I have just described. He is in a forest. He is drinking a small flask of what I believe to be tea, and there is a chainsaw to his right, and behind him - in the van - several dozen logs of wood. His only words in the message ask if he has been right to leave behind the screenplay capital of the world. Well, they may not have coyotes where he is now but I have just read that the lynx is alive and well there. Also, his wife, who is presumably taking the picture, is six months pregnant. (The mother of all screenplays.) I wonder if a screenwriter's wife is anything like an artist's husband.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it

The artist has almost finished her latest piece and amazingly enough looks ten years younger. What is going on here? The artist’s son, my son, sits next to the artist’s husband, me, on the bright red sofa and there is a small plastic toy by his foot. His eyes wander the room and he soon catches sight of the wooden coffin on TV being loaded by four large men into a long black hearse. ‘What’s in the box?’ asks our son. He is squeezing his big toe and the tone of voice is wary. I tell him - without prevarication - that it carries a dead body. ‘Is it a real body?’ interjects the artist’s daughter. I smile gently at her and say I think it is. ‘Why do you have a box?’ asks the son. I think about this a while - he is eating a banana – and wait as he chews. ('Finished,’ he says as the hearse door is shut and the banana devoured.) I look him in the eye and tell him that one reason for putting a dead body in a box is because when a person dies the body after a short period of time will give off this terrible smell. (The language is like this because I am after all in the company of a 5-year-old and 8-year-old.) ‘Anyway, what about in places like heaven?’ asks our daughter, not quite sure where she is going with that one. The TV changes tack and goes back to life again, but I am still deployed on the frontline of more questions about death - the difference between cremation and burial for example is discussed. Moments later, our son looks up at me slowly and without saying a word, then he looks down at the floor again. But then he looks up again: ‘If you bury the coffin and someone finds it, what would they do? Would they put it in a history museum?’ he asks. His eyes water with a kind of innocent embarrassment at his own question for some reason. I reassure him and tell him this is a very good question, which appears to allay any fear of imminent infant mortality or an accusation of stupidity. ‘What would you do?’ I say, trying to make real light of it. ‘I’d put it on my bed,’ he says without any hesitation. ‘No, no, I wouldn’t,’ he corrects himself: ‘I don’t want my bed to get yucky.’ He looks at me deeply. He shrugs his shoulders and smiles. I am so proud of him. I am so proud of them both. I wonder if they pick up on the fact I am proud of them. An hour or so later, the children are in bed and by coincidence the old school building housing the artist’s former studio ten years ago is on TV. (The artists were booted out and speculators moved in.) The programme is about people thinking they're defying death by making themselves look ten years younger. (As I've said, no need for that here.)

3-0

I have left it very late writing today's blog. The reason for the tardiness is a game of international football, and all that that can represent. I know the presence of a game of football in a blog about an artist working towards an exhibition may seem like a weak link, but I will attempt to make it. I am immediately reminded of some of the game's great social history. Its importance in local culture. Working men would finish a long and hard and often underpaid week exhausted and dispirited and yet gather together on a Saturday afternoon to watch their team play to win. For ninety minutes, plus injury time, they would stand sometimes in the wind and rain watching as the game unfolded. Perhaps for ten seconds, or, if they were lucky, maybe twenty, they would witness a piece of skill so magical, so deft and subtle, so impossibly beautiful at times, it would somehow forgive or forget some of the hardship endured over the previous week. No, a fan can indeed be a fine thing and should not be confused with the occasional moronic inferno. A fan is someone who admires something other than themselves. In football this really can be a moment of beauty. A real moment of magic. And there is a reward at the end of it. A result. Even if you lose, it is something more finite than most other news. So what is so different from all of that and art? People gather together under the banner of football to support something they love and to appreciate skills they do not consider themselves good enough to achieve. Well, in art, people also gather, sometimes together, under its banner, to support something they love, and to appreciate skills they do not consider themselves good enough to achieve. And they are looking at results. OK, so I have made the link between football and art - he writes swiftly - so that is the first part covered. But how on earth am I going to make the link between football and the artist? To write about the footballer is an artisan would be too obvious, though by no means unjustified. So how else will I achieve this, especially when the artist here - it must be said - is perhaps not football's - or soccer's - greatest supporter. Or could it, in fact, be that she knows very well precisely how much football can mean to me, and because of this knowledge always gives it a kind of companionable respect, and is this not in fact what I am always doing with her art? There. I tried. I know. It was a long shot. (Back of the net.)

One should never know too precisely whom one has married *

Being the artist’s husband is not the only hat I wear. During the course of a day such as today I am in fact many people. One thing I hadn’t expected to be today however was the recipient of two separate phone calls from two different people, both of whom I know very well, and both of whom I introduced to the other several years ago. I discovered later that they were phoning to inform me that they were about to get married. To each other. On Friday. (Amazing.) I remember when I first introduced them. I can even remember warning the man with a smile to do no wrong. I don’t remember thinking in the course of the introduction of what I should have thought, which is that every such moment is loaded, every such event can lead to something profound, and that no matter what I say to either of them, we are in the deep and rolling laps of the gods. Now, of course, I wonder with another smile: What have I done? Actually, matchmaking is far too grand a title for what I have done, but I have acted as a kind of joy-enabler. Yep. Joy-enabler. That’s the word. I wonder if they knew when they first set eyes on each other that further down the road they would be marrying in arguably the most famous registry office in the capital, where everyone from Judy Garland to Patrick Veira has been tied. And what exactly happens, I still wonder, when two people meet like that and two previous futures become one? Is it – can we make that leap? - like seeing great art? (I remember my first glimpse of Michelangelo's’s Pieta at St Peter’s: that was like falling in love.) Or is it like brushing away a fly, only to discover it was a bee, and that the bee has in fact stung you? (No, I’ll stick to the art analogy.) Kiefer does it for me. Clemente. Rothko. Beuys. It’s funny: it’s always the spiritual ones. Anyway, as I was saying, there were these other hats to wear in the course of the day. I was checking to see if there was news on a wonderful book project I’d really like to do. I was in touch with someone else about the war-zone: some facts I needed confirmed. I was firing off messages on items relating to earlier conversations about film. I was pondering calling the (literary) agent. But each time I went off on one of these largely work-related tangents, I kept coming back to this startling image of my two friends getting hitched. OK, it’s not completely out of the blue. But it is still remarkable. I was telling the artist about it. I was trying to explain how good it was they were getting married. Deep down, I was trying to explain the importance of marriage. I forgot for a moment about us. How funny is that?
*Friedrich Nietzsche

Lines not mines in the lands of sand

I heard from a friend today, a good man who has spent an accomplished period of time in the desert, and I was thinking after emailing him back that the desert is like a giant canvas. And I hope it still is for the last of the Bedouins, badawi, or desert-dwellers, people my friend knows well, still scratching, etching, even caressing their nomadic way across today’s desert sands, the rest reportedly having already begun their possibly last migrations to the cities some forty or fifty years ago. War aside, man’s expression in such places from what I can gather is largely humbling. I love, also, the misleading simplicity of deserts being split into three basic types: semi-arid, arid, and extremely arid. (That’s your lot.) Even aside from my own experience, squeezed as it was into the run-up of a war, I know it to be a hostile place, but how complete and spiritually fulfilling the sense of perspective must be when you are actually born there, brought up to respect it, bound to watch it, and there is no war. Sometimes when I speak to the artist about these things, as she steps back from her work, there is an initial feeling of none of this being real, so abstract I guess is the idea of the desert. And yet when she thinks about it as an artist she seems to understand it immediately, and responds first and foremost to the scale. I also tell her things like how I remember briefly the utter cleanliness of the sand, the harsh coldness at night, the purity of the mornings. (Alternatively, as William Blake said: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand.’) This goes back of course to the idea of beauty and the eye of the beholder. It’s funny that the friend who triggered all these thoughts about the desert is across the ocean in fact in the heart of what I think is forest, not desert at all, reminding us that it’s not just the desert which accommodates the big idea. (And as for the sea...) The one thing possibly in common with all these themes is nature as your teacher. (Can there be safer hands?) I'm also thinking: there are so many places I have not been, so many canvases I have not seen. (The desert is indeed a giant canvas.) But the last thing we need now are more desert shots of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems - MLRS - shooting mournfully across the sky.

The drawer pulls up her drawbridge

I always think Sundays throw a kind of magisterial rank on the weekday. Just by being there they can give entire weeks good press. On a good day Sundays have the power to give life a sweet sheen, maybe by virtue of the fact the rat-race is being held back for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and is somehow anaesthetised. Sundays, bringing it all back home, leave the artist tired, yet you know she will find a way of inching back to her piece on the wall again, for at least two hours, and probably before midnight, taking down the newspapers used to conceal and protect the piece, and only after the children have finally and unwillingly fallen asleep. Sundays are also, I guess, the busiest day for galleries large and small, though in this city mostly large, as hoards of people, tourists often, file sheepishly into the institutions of the great and the good, staring at each other as much as at the art, with limp hands on moving escalators, neat money-bags round large waists, city atlases clasped in tight hands, and eyes forever peering into the unfamiliar distance. Like now, Sundays are also a time for reflection and correction - even the way news is reported on Sundays offers a more considered take on the world, as if everything has a second chance, and because Sunday opinion permeates into the actual news telling, readers can often come away with as much philosophy in their heads as information, which may be a good thing. Sundays are also for lovers, thankfully, as the world withdraws from the often young getting to know each other, and the unfamiliarity of their tenderness is allowed at last to prosper. Sundays are for veiled windows and veiled widows, as solitary figures hunch their rheumatic backs up increasingly steep steps to respective churches. Sundays are for visiting the infirm in infirmaries, gardeners in gardens, prisoners in prisons, and larks in parks. Sundays are for children to wonder why grown-ups are happy just hanging out, when the children want to do things, go places, see people, engage. (Sundays are also for careers to be placed on hold while energy levels are topped up.) Sundays are for catching up on reading, self-examination, deep thinking. Sundays for some are for drinking, drugs, self-loathing. Sundays are for recovering. Sundays are for boy footballers and girl swimmers. Sundays are for the weak and sometimes picked upon not to fear the five-day state. Sundays are for visited graves and crouched memories, for leaving bouquets or running fingers across headstones. Sundays are for tipping a son's bike upside down and oiling the chain. Sundays are for the five-times table. Sundays are for quiet moments, thinking how great it would be to do this project or that. Sundays are for blogs to trawl with a kind of abandon. Sundays, I just wish, were not also days when people die unnecessarily, are bombed, starved, tortured, or taken away. (Sundays have a lot to answer for but at least they try.)

High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city

I have gobbled a book down today, a recent autobiography, on and by someone I know quite well, well enough to have risked inclusion, which I’m glad to note did not happen. At one stage, the writer of this autobiography went off at a geographical tangent, citing his time in a windy and erudite city - which he hated - to the chilly north, a city I knew well, but one I did not know the writer knew. (Just goes to show how little I knew about him.) Anyway, autobiography is a powerful thing and must be told with an awareness of its irreversibility, I was reminded. Like fashion, it can risk later mockery. It must shine with a kind of factual enchantment, I believe, not dogma. This section of his book reminded me of exactly this. His criticism of the city smacked of ignorance. It also sent me right back there again and I suppose I must thank him for that. I was living there at a time before I met the artist and was a kind of loose semi-creative cannon rolling about the city’s deck, putting on shows, working at a theatre, reading poetry at nuclear power stations, and writing once with a kind of unusual innocence from a major war-zone. My girlfriend at the time went on to marry a man who later wrote a novel about this period, but for me the city has never been a page in a book. It is a breathing reality. It is a beautiful place and to some degree responsible for my appreciation of art. I had the privilege of being born by a roaring sea. The horizon held a large castle. The area was quiet, uncomplicated, and unexplored. As a result, it was not until I visited the city in question that I witnessed for the first time in my life such a concentration of good taste, exquisite design, architectural courage, and simple self-respect. It was untainted by too much authoritarianism, if you like, and good enough to drag an essentially provincial people onto an occasional world stage. Galleries were everywhere but by and large bursting with great but old art. There was one man, though, who had dedicated himself to ‘contemporarising’ this city’s love of art and I used to watch him in the corner of my eighteen-year-old eye: a short and intense man with a darting expression and hungry mind. Just hearing him extemporise about art sent me in a hurry, usually through a cold wind, to the nearest modern art gallery. And even if I did not quite understand the work, I would - thanks to this man - feel protective about it, fearful, in a way, of insular eyes. Of course, with this fairly young love of the arts came a love of the artist, too. A famous continental artist with a muscular past and ecologically sound future for example would visit the city regularly. People would wander up and down the many steps of the city, wearing a small badge declaring that the artist was back. But my friend’s book mentions the city in a way I don’t really recognise, reminding me again how dependent beauty is on the eye of the beholder. This goes one step further, too, and teaches us therefore that art is also about ourselves, not just the artist. It hunts us out, too, when it’s good, no matter how we feel, and exposes our strengths and weaknesses. No, art can be our autobiography as much as the artist's. Let us not put it down.

As the evening sky grew dark

We sat together in the park, as Dylan says in Simple Twist of Fate. I was with a good friend, the friend who sent the Chardin postcard the other day. We were talking about the artist and I was updating him with an image of her most recent work. We were in the heart of the capital, close to the government, and my companion was framed as if in a painting by an English lake and some tall English Plains trees. Furthermore a pelican was poking its long beak through the railings behind and two tufted ducks had caught the attention of a pretty young woman in jeans, who in turn was catching the attention of my friend. This person is ostensibly a writer but also an ally to the artist, having both written about her in the past for a major magazine and published some of her work in a literary journal. He suggested in the course of our catch-up that a friend we have in common might actually be able to help the artist because he knows the owner of a gallery the artist has already singled out as one she likes. He knows this man well enough to move into one of his properties. I am going to forge contact with the man if I can next week. You know, it's a kind of honour to represent an artist in these kinds of discussions, especially when the occasion is peppered with soundbites on life, love, and liberty. It's certainly far removed from the pricklier but equally compelling subject matter I was about to enter into again next when I bade goodbye to my friend in order to attend a discussion given by a well known moderator, a brilliant ex-junkie ex-army officer journalist, a retired major-general with pluck and yet kindness, an exotic tribesman with balls, and a Mediterranean professor with impeccable manners and grammar. Even stranger was the so-called rebel contacted on speakerphone, talking to the panel from a mountain. I just sat there, silently sipping my glass of water, wondering what the world was coming to. Information, like war, like life, is ever-changing. Expertise in almost anything these days is impossible. It is getting to the point where art is the only constant. Now, that would be something to talk about in a park.

Menstrual Gallery

From what I know of aboriginal art, it is all about story telling, rituals, myths, sorcery, and magic. The artist is often describing a dream, creation, spirituality. There's usually a link, as I understand it, between ancestral beings and the present. But what is aboriginal art doing on the artist's latest packet of tampons? Is this some kind of subliminal reference to women and their mystical union with the moon? As a man, I'm baffled. (I would be.) Actually I came across a woman artist today who uses menstrual blood as ink in her art. On the grounds that menstrual blood is the only kind of blood that's hidden in shame. (I'm not sure the artist of this blog likes the idea of suffering being seen as the single engine of feminist art.) But, still, I don't get why aboriginal art is featuring on my wife's packet of tampons. Don't tell me it's because the chosen decorative pattern looks like neat drops of blood. You know, when I sailed once on a restored 19th century brigantine that had just circumnavigated the globe, the women voyage crew members on the boat - who had been together for over a year - were menstruating at exactly the same time after only four months. In truth, I find menstruation just as baffling as art on tampon packets - and I'm a man with five sisters - but I do get tired of male indifference to the subject. Did you know that Walt Disney Pictures advised women in their long-lost 1946 animated Disney film The Story of Menstruation that 'once you stop feeling sorry for yourself and take Those Days in your stride, you'll find it's easier to remain even-tempered'? We men must seem so ignorant to women. We're more likely to ask why it takes three women with PMT to change a lightbulb. (Cos it does, RIGHT?) Anyway, all this would be even more meaningless were it not my birthday today. Like you, my life began when a sperm from my father fertilised one of my mother's eggs and about nine months later I was born: a mass of billions of cells. No risk of aboriginal art on the packets then, then. But maybe this was when that flighty person who dreamed up the whole idea of aboriginal tampon packets was born - presumably after reading Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and watching Werner Herzog's aboriginal feature Where The Green Ants Dream. Anyway, this is the end of my birthday blog. Period.

When the student is ready the teacher will appear *

It is late evening and the children are in bed after their first day of school. I have been watching personal online fresh reports from the war-zone by a formerly retired freelance TV journalist famed for smuggling himself into the 1991 Gulf War by faking British Army identity documents. These two worlds - this one and that - seem so far apart it's as if they can't both be true. I hear the amusing but unusual scrunch of the artist's worn fingers on the TV channel changer as she searches for something other than her work to look at. Half-remembered soap stars flash insecurely across the screen. Ugly products people only think they want vie for approval. Like a ship, our modest but buccaneering household tries to understand the brand new current of the day and fails miserably. We have, I know, been only marginally rocked. But the artist kept forgetting things, at one stage almost our son. I cooked in the kitchen listening to our daughter reading and somehow ended up grating my thumb. (There's a rubber frog shot with holes lying on its back by my cup of tea and I think I know how it feels.) The artist, to be fair, has done much today; it's just a case of some necessary tinkering and readjustment. She has, for example, radicalised the large piece on the wall by bringing out more sun, illuminating some of the darkness, in other words, without sanitising the piece. And I was looking at the smaller pieces on the opposite wall. They, too, remain special. (It's late evening and the children are in bed but the artist's work is wide awake.) The artist may be sitting on the bright red sofa grazing the channels but her work knows what it is and what it wants. A good friend has just sent us a postcard with a 1773 self-portrait by Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin. It stares out at us from the front of the fridge. It's like a secret ally and sits well, we hope, among its new friends. It is indeed a welcome guest in the recovering household and when I look at Monsieur Chardin's pastel blue eyes I can also see the artist's, which is strangely comforting.
* Lao Tzu

The Artist's Daughter

This morning I could hear the seven-year-old birthday girl before I could see her. She was somewhere to my left, over there, that way, whispering to her artist mother. I was too busy pushing my way out of a dream about border controls to remember her birthday. But as the remains of my sleep fell to the floor, a gust told me this was no seven-year-old: this person was eight now. 'Happy birthday,' I said, rolling over and squeezing her. 'Happy birthday,' said her mother, on the other side. She looked taller than she did yesterday, her eyes looked that little bit wiser, and the distance between now and the morning I watched her being born grew life-affirmingly longer. I've since seen her feature just as much in the artist's work as down the corridors of life. I know she knows the artist as well as anyone on the planet. She can read the mood like a shepherdess reads the sky, and her appreciation of art suffers only because it is cheerfully stalwart and well informed. One major art gallery in the capital is as familiar to her as a close family friend. Before she could even speak she was accompanied by the artist through snow, wind and rain to see or make art. She has watched the artist work through pain while strapped like a koala to the artist's breast. She has woken up finding the artist next to her drawing her. She has wanted to go outside but couldn't because the artist has been working. She has put a little arm round the artist at times of low self-esteem. She is exactly how an artist's daughter would be - heaven forbid - if you chose one. And today - yes, today - is her birthday. Happy birthday. Don't cringe too much if you ever read this. And may your wishes all come true.

This great solitary ouevre

We spoke at length today about an artist whom we discovered this morning had died just under three weeks ago. I met him across the ocean so a small part of me takes his death personally, which is absurd really as I didn't know him at all well. He burst through the room at a party in tweeds one night, looking like a rock star dressed as Sherlock Holmes, so intense and wanting immediately to discuss the superficiality of the art world. You could feel the ruffled feathers in the room shimmering like fear. He was in such a hurry, too. He was 54 when he died. The cause of his death was given as a ruptured appendix. But he was always in a rush, it seems. I keep seeing his long blond hair parted to one side and the small blond beard clipped like a thick cigar when I close my eyes. He worked as a maintenance engineer in a steelworks before going to art school. When he crossed the ocean in his late twenties, instead of hanging out like everyone else in the warm blaze of an over-bearing art scene he disappeared into a small studio and worked his socks off for a year. A major art critic - a gentle man with white hair and red cheeks - wrote about some of his work in the major broadsheet and the rest - as they don't say - was a pocket of short-lived but intense art history. Soon after, our man defied yet another trend - that of soaking up the praise and preening oneself forever in public - by returning back across the ocean to his native land in the chilly north, claiming he needed some space. What I think really happened was that he could see fashion's tide begin to turn again. The obituary in front of me as I write on the round red table has a large colour reproduction of one of his pieces, and it has to be said that the unfashionably figurative nature of his work shines through. How dare the art world have turned its back on him. He was another victim of other people's idea of fashion, and the art world that thrust him into the spotlight later switched him off at the mains. (Cannot something be both universally and timelessly profound? Does it always have to have some too easily decipherable code saying, 'Now!') They say he never doffed his hat sufficiently to the people who make up the art world. I'm doffing mine to him right now. While it's warming to hear his belief in painting never wavered, I'm still waiting for the critics. In fact, I can hear some of them now. 'Actually, he wasn't that bad,' they'll say. Someone else: 'You know, at the time some of his paintings seemed either dated or juvenile, but when you look at them properly ... they're all rather deep.' As early as the late 1990s his health had begun to fail apparently. They say he lived dangerously. Well, conviction is dangerous.

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men

As the artist sleeps the night after the birthday party, the artist's son has a dream. He travels through these long broad tunnels of cauliflowers into a large and open lake where birds with little birthday notes in their beaks dive from left to right and right to left again. Fish of all colours leap from the water and soar through these multi-coloured rings held by fantastic stand-up cherubs in the clouds. He makes it through entirely and lands on a giant leaf, getting caught in the current. Then he travels faster and faster, towards a giant waterfall, and after a while goes sailing over the edge, gliding like a leaf himself, cutting through the air like a paper dart, and by the time he lands at the bottom, he is lying on his back with a broad five-year-old grin on his face and with his little presents beside him, waving at the friendly gorillas in the trees, nodding at the odd hippo's head emerging from the water, and belly-laughing with the pikes. There is no doubting it: he is happy in this dream, and he bears none of the anxiety befalling some of the crabs at the bottom of the lake. He looks up with an air of bliss as he continues through the water and spots high above himself a flying pig. He so wants to be up there himself - he likes pigs - that he wills himself into the air like a magnificent boy in a flying machine and starts - as if by magic - flying higher and higher. As he looks down he can just about see everything - the wooden huts being built at a rate of 3 million a second, the factories churning out custard pies, the armies gathering in the distance with their feet stuck in concrete. My, he shakes his head and goes even higher. He feels the warmth of the sun and suddenly remembers the chocolate car in his pocket. Better eat it before it melts, he thinks. And so he does. 'I like birthdays,' he whispers, to the make-believe earth below. 'I really do.' This last phrase wakes up the artist, but not yet the artist's son.

hi5

It was the artist's son's birthday today. The brightest face in the land beamed five years of joy at us both this morning. My son. His excitement was as wonderful and as innocent and as a flower without cynicism. He ran through the room like an erupting balloon to gather up his presents. Paper and tape were ripped apart. Gifts were revealed. A dungeon of doom was erected. Ghosts were planted in cages. His elder sister, whose own birthday it is in a couple of days, was on hand for him. Whatever he wished for she would endeavour to get for him. He did everything. He leapt. He spun. He played with his toys as if under their spell. (The artist took one last look at her work and covered it up.) And then the birthday boy led his creative troupe - the four of us - out the door to buy the food to feed the family on its way to the party. Five years old today, I am thinking. Five. I watch the artist marvel at her son's progress on this planet. She knows the children are her greatest creation. That is her edge. We returned home. I had twisted a nerve in my back and was straining like a clown to get everything ready in time. But of course when the people began arriving it was all somehow in shape. We ate salmon and creme fraiche mixed with lemon juice sandwiches and roast beef with lettuce and gherkins in sandwiches. The birthday boy played with his cousin, again watched admiringly by the artist. There was the odd grey cloud above, competing with the blue sky. There was laughter from the next garden but one - another party. The artist looked content throughout, like a selfless critic at an exhibition. She is at her strongest when giving, I was thinking. The birthday boy continued playing and running. He looked older and acted accordingly. There was also an assertion to his stride, and a confidence to laugh. This is the peace we defend.