Faith, A Leap of

Wait a minute, hang on a moment. You're actually telling me a solar year is almost six hours longer than three hundred and sixty-five days? That can't be right. Isn't that typical? Just when you're beginning to think that it's all perfect, that the world and all its cosmology if not its inhabitants is rhyming, some fact, some pick-axe of a piece of scientific detail comes along and shows you the fallibility of it all. But that's of course why we have to go and add this extra day, this leap day, this today, to the calendar every four years. The Gregorian calendar, that is. In the Islamic calendar, leap months are not used at all. (How does that work?) It actually gets worse. Exceptions even to the leap year rule are required since the actual duration of a solar year is slightly less than three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days. (Christ, it takes a leap of faith to conjure with all this.) Rather charmingly, mind you, in some cultures it's a tradition that women can propose to men during a leap year. For example, in the flatlands across the choppy sea - in the country of my paternal ancestors, in other words - tradition has is it that women may propose on leap day February 24th and that refusal from a man must be compensated with twelve pairs of gloves. The French-Polish painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) was a Leap Day baby. He is considered one of the last century's greatest realist painters. I'm not a fan. I just feel uncomfortable with the work. It may be that his depictions of young girls were not pornographic at all and simply acknowledged the discomforts of early sexuality. But it leaves me cold and uncomfortable. It is as if a selfish adult statement is being made at a child's expense. Very different to the artist of this blog. She for example uses childhood as one of her themes in her art, her major theme to some degree, but always you get the impression the point is one of universality and respect - for both subject and viewer.

Chop-chopping choppers and cargo hooks of art

As I crossed the busy road and walked the narrow pathway to pick up our son* from school, the light in the sky and in everything else reminded me most evocatively and to some degree sadly of the other capital. In fact, all that was missing were mountains in the distance and several million battle-scarred inhabitants. There was even a chopper crossing the sky. A green military helicopter: one of those famous twin-engine tandem rotor heavy-lift helicopters popular, to continue the vernacular, with troop movement, artillery emplacement and battlefield resupply. In this instance, I suspect it may only have been transporting politicians. They have such a distinctive sound, don't they? Part-spluttering. Part-droning. The helicopters, I mean. (Not the politicians.) Actually it is an alarmingly reassuring and heart-stirring sound in a conflict zone when you hear what is in effect your own defence system traversing the sky. Everyone from a squaddie to a royal will tell you that. Somewhere in that feeling, I suspect, is the sometimes necessary intoxication of war. I say 'necessary' aware of the controversy of such a comment, but some wars simply have to be won and if the sound of a helicopter puts you in a winning mood then so be it. Nor, bringing it all back home, is it such an improbable leap to say I still also see the all-important task of the artist getting an exhibition as a kind of battle, though only recently have I developed the appetite for the kind of singlemindedness required in order to win such battles. Though I have the artist mostly to thank for that, I can probably give myself some credit too. I still drag a tied and tired sequence of empty tin cans of weaknesses a mile or so behind but there is a small part still evolving, still growing, and determined for example to honour the artist's steadfastness with the pleasurable witnessing of an exhibition. The work, as I have said countless times before and will enjoy saying countless times more, most certainly deserves it. In an age of conflict, a corridor of dry concern, hers is one of the peace treaties and a small part, believe it or not, of a big solution in global conflict prevention. Win it on the walls.
* Our delightfully social daughter went to a friend's house.

Ever fresh and fresh

Let me describe to you the living room. I have mentioned it in many ways many times before but I have usually been physically accompanied in the room when writing about it. This time there is no one around: nobody. It is a million miles from the war zone and all I can hear is the washing machine. The artist has disappeared to pick up the children from school and take them to a friend's house. I have just returned from our closest supermarket with some food. (As the artist is going out with her sister tonight, I thought it a good idea to cook something special for the children, something they like, as they will inevitably miss their mother and need consolation.) Anyway, the living room. A dozen or so newspaper pages are spread out across the silent floor by one of what are now three art pieces screwed to the wall, two of which are works-in-progress and one not quite sure if it is finished or not. It is very much a working scene. An open-cast mine. The artist's materials sit like spices in the boxes on a table to my right. The small turquoise blue plastic stool, upon which she stands in her clogs to reach the higher parts of whatever the piece she is working on, stands alone in the middle of the room. It is like some curious item from a model of a TV studio. Next to the stool stands our son's intricate and treasured pirate ship and next to that is the bright red sofa. It is all so still - everything - it is as if Mary Celeste was an artist and not a ship. Also, there are no electric lights switched on in the room, the window blinds are open, and the afternoon light pouring in gives the faintly smudged white walls an air of omniscient credibility. Furthermore, at the far end of the wall is a smaller work of art and this is covered entirely in newspaper, with the paper taped to the wall. This is in fact a portrait of the daughter of the sister the artist is going out with tonight and who will be staying with us later. No, there is something fascinating and slightly loaded about an image covered and hanging on the wall. While I have the advantage of seeing its progress daily, I am sure it is even more exciting having seen nothing of it at all. Memories of unopened presents as a child spring to mind, adolescent unbuttonings, the breaking of the spine of an exciting new book. That's it, isn't it? Art is at its best when served fresh and if it is great it will always be fresh. Meanwhile the cars and heavy vehicles muffled only slightly by the line of trees between here and the busy road continue past the window. Bills and books and bluetack sit on the table beside me. Life goes on like traffic and one by one our destinations are reached. Here in this room is no roadblock.

Song for today

I left the artist hard at work and firmly pulled the door behind me and climbed the cold steps into the light and made my way across the open expanse of common land between me and the station; I was listening to some music on my phone and the words were fighting with the wind for my attention. I braced myself: the woman twenty or so meters in front looked like a mountaineer, so strong was the wind gusting towards us. Just then, a song by the name of 'Villanelle For Our Time' came on, sung by Leonard Cohen, a man who, like Bergman, is wittier than people credit, though on this occasion deadly serious.
From bitter searching of the heart,

Quickened with passion and with pain

We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start...

The clouds were moving fast and when I wasn't thinking about the words I was thinking about the time between now and when the gallerist gets back. It is all so ambiguous. Really there is no way of knowing what she has to say. Hope flatters. Still, I noticed the gap in the clouds and the sun slanting through, stroking and clearing the shadows from the grass where during one former conflict there were allotments.

Men shall know commonwealth again

From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,

But now, with keener hand and brain...

There is something unusually reflective about song, I was musing, and something entirely non-reflective about the way people go about their business in the capital. Ah, the sun was now reflected on the small pond, blindingly so, and I waited for a car to pass before safely crossing the road.
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart,

And neither race nor creed remain

From bitter searching of the heart...

I was invited with the artist to an exhibition this evening. We couldn't go. I don't think we wished to, either. It was at a gallery who kept the artist waiting for months to make a visit that they promised to make and the artist never asked for. They never did make it in the end.
Not steering by the venal chart

That tricked the mass for private gain,

We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art

Whose symbols are the millions slain,

From bitter searching of the heart

We rise to play a greater part...

But first I must get to the station and ride into the centre of the capital, crossing my fingers for the artist and us all. Not heavy of heart but gleaming, like the sun now encompassing all of the city.

The Other Capital

This capital here is different to the other. Here the problems lie in the execution. There it is in the executions. Today I passed the public galleries and worked my way through time-honoured streets and rich biography. This punishment of luxury of sorts is important and not deemed unworthy by its present relative peace. Just because one part of the world is in turmoil does not mean the rest of the world should suffer too. The body global is like the body politic and is connected enough. Besides, we from this more stable capital are also represented in the other. Many people far more accomplished than me work very hard indeed to eradicate the poverty over there, to unshackle the women, stimulate the growth, becalm the fundamentals, and unpoison the crime chalice. When I look at the city here and admire its engineered elegance I do not feel any guilt; I feel only a kind of non-jingoistic pride. There you go, I sometimes think. This is how it can be done. Yes, it is full of flaws. Full of them. No, it is not perfect. By any means. But it does meet and greet and it does accommodate. Debate thrives here and is spectacular. I wandered into a famous map shop in the centre of the capital this afternoon. There on the shelves was the bristling of a kind of nomadic erudition. Silent wanderers had done their research of ancient lands and the testimony stood before me pret-à-lire and sheathed in evocative covers. I had met up with a friend earlier, the friend who travelled alone across the desert. Friendship is not the preserve of this capital alone, I was thinking as I looked at the spine of one book exhibiting sepia-tinted palm trees and sand. Indeed, where there is poverty and where there is hardship, as indeed there is in and around the other capital, there will always be friendship. It may not be to the visitors. It may not be to everyone. But it will exist. This - friendship that is - is life at its best. With friendship life does not discriminate. Only with war. I also wonder how the gallerist is getting on with her holiday.

Landscape

It is sometimes as if I have never been away, so brief was my going and so far the location. And then I get a flash of something. A thought. Deep in my psyche, like a smouldering pike, there is movement. Small bubbles on the surface denote its place. Though today traditionally is a day of rest, I am already looking into the plans required in order to raise my game. More importantly, however, I have been slipping into life again with the artist. We are family. Our daughter returned tired from her sleepover and our son enjoyed single status last night. The artist is rested, I was thinking as I sewed more grass seeds into the bright green but occasionally threadbare raked and poked lawn in the back garden this afternoon. The restfulness is obvious not only in her face, I was thinking as I stamped the seeds down again in order to help them germinate, but in the way she moves like some kind of lucky spectre from one room to another - slowly, easily, calmly, and smart. It is as if the pores of her skin have been cleansed with a kind of organic joy by the air in the foothills. It is strange how I think in terms only of beauty when thinking about the foothills and the mountains thereof. The mountains in the war zone are just as epic, in fact more so, and yet something far graver parks in the mind when considering its warrior skyline. Like butterfly mines, deliberately shaped to look like toys, human beings made small by the landscape move in lines of hatred towards their prey. Giant green ants land on rocks. Plants poison and addict. Rustles, in bushes, in sand, in caves, in war, predict death. But now that the toys on the floor by the bright red sofa are being gathered up and taken into the children's bedroom by the artist, I marvel at the grandeur of the landscape at home - its civility, romance, and charm. What is so easy for us is a deathly leap for others.

The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work

I have done nothing much but sleep over the past two days. But our son is now here and our daughter is enjoying the self-imposed mystery of a sleepover over at a friend's house. As I write, I can hear the artist gently urge our son to sleep. When not sleeping I have been loosely reassembling my thoughts - old and stiff playing cards drifting down a fast-moving mountain stream come to mind - while leafing through my notes and cards in my hardback notebook. It frustrates me that the artist had not been in touch with the gallery when they were making their various attempts to contact her, only because I had made provisions for that. But this is also her unique strength. She is so seeped in art itself she has no time to fathom its curricular business. However, we must now wait for the woman who came round to return from her holiday and this will not happen for over a week. When I sleep I am like a runway, across and upon which are landed planes of every hue. I have been back to the war zone. There is the plane of reason, the one of visuals, the jet of fury, the hot air balloon of comic self-indulgence. I will be returning to the war zone - the first trip was just a taster - and already I feel in touch with a different world. War, I hate to say it, can also bring out the best in people. The artist looked well when I collected her and the children from the station. She looked rested - from all the hard work and successful but tiring mothering. I sat facing them in the back of the taxi as the city became our backdrop and the road our good route back home. Strange without a close protection team. In our children's eyes are many corridors and I love each one. Now, as three candles burn without grief in the fireplace, and my fingers pound the keyboard, I am aware of the work I must now do in order to make good things happen. I am aware of the broken hearts and minds. The artist is best at making good things happen through hard work. She just doesn't like reading emails from prospective galleries. It is an intrinsic and undeserved and very beautiful fear of failure.

Only the dead have seen the end of war

What I can say is that the light was improving when I left. The gods were playing with the dials and turning it up just a notch. The mountains in the background had a frankness about them and sat well among the helicopters and multi-armed agents of peace and state preparing like me to get the hell out of there. But I was thinking about the depressed faces I saw by the side of the road as we were driving there. I wasn't just thinking about myself. People who have known only war, I mean. The tormented. The angry. The fragmented. It was easy enough for me. I was at the end of my first phase and about to return home. But for those whose country I was leaving, it was misery as usual, just as it's ever been - life as a lingering, blistered lack. That said, I also found myself discussing the artist to a man with incredible eyes and elite skills also waiting to board the plane, the tail-fin of which was reflected in the large round window set like a clock among the cracking white paint of the small airport terminal building. Towards my right, a man sat alone in a ramshackle garden with a satellite-pointed laptop on his knee. Young soldiers squeezed their chins with fingers and thumbs and one old man tried to light an old heater but gave up in the end. Battle-hardened vehicles sat like warriors a few meters away, but I wouldn't be needing them for another while. It was cold - where I was standing was exposed to the winds from the mountains - and I was thinking about childhood. On the bus to the plane we were asked to disembark in groups of five and were rigorously searched. 'New threat,' said the fixer. I watched as the man I had been speaking to got through and safely boarded. Soon we were flying like a kite across snow-set mountains. Next we were skimming clouds through which mountains like lizards could be seen dominating the sand. When we reached the oil terminals it was like looking down on blotches of power. I changed planes. I was restless to get home. This I did hours later. Yes, I was back. The artist and the children were away. But I was back in the flat with the large red sofa. Later, as my amazement settled, I checked the artist's unopened emails - she had asked me to do this when I phoned from the airport. Remarkably, she had one from the gallery who had come to see her work. They were desperate to get in touch.

Art Lives

The day we cease our art is the day we stop stop breathing.

What can I say?

Sturdy.

Happy Valentine

I don’t know what the artist would make of it. It is like an oasis at the side of a desert, a gulf between us, a wet fruit in a dry skin, a chapter in your own book that you did not write. Tall thin buildings stab the hot smoggy air like bent knitting needles striking out from a half-baked pancake. Serious faith mingles with sun-reflected aspirations. I have not reached my destination. (I shall not cease from exploration.) A mixture of fog and snow where I am heading means a delay of at least another day. Such is the nature of the beast. But I am not alone. I have carved the initials of some kind of camaraderie with someone also working for the same people, and our tribal elders so-to-speak have found a way of taking care of everything. As a result, I am sitting alone in a hotel room on Valentine’s Day having managed to catch - like amnesia - a few hours sleep. Desert images from the plane journey to this moment flash back. Oil fields pocking Planet Sand. Night flashes like night sweats. But I do remember the artist, oh yes, and the children. As I write, the sound of air-conditioning hums like a progressive, slightly dulled choir. Just then, as I finished that last sentence, there was a knock on the door and a polite man in a black suit entered with a beautiful bowl of fruit. There is no round red table, no bright red sofa. But there is fruit. I am due to fly out of this fictitious oasis early tomorrow. I am sure this world and the world belonging to my destination could not be further apart, and yet both my destination and the other war zone are really no distance from here at all. Is there some kind of moral there, a clue perhaps to the mechanics of peace rather than the splinters of war? What is it for example about one place and another that makes one prickle so with violence and the other chill like a perfectly cooked pepper plucked from the fridge? It can’t just be natural resources, for obvious reasons - one of the war zones is on fire because of oil, this one not. Was it because it was attacked? (Sometimes, obvious is illuminating, instructive.) Anyway, I am watching the news. I am thinking of the artist. I am eating fruit. I am poking through the plastic seaweed of this culture clash in order to get my bearings. I may slip out of contact again.

Salut

I salute and love the artist and my family as I slip from view.

Never Give Up

The art can be ripe. The notes can be neat. The scene can be set. The pens can be counted. The gadgets and chargers can be placed in some kind of order. Printed tickets, electronic or otherwise, can be neatly folded and placed into crisp white envelopes. Clothes can be laundered and gutted from polythene. Unfamiliar transit reservations can be checked. The currency exchange can be examined in some kind of non-commercial preparation. Foreign newspapers, the editorials imagined as pertinent, can be finished off. Lists can be culled with the stroke of a pen. Forms of goodbye can be softly spoken. Boots can be polished. Fear can be sublimated. Contingencies can be revealed. An artist's cheek can be kissed. A deep breath made. A pocket patted. A key felt. But nothing can prepare for that moment when something happens out of the blue and causes everything to go pear-shaped, which happens to be exactly what happened to me today. But, and I must repeat this to myself as well, it is precisely how we deal with these unexpected incomings that defines the crisp edges of our abilities and survivalist flexibilities and instinct. My poor artist, though. She, like me, was tuned like an instrument for the 'concert' tonight, but it isn't going to happen. It will. Give it a few more hours, day, or days. We, I, it, will get there. Like life itself, like the artist's search for a show, like the child's pursuit of a dream, like the shuttle racing through the sky, nothing comes easy for those who cannot see where they are heading but know that the not-seeing is part of the deal. But it comes. It does come. It has to come. If you never give up, if you keep the faith, if you hang onto the ledge with your fingernails, you will be rewarded, you will be believed, you will climb back in again. Never, let's say it again, give up.

Avail

I met my friend who has lived for long stretches of time in the desert for some lunch today. A bowl of wide thick Japanese udon noodles with seaweed and two slices of salmon sashimi on a side dish were served. Green tea was the beverage and a few topical articles were exchanged before some long distance thoughts about the war zones were aired. I don't know what the desert equivalent of a fish out of water is but my friend is probably more at home by an oasis than a metropolis. His spine and perception makes for good rumination in any context, however. The artist meanwhile has been waiting to hear from the gallerist who came round the other day and it was impossible for me not to be also thinking about her as the centre of the capital bubbled and our conversation flitted from reportage to my trip to my friend to the artist and back again. Mind you, all this waiting for news from the gallerist occupies an even larger space in the mind of the artist, I am sure. Let us hope there is no tilt, no crash. I suppose it would be asking too much for her to receive confirmation of a show just as I am obliged to either tone down, or stop completely, the blog. I suspect my imminent departure features in her psyche like an irritant as well as good news. I am trying not to make too much of it. Especially to the children. Our 5-year-old son will occasionally glimpse conflict on the news and ask a searching question. ('Do guns not work sometimes?') Our 8-year-old daughter's rather charming way of dealing with it is to tease her father when talking about where I am going. It does tally with previous experiences and adventures, so I'm not strictly a scorpion out of the desert. (Is that the one?) A goat down from the mountains.

Ceremony of the Horsemen

Action! I have been watching a film awards show with the artist. With some amusement we have witnessed like bad critics various movie stars moving silkily down the scrubbed carpets before levitating like digitally enhanced ornaments onto the thinly constructed stage to receive their peace prizes. (Not.) Actually one or two faces in the audience were half-familiar to me. One of them was a well known thespian whose diary I had to arrange over and over again a number of years ago, in what feels like another lifetime, in order to get them to do some ADR - additional dialogue recording - on an otherwise bearable film. (This person cancelled me 21 times, usually only a few minutes beforehand, and still put in a crackling performance.) It is a pompous business. A majority of schlock films aside, however, at least one or two poetic souls appear to have made that rare transition from penniless auteur to mainstream minstrel in one piece. Abstractions in some films are even acceptable. In fact, to be fair, some of the film makers and much of the public have never really been the problem. No, it has always been the money men - and they are usually men. They have this utter conviction for some reason that all members of the public are dumb, while they sit among their sunlit clouds unaware of the precise nature of what it is they are dumping on us all. Maybe I am old fashioned. I still flirt with the notion that there is an essential intelligence to every living soul. It is just a question of believing that and finding a way to absorb, enjoy, or accentuate it. Isn't it? Not so long ago - the artist was working - I took the children to the cinema. It was a good enough film, but our experience of the cinema itself was loud, garish, and cold - air-conditioning in winter is like people cleaning their houses before the maid comes round. Meanwhile on the TV screen a woman with somebody else's body reaches the stage. She struggles with the autocue. I look at the artist on the bright red sofa and I stare at my notes on the round red table. A number of people from where I am going have ripped up their contracts in the past few weeks and left. We stop watching the awards ceremony and miss the winner of Best Male Actor mentioning our children's school in his acceptance speech. Serves me right. Cut!

Saturday Night Fever

I actually began this blog with a slightly rudderless tirade against all the pressures in life that people face these days, especially to conform, but I deleted it in the end as its inclusion felt rather unsporting. Perhaps it was the calm that has befallen the flat ever since the children and the artist cleared some space in the living room, turning down the lights and dancing solidly for eight songs as I played some music through the laptop. There was fancy dress. Clowning. Pastiche. Much disco. I even filmed some of it on my phone as practice, if you can believe it, for my trip. Now, as the artist lights a candle securely set back in the fireplace, and our son holds the artist's cup of decaffeinated tea in his hands, and our daughter tells me how many pages of her book she has read, any kind of complaint seems ill-placed. No, the rest of the world, family and friends excepted, can back off just now. We have our invisible wall and we just so happen to be using it. Invisible, because manners are important. A wall, because people penetrate. Also, as the candlelight illuminates the blood-red rose petals above the fireplace, I keep thinking of things I will need shortly and jot them down in my large hardback notebook. Once the list imagines itself complete, I will deduct from it what I think I can get away with not having. Research. Planning. Contingency plans. What equipment will I need? These are the sorts of questions. I have also been told not to overpack. I seldom do. After five years of living across the ocean, I returned with just the one suitcase, and that was pretty empty. Admittedly I disappeared to the desert fairly soon afterwards, via the odd broken bone and car crash, but I have never been particularly materialistic.

A Pair of Art

Today I think is the first time since the artist was sick over a month ago that I've actually seen her sit back a moment from her work, move aside from the industry, the gifted labouring, and all that diligence. I am sure that the meeting yesterday will have had something to do with that. (The result of which remains, unusually, in the lap of the gods.) However, it is still interesting to me how some people will always find a way of staying creative even when they are trying not to be creative. Today for example the artist bought some rail tickets and booked some seats for a northbound train next week with the children to their grandparents in the melodic foothills. On her way back from the station she saw in a charity shop a pair of bright red Spanish high heels. Quietly, she slipped them on in the shop and decided to buy them. When she returned home she walked into the kitchen and took out a tube of acrylic Mars Black paint from the sink and proceeded to completely redesign them. Afterwards the two heels bore the unmistakeable imprint of the artist's detailed doodling. Now we had a pair of art. The creative impulse had been satisfied. The height was fetching. She didn't wear them out - she is with friends at the moment - but the children were amused. (The artist may have taken a night off but she had just taken our daughter to gym.) Now they - the children, not the heels - sit on the bright red sofa under a duvet; I am at the red round table, working on my trip. And no one's got the Tombstone Blues.

The Visitor

With the kind of confidence that perhaps only a certain kind of truth can exude, I watched this morning as the artist prepared the living room for the visit from the gallerist. The bright red sofa was pulled to one side. The African mat was rolled up and moved. The round red table was squeezed into the corner. Dust was wiped. Blinds were hoisted. (OK, I helped.) Then, one by one, the artist carefully slid the heavy completed pieces from their precarious resting place by the front door - space, like art, is a premium round here - and we posted them in various positions around the room. I then worked on the bathroom, cleaning the sink and bath and mirrors. I had already opened the front and back doors and a cool air blew through the flat. Then I blew up a yellow balloon. This was to leave outside the house for the visitors' taxi. Anyway, all done, I kissed the artist and wished her well. Her visitor was imminent. She had phoned, even left a courteous and friendly email confirming the visit. As for me, I was on my way to see a friend and former Marine for lunch. I was almost there when the artist phoned. Apparently the woman was as I remembered in her gallery a week ago - informed, gentle, confident - and the artist told me that she thought the work was fantastic. The artist sounded the kind of positive you want. A meeting without the artist will take place next Monday at the gallery during which the artist's work, with the benefit of some printed images, will be discussed. The gallerist will then get back to her. I am pleased it went well. The artist is trying to be philosophical but I knew there is real trust there. I also noticed a real strength in the artist's voice when she told me her news. It was as if the currency of their exchange was high art indeed.

Artist's Essentials For Survival, Part 2

PERSISTENCE
If an idea feels right but doesn't seem to yield anything at first, keep working on it, keep shaping. If it is really good, it will declare itself.

WET ART
Avoid placing wet or porous works of art near fires, especially papier-mâché type work that has been accidentally submerged in water - it may explode when heated, producing dangerous flying fragments which could take out an eye if you are close to the fire.

COLD STUDIOS
If heat is lost rapidly - rewarm rapidly
If heat is lost slowly - rewarm slowly

STUDIO LAYOUT
Latrines must be downhill of studio and away from the water supply to avoid risk of seepage.

GALLERIES
Be suspicious of any gallery with no goodwill, or avaricious dealers present. It is likely to be regretted. Check eyes for soul which might indicate true prosperity. Always show art in intelligent rooms. In foolish circles, art without stewardship becomes dross: its company must be respected.

HOW TO RETAIN FUNDS
Avoid giving away too high a commission. Keep cool. Never lie. Be as much an admirer of them as they are of you.

FEAR NOTHING
You are an artist. As such, you must aim high.

Congratulations to the man with the show

There is a present exhibition featuring an artist who now regularly sells his paintings for millions of dollars yet never do you feel money is the point. This is rare today and makes me happy, because unlike so many of his peers his work is actually about something. Something bigger than himself, too. I have a second reason for being happy about his progress. Years ago, not so long after I had witnessed my first ever firefight and shortly before I moved across the ocean to the city of the scraped skies for five years, this very artist came to me for some advice. (As I remember it, we were in a former timber warehouse the first time we met.) Anyway, though I haven't seenm him in years, he was a shy person then and is no more than a year younger than me, and though he was tall he gave the impression of not wanting to take up too much space. I of course immediately suggested I had no advice to give, in fact felt embarrassed he thought me capable of any. (If he had asked about war, then OK ... I might have had something to say.) Anyway, he picked my brain about his work all the same and I liked him immediately. We even discovered that his father before travelling the ocean and starting a family there had gone to the same school as me in the far chilly north, though naturally before my time. As for the work then, it was perhaps more about wit than wonder but still had glimmers of the respect for nature and humanity so attractively prevelant in the work today. In time, I would recommend his work to people I knew across the ocean myself, but no one responded. I remember one time wanting a fairly senior gallerist over there to show him but I was instantly mocked, though not unkindly, and it was suggested the work was uncommercial.

Universal Privacy

The centre of the capital bristles with power like a massive building bristling with antennae. And yet the people with the power are just as vulnerable as the rest of us. I was thinking this only this afternoon as I popped in to do some paperwork in a large and busy building. I was actually thinking about it in the context of the artist's work, too. This is what is so strong about the art. It manages to show us both strength and vulnerability. A kind of lifeforce is acknowledged, and yet no rank is thrown. The fact nature is deployed so broadly in each piece is another asset - it places the human condition, the lives within the figures, into some kind of universal context, or perspective. Everyone is rushing about, especially down the corridors of power, in the world today. Sometimes we have to move in what in any sensible situation might be called too fast and yet important issues can be at stake and people have no choice sometimes but to move fast. What the artist gives us - in my humble yet provenly abiding opinion - is a rare opportunity to slow everything down, not to a halt but to a calm, without sucking out any of the work's strength or energy. It is rather like having life slowed down to what is probably its preferred speed. I know these are vague terms, but there is a genuine unsnatchability about the work. And when there is great purpose and limited time down these aforementioned corridors of power, in other words when public service meets limited time, and duty grasps idleness, sometimes flinging it aside, these people doing all this will often mean well but simply not have it within their gift to contemplate fully what it is they hope exists and therefore justifies their duty to keep some kind of peace. Well, the artist is proof that that peace, that very peace, in real terms, and without fake ribbons or bows, exists.

A seahorse, a tomb, an antelope, and a four-eyed fish

Our children's voices travel like light and music through the cleanish flat. A bath is running - not a river, but like a river - and the children's voices travel above the additional sound of hot and gushing water. Then the artist wanders into the living room. She is nude, naked. She disappears into the bathroom again, shutting the door behind her. I hear the water being clawed and the hot or cold mixed with cold or hot as she paddles her way towards attempted bliss. She has worked very hard today. In fact I will check to see if she is having a bubble bath. She is. Rosemary. The flat is now scented. This small urban habitat is faking nature superbly. The children by the way called me as I checked on what I hoped was a bubble bath. They were sitting on the top bunk chatting away and drawing. Our daughter was with a friend today and with her friend's mother they all went to a museum. While there they did some art and I have our daughter's in front of me. The pièce de résistance is a pencil drawing of a snowy owl. The owl looks like it is concentrating, more alert than wise perhaps, and has a kind of awkward beauty which make the entire piece feel very sophisticated. She also drew a rabbit. This poor creature looks frozen by the young artist's glare: it is endearing and intimidating, though. (She also rendered, though smaller, a seahorse, a tomb, an antelope, and a four-eyed fish.) The artist is out of the bath by the time I finish this - I have just been checking the news and reading an irritating and gloating opinion piece on the war zone - and looks washed if not entirely refreshed. I hear laughter and feel bad about wanting to quell it but the children really should be getting ready for sleep now. As for the artist's new piece, for me it is more interesting by the day. Today I am especially impressed by the manner in which it explains all the other pieces rather like a tent-pole holding up a tent.

Artist's Essentials For Survival

Survival is the art of staying alive and true as an artist. Mental attitide is as important as skill and knowledge. You must know how to take everything possible from your talent and use it to the full, how to attract attention to yourself so that the right kind of gallerist comes along, how to make your way through the social minefield that surrounds a show and make it back to your work not too impaired by either success or failure, still navigating successfully without facts or figures. You must know how to keep healthy, or if unhealthy how to make yourself better.

CRITIC ATTACK
Slashing your way through the thickets of unsung industry to get a show does not mean that once you get one you will not be disturbed by venomous critics. Any bare emotion is vulnerable to attack. Say nothing! Don't get angry - you won't want to ridicule yourself having just watched them ridicule themselves. Calm will protect the nerves. Contemporary critics, sometimes desperate for something they know they cannot do themselves but wish they could, will make for and mock the honesty of the artist. Protect all parts of your talent from their painful stings.

You must be able to maintain your morale as an artist and that of others who share your situation. Any studio space you have must be considered a bonus. Lack of studio space should not mean you cannot work, for you are an artist always and those skills and talents must not get rusty and you must extend your knowledge at all times.

WHITE PAINT
Too much white paint can cause blindness. Protect the eyes with goggles or a strip of cloth or bark with narrow slits cut for eyes. Blacken underneath the eye with charcoal, or Daler Rowney black soft pastel, to reduce glare further.

Knowing where you're going

I feel I don't want to go into my imminent trip too much but I want to present it as a continuing background while still honouring the artist in her unhesitatingly impressive journey of her own towards exhibition. Today for example I walked with her into perhaps the largest and best art supply store in the capital and watched as she strolled the upper floor sniffing approvingly at the various materials, admiring without reproach the beautiful wooden boxes filled with small tubes of paint, and reminiscing before paying at the till about the crayons she would be given each year as a child. I must admit, she looked attractively accomplished as she dealt with the transaction. The surfaces were largely stainless steel and at one point I could see this warped reflection of the artist staring straight back at me. To her left meanwhile was a large table of art magazines. I had leafed through some of them earlier and there was not much within their glossy and advertising-led pages to catch my eye, which is not to say an absence of the artist's images within such pages is a cause for bitterness. How could it be? Only now is the artist feeling ready to step forward. But that image of the artist, that shiny warp, reinterpreted by the stainless steel, is clear in my head now. More than any of the pages of the magazines. It is the delightful image of someone going somewhere.