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.