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.