Onwards

I have been away for some time. I feel trained. I feel about myself, for a moment, the way I have always felt about the artist. Application, for that is the word, pays rewards. But tomorrow I return to the war zone. There I will think about the artist and our beautiful children the way a poet might sometimes contemplate the sky bleaching out melancholy. I am going into the light. There is darkness there but for my part there is no vainglory, only a kind of service to one's fellow man. The artist serves us all. She pays homage where others take things only for granted. She is a cradle of discovered ideas. I cannot wait for you to see the work as a whole. It is a whole with which to fill the hole which is man's inhumanity to man. Think big and you will be big.

Chocolate Melts and Befriended Viewers

Crouched on the wooden floorboards last night like the Little Mermaid statue, the artist laboured until two in the morning preparing her new piece. She was doing this only in order for me to be given sufficient time to put the piece up for her to work on before I disappear on my pre-journey journey first thing tomorrow morning. (I am crossing a short stretch of sea and back.) This of course is typical of her. It was late in the night, very, she was tired, very, but she knew it was something she had to do, and so she did it. In an age where publicly funded artist millionaires complain regularly about the lack of public funding, it is always refreshing to see an artist determined to walk the true road to art alone. It is difficult, however, to remain totally concentrated on the artist and her work at the moment. This is because I am probably without sufficient time to do everything I need to do myself. In a way it may even be fortunate the artist and children will be with their grandparents soon, as that way I will know they are safe and well at the same time as being able to be a little bit more selfish about my own preparations. I still have a host of people to see as well as technological corners to turn. Since writing that last sentence, mind, I have managed to get the board up on the wall. As far as the technology is concerned, the test I did the other day did exceed my expectations. And as a particularly cherishable piece of chocolate melts in my mouth, and the artist snaps herself another on the sofa, I do feel more relaxed than I have all day. Also, I am settled in my mind that the artist is correct in going for another piece rather than concentrating all her efforts on getting galleries to visit. Besides, she will be able to get her teeth into the new piece big time while I am away. Art is companionship as well as expression and what one day may befriend the artist may another day befriend the viewer.

Erithacus Rubecula

There is a robin's nest outside the front door inside a basket of plastic flowers. There in the middle sits a female robin when all of a sudden her male partner flies in.

Robin (male): How are you, my little redbreast?
Robin (female): Fine. Fine, darling. You?
M: Glad to be home. Some of the other males out there are acting a bit uppity. How's the -
F: The family in there?
M: The artist.
F: Pretty good, I think. It was snowing while you were out and they were all out in the garden. The artist's husband was filming them. He looked like a twitcher. The snowflakes were pretty thick.
M: He should be going soon, no?
F: Not sure.
M: I'm sure I heard them talking about it when they were in bed the other night and I popped round the back to get some more twigs.
F: Bring anything for supper?
M: A couple of worms.
F: I'll put the appetite on.
M: How's the belly?
F: Fine.
M: What shall we call it?
F: Do you like Latin?
M: A little.
F: How about Erithacus Rubecula then? Hey, the artist was on her exercise machine again.
M: Was she? What about the kids?
F: They don't need more exercise.
M: No, I meant what were they doing?
F: Oh, that. Sorting through their toys and clothes mostly. Once they came in from the snow.
M: Did the artist do any art?
F: Not today.
M: Good. She needs a rest.
F: You didn't find that magazine did you?
M: Which one?
F: BirdLife International. There's the new IUCN List of Threatened Species.
M: No. Sorry.
F (whispering): Shush.
M: A thrush, did you say?
F: Shush. The artist's kids have gone to bed. I can see the husband typing at the round red table.
M: Not again.

The two robins place their paper napkins round their necks and tuck into some worm.

Art of the matter

I have the bad habit sometimes of discussing the need for identifying potential venues for the artist's next exhibition just as the artist is beginning to feel relaxed and the children are all asleep and everyone has arrived at the end of the day with a fatigued but well-earned sense of completion and sometimes, if we are lucky, achievement. I really must stop doing this. It is grossly unfair. It is like watching someone climb down a large stepladder with shredded palms after completing a huge mural and suggesting they had missed a bit. I suppose, as someone who knows how good the latest work is, I must feel the artist's frustrations more than most. What is foolish of me is that the artist probably has it all under control and has for example decided without any hint of procrastination to begin and complete one more piece before getting more people around. (The work probably does require another in order to emphasise the range.) It is not as if the artist has been met with a downpour of rejections. As I have suggested before, anyone who has stepped across the threshold and seen the work in the flesh, so to speak, loves it, and the only private gallerist to have come and seen it did in fact want to show it, but for one reason or another could not. We looked at another gallery on the internet this afternoon. This was after I had finished a new test edit of some footage and the artist had finished her volunteered art teaching at our children's school. We drank our tea and examined the site closely. One of the artists from the gallery's stable used to share a former gallery with the artist. His work is good, but sufficiently different for there not to be a conflict of interest. (It can be a competitive place the art world.) The artist looked up from the screen at one point and stared at me with her beautiful blue eyes. 'I'm not avoiding the issue, I'm really not, by wanting to do this one more piece,' she said. Her two most recent pieces were on the wall behind her, sort of bookending her head like pillars of excellence, ear-muffs of glory. Just then, the sun came out and travelled across the trees in front of the flat. It was like the sunlight was made of fingers and they were unknotting all the gently swaying branches. A tulip, I also noticed, bent like a swan in the wind. That was when I vowed not to hassle the artist again about her work, not when it is late at night and I really should know better.

Testing truthfully under real circumstances

It is perhaps within the correct spirit that I should be using images of the artist and our children as material for testing how best to do my work in the war zone.

Shot 1: Our 8-year-old daughter dances by the fireplace while our son sews his stitched sculptural man.
Shot 2: Our daughter types a list of her favourite books on the laptop: the list reads like a poem.
Shot 3: Our daughter's fingers type at the keys with improbable speed.
Shot 4: The artist is in the foreground on the bright red sofa listening to Bob Dylan's Workingman's Blues #2 on headphones while our daughter continues typing in the background.
Shot 5: The artist is dressed in grey and works on the detailed grey surface of her latest piece.
Shot 6: The artist's hand fills the frame as she crafts away at the detail.
Shot 7: Our daughter eats tomato and mozzarella while reading again on the laptop screen what she has just written.
Shot 8: Our son eats a bowl of soggy cornflakes with the TV screen in the background showing a weather report.
Shot 9: The artist tests a wireless microphone, twirling, mocking, smiling, talking, dancing.
Shot 10: A silver-coated Buddha sits on a lace-patterned black bookshelf between eleven novels and biographies.
Shot 11: The artist's husband looks and talks to camera while testing the wireless microphone and remote commander with self-mockery and a zoom out.
Shot 12: Our son and daughter are sitting on the bright red sofa as the camera zooms in and they whisper into a concealed microphone all the things they want to do when they visit their grandparents and cousin in the foothills.
Shot 14: Side-angle of the artist still working away at her piece.
Shot 15: Our son yawns and stares to camera.
Shot 16: Our son explains his stitched and sculpted man.
Shot 17: Our son and daughter dance again by the fireplace.
Shot 18: Caption
Shot 19: End credit.
Shot 20: Our son still stitching.

A well-known teacher across the ocean in the city of the scraped skies once described acting to his students as living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Perhaps the above is simply about me testing truthfully under real circumstances.

Sound barriers

I was thinking this afternoon that it is in fact a very sound barrier the pain barrier that is the line between good and great art. Few reach it, even fewer get past it: especially when the onus these days is on immediate gratification and simple one-liners. Mind you, you might think such a barrier would keep out what few might dare call bad art, but bad art does sometimes still get through and even enters the very psyche of the culture. Anyway, I was made aware of this line again, this important pain barrier, when invited by the artist to offer an opinion on the piece she was still finishing. A fellow artist and parent of one of our 8-year-old daughter's good friends saw it the other day and he thought it was already finished. I knew it wasn't. I certainly knew the artist didn't think it complete. Anyway, that was many days ago. Since his visit, the artist has been grafting away, 'polishing' further the surfaces of a thousand pieces of slate - some tiny, some forceful, most half-slid down a mountain side. It is sometimes as if she is actually there, inside the image, polishing away, quite literally, and stumbling precariously across the slippery, steep surface. Look. There she goes, with her bucket, her liquid, her large scrubbing brush. Watch the deep chasm, I am thinking. That was close. Steady while you're on that tall rock. Don't cause another landslide. Careful. Yet more days pass and the artist is still on it, at it, with it. You know why she hasn't stopped because a part of you approves of her tenacity, and you know the standard has been raised so high you may as well carry on through with bleeding hands and feet. Excellence in art is not always waiting by some roadside as in Zen Buddhism. Sometimes you must climb onto, and across, the scree. You must also have a head for heights. You must know what risk is. Idle materialism will go out the window right away. But to watch this pain barrier being broken, I tell you, is to see a coming of age. Ironically, it always reminds me of when I was a boy and the jets in the sky would scream past breaking the sound barrier. It was always a thrill, a kind of sense of achievement, a glimpse of the extraordinary. Well, today, in the late afternoon, I felt the artist close to it again. In fact I almost placed my hands to my ears and ducked.