RIP: Red lips are not so red

It is especially useful to take stock of all that is good in one's life on remembrance day, memorial day, decoration day, ANZAC day, call it what you will day. Just as it is important to commemorate the dead or slain, now or in the past, which is what we do, and will continue to do, though it properly aches when we do so. War is war today. Art is art. Take the battle represented in this blog, which is to say the fight to get an exhibition. It bows meekly, and must, in the face of human sacrifice, though it can for the artist sometimes feel like hell. There are not shells exploding as she walks - and she is the first to acknowledge this fact - and the real battle for the artist is not in trying to get an exhibition anyway. The real battle, the true battle, is in the work itself. The constant, daily straining to keep up with the rigours of the original idea. The deliberate, subsequent tending of the task at hand. No, art is not war, and the artist knows this fact, and it is not always true that a great war leaves a country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. There can also be an army of artists. Yes, art can have a role in this recovery. It should be a kind of celebration of peace as well as any visual valediction. Besides, all sorts of battles are going on all the time, and each have their own ways of being remembered. One writer who wrote about war in his very first novel lost his battle against death only yesterday, but for him everything was a fight anyway. His second love was boxing and a kind of lyrical pugilism ran through just about everything he thought and did. (Oddly, he was both an anti-feminist and liberal, which is tough to digest.) His battles were largely masculine. As are war's. (Though I do remember on the edges of one recent splintered campaign on the continental mainland seeing women on the sidelines positively baying for blood.) War kills. Sometimes it must. Art breathes. It lives forever. Let us make great art while remembering the dead. But let us not forget why.