The Artist's Husband

We only part to meet again

2008-06-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

The artist has still sold all her work. I am still going to the war zone. Tomorrow. Fresh razors are bought. First Aid is checked. The artist is delighted with her news but sleepy. My passport is felt. Shirts are selected. Money, currency, is sorted; kit inspected. Lenses. Tapes. Leads. Microphones. The artist is smiling but dozing. Flight times are double-checked. The latest news is viewed. The eight-year-old girl is, especially, hugged before going to sleep. The five-year-old boy is, especially, hugged before going to sleep. The artist cannot believe her good fortune. Bags are readied. Shoes are polished. Lists are crossed out, rewritten. The artist has almost fallen asleep on the sofa. Emails are sent. Arrival times verified. The artist wants to do a large piece after some time off. Expense claims must be sorted. Toothpaste. Aide memoire. Cash. The artist must be coached about her emails. The artist is an artist. I am the artist's husband.

Expect victory and you make victory

2008-06-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

There is a pearl in the oyster. There is a genie in the lamp. Hats off to the tireless artist and her shining knight of a visitor. The visitor, the artist of all artists, who came today, bought everything, which is to say everything the artist showed him, eight pieces in all. He also wants to do a book on the artist, perhaps two different types of publication. He has also commissioned her to do another piece, and has said he wants photographed and framed all the unframed work, even work he does not own. His gallantry delights me, reassures me. In other words, the sun came out this morning on a small part of the capital. It lit up dark corners of the soul and showed them to be luxurious, generous, clean, and progressive. The artist, like a rising sun, is over the moon. All the doubt, all the pain, all the self-punishment, has faded away, broken apart like bread. The whites of the eyes are matched with the blue. Truth has won, over cynicism. Wildlife has popped its ears up and listens again. Leaves have delayed falling from trees. Poems sit parked on pages, finally convinced they will one day be read. Terrorists have paused over their bombs. Squirrels have passed, on the offer of nuts. Cars have decided not to crash. The sea has cleaned itself. Fruit feels rightfully boastful. Water has never tasted so good. I will leave for the war zone in two days time so impressed with the artist and delighted for her too. Her integrity, in short, has been rewarded. And the artist of all artists deserves some credit too. Hats off to him, I say. I could not agree with him more. Why, even the laptop feels tactile today.

The Artist's Code

2008-06-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

The artist worked until four o'clock in the morning and is still working now. She is what a friend of mine calls a grafter. Furthermore her visitor tomorrow is being treated like a king, by virtue of the amount of work the artist is putting in, and so he should be, and in a few days time I will be gone, my passport stamped, me flying across both mountains and desert, and some kind of verdict from the visitor in place. Still, I like all this intensity, enjoy both its calibre and drama, and the importance of this man's visit, certainly in terms of what it can do for the artist, cannot, should not, be underestimated, even if it does mean I am presently unable to share with the artist any feelings of apprehension I may have about returning to the war zone. I cannot for example discuss with her the prospects of dry mountains, epic space, mines, manners, weapons, vigilance and nerves. But this does not matter as ours is not a selfish relationship and I think both of us 'expect' the other to pursue expression with a kind of creative, if not purist, relentlessness. What has been interesting for me about these past few days has been the scrupulous manner in which the artist has harnessed herself so completely to the idea of 'collecting' the different works, 'binding' them with a kind of equality of detail, and 'shedding' any notion of disparity. In short, the work has been made conceptually more sound, which I suspect will not be lost on the visitor. Looking at the artist now, she bears what look like the scars of labour across her face, as pastel marks, like war paint, stripe each cheek with a kind of primitive authority, and black stains disrupt the self-drawn image on her t-shirt. I tried - with the promise of some Madeira cake - to tempt the artist to take a break, but already she is back to work, the opposite in fact of the eternal tea-breaking worker. We have a code for a tea break in the war zone. We call it Tango Bravo. We have a code at home, too. It is an artist's code. It is called work.

Chalkhill Blue

2008-06-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

The Chalkhill Blue butterfly ascended from the sunny slope in the garden. Like a leaf, it floated towards a pair of open glass doors, its tiny shadow stroking the freshly mown and occasionally threadbare lawn. As if by magic, it slipped between the gap presented by the two doors and our Chalkhill Blue was suddenly inside the building. Stunned to find itself in a children's room, it sat for a while, spellbound, on the bookshelf, next to Jacqueline Wilson's 'Cliffhanger' and Francesca Simon's 'Horrid Henry's Wicked Ways'. Just then, a five-year-old boy wandered in and our butterfly remained perfectly still, quietly watching as the boy rolled out a small plastic drawer from beneath his bunk-bed and unearthed a small brown rubber band. The butterfly watched further as the boy, unaware of the small creature's presence in his bedroom, pulled the rubber band back, dangerously so, then let go: laughing as it sped through the air and smacked against the patchily grubby white wall. Upset by this, aesthetically disappointed, the butterfly took its leave, took flight, flying into the sitting room instead. There, suddenly alive to the fresh reality, it parked itself on a small wooden table. The table was crowded with drawing instruments of various sizes and colours, and the butterfly watched as an eight-year-old girl drifted through, contemplating another cartwheel, and an artist to the butterfly's immediate right knelt before a picture as if in prayer. That is strange, thought the butterfly to itself, the two figures in the picture, though small, are familiar. And then it dawned on our butterfly that these were indeed the two little people in the flat. Anyway, there were many such pieces visible in the room - art work, mirroring itself, everywhere - and each piece looked braced as if for the elements, as well as an important visitor. Meanwhile by a nearby round red table studiously sat a man by a laptop. At this very moment, the butterfly took to the air - the Chalkhill Blue, that is - and landed bravely by the man's laptop. It looked at the screen, which was glowing and looking faintly nuclear. 'Chalkhill Blue', it read on the screen, the light blue of its wings already itching to take flight again: 'Males congregate on animal dung.'

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

2008-06-09T02:15:00.000-07:00

I feel bad for missing the second wedding party of two friends yesterday but as the artist said to them in an email I had no choice. My next trip grows ever closer and preparations intensify. This morning for example I received four fresh boosters in both arms and as a result feel like Popeye at the moment without the spinach-fed strength. In fact I am walking like a cowboy with motionless arms held either side a few inches from the hips. I have had almost twenty such injections in the past few weeks. This morning, as the needles entered my arms, I glanced at the front page of my accompanying newspaper. Where I am headed was the subject of the front page. My eyes then travelled across the room to the window. The tops of some branches blasted a kind of gorgeous green as the sunlight licked the leaves. It reminded me of one of the pieces the artist has been working on. But my eyes travelled back to the front page again. A journalist also died yesterday. He was found with a bullet in his head. He worked with someone I know. With one of the papers today came the counterpoint of a fold-out guide to the nation's butterflies. What beautiful colours, let alone names. The artist's colours are butterfly colours, which is to say matte-like, accurate, pastel colours. Presently, I am looking at illustrations of a Purple Hairstreak, a Painted Lady, a Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary (Fritillary: what a name), and a Green-veined White. Perhaps, instead of armies, all sides should unleash legions of butterflies on each other instead. Where's the White Admiral (adults often nectar on bramble flowers in clearings with dappled sunlight)?

Instant Vintage

2008-06-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

The artist's parents kindly sent us some money from the foothills for an anniversary meal. This we had last night with the children. We sat round a friendly table in a pleasant restaurant, a table of twelve loud women to our left, a serious couple to our right, and were enthralled and gripped unashamedly by our own narrative, as if this was one of the first times in a while in which we were able to let other people do the work for us, and I guess we wanted to celebrate this too. The children were - in a napkin kind of way - dribblingly incisive, as indeed was the artist fetchingly strident: a hint of cleavage, warm red lips, affection for her grateful husband. No, it was an all-inclusive experience, whose backdrop had been a day of helping the artist - as if help was needed - fine-tune the pieces to be shown Wednesday's important visitor. Now, presently, right now, as some 'electronica' plays on the laptop, and the children do hand-stands by the bright red sofa, I look over at the artist with a third - previous - piece on the go, and watch her hand tweaking, comfortingly, the already rich, and impossibly detailed, content, and I feel a mixture of pride and hope. Actually, I have just noticed a sculpture freshly created by our five-year-old son. Where did that come from? When did he do that? On a pink plastic plate in a bed of clay are three small toy ladders, one slipped slightly into the other, and the three of them, tall and aspirational, now leaning like a skeletal version of the Tower of Pisa. ('It's called "Nothing",' he says when asked.) Also, in just under an hour our eight-year-old daughter has a friend over and I will take them all to the old-fashioned fun fair erected for a few days on the open expanse of land serving as a kind of buffer zone between us and the rest of the city. Seabirds will glide in the vast blue-grey sky. Kites will compete. Buses will move grumpily. The sign outside the local drinking establishment will sway in the light wind. And I will look upon these children and feel the opposite of despair. All the while knowing the artist will still be working with a smile on her face.

A Dab Hand

2008-06-06T04:35:00.000-07:00

The artist is on a roll. There is no stopping her now. Her hand moves furiously across the paper on board. It goes dab, dab, dab, like soft fingers on soft glass. A piano sonata plays in the background - more fingers, more dab, dab, dabs - and it is a joy both to see and to hear. This is all in preparation for the visit on Wednesday from the most expensive living artist in the world. He has emailed the artist several times now, as has his assistant. No pomp. No self-importance. His last message reaffirmed that he was indeed looking forward to seeing what he called the 'pictures'. It will be interesting for them to see each other again. Both are as committed as the other: it just so happens that one of them was rewarded with extraordinary success. But he, I suspect, knows Oscar Wilde's dictum that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, even if my earlier mention of him as the most expensive artist in the world today suggests I do not. Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. I sprang into the back garden, like a cat, not a particularly agile one, at seven o'clock this morning, and plucked a bright red thorny rose from the rose-bushes by our bedroom window and presented this to the artist while she lay in bed.

Strange Dream

2008-06-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

Of his love for his city, he was sure.

Maybe he was never quite meant for this world. Maybe he was like an islander on a mainland ward - comfortable, at times, with his own soul, but seldom with anyone else’s. But on the subject of the city, his now, he knew he was quite sure.

So why did he feel so nauseous? Or did he always feel this way, before and after, which is to say sick, sick as truth sometimes, sick like some political virus working its way into the body martial?

He needed wisdom, advice. Before going back, to the mountains, before returning, to the fight, he needed wisdom fast. His city, his now remember, was under threat. This was why he spent longer than usual pulling himself out of bed, if indeed it was bed, entering and exiting the other room, the so-called room for ablutions, kneeling by the bowl like some half-believer, whom he had almost forgotten, in his attempt the night before to body-surf across the up-raised hands of the city, was this city's man through and through.

He entered the populous streets and walked alone in a long straight line. Romans. Anglo-Saxons. Danes. (Runestones?) He needed some advice and needed it quick. The air by the river was fresh but no match for the mountains. Even with everyone in both places armed, at least over there you felt nature’s triumph. Here, these days, he found only a kind of former magnitude. And even with the mines over there like seas of jellyfish once the rains had stripped away the upper surfaces of the soil, nature did nothing wrong. Here, within the conurbation, within that which he had up until this very moment thought he knew well, cars continued to target the money, with their businessmen and businesswomen and service-based minds. Credit crunch? A mountain stream, he thought. Fifty million tonnes of cargo on the river each year? How about a place where the angels sing?

Anyway, he felt a swelling in his throat again and began concentrating on the enemies, for this was one of his bents. He thought about deliberately unimposing houses in the suburbs, dissociative glances, here as well as in the mountains, and he thought about stealth. And, he remembered, the quiet, increasing gatherings: the beards, darting eyes, and closing minds. The giant, epic, other bowls, of granite, made of granite, in mountains far away.

And he wondered why they wanted to kill him so?

He crossed the floodplain, by this hill and that. He crossed the busiest and oldest road, at least of his world, and saw some of the lights were on in the building. This was his, for now, his building of advice. These lights, he knew, these bulbs, like bulbs, like beacons of enlightened but depressed courage, belonged to this city, too. Even though it is day and the clouds have parted and the sun is sending wave upon wave of ancient heat and light to stoke the city’s heart and stroke the city’s skin, these lights will always remain on.

He didn’t bother with the lift and kept on walking. He could feel the sweat on his collar and still he kept on walking. One bead ran the length of his back and did a kind of detour passed his scar. Vertigo, he was thinking. He never used to get vertigo and yet two weeks before in the mountains he got vertigo, started trembling - right there, on the mountain. And this was exactly when he saw the city’s enemies.

It wasn’t like the old days. Not like with the others. Not like when with blazing ants coming at you and screaming like undertakers, you popped behind a rock. Not like when with the this and that and more rocks, you fed their children. Not like when they hit above your heads and you had to lean right back and watch what you thought was the mountains fall.

He had a pet theory about vertigo and it was this. As you eat your city sandwiches by the river and dream of falling in love again, please remember. They don’t give you vertigo when you are young because you are expendable then. Vertigo is there to save your life when you have children.

The carpet was soft, thick, violety. It was also, in patches, a quiet, almost shy, salmon pink. (Like a salmon, bouncing its bloody belly upon the tooth-like jagged rocks, he was also thinking, I shall reach my goal, I shall make a shoal of my affection... ) Anyway, a woman in the room to his left took her feet off the desk. He couldn’t see who she was, not to talk to, but felt a kind of respect, like they were two sides of the same river.

He proceeded towards the end of the corridor. This was when everything fanned out like a beautiful idea, like he had always hoped the city would again, and this beautiful idea was like a kind of half-nightclub and half-sitting room in which you might find God.

He moved cautiously, careful not to crunch the candles underfoot. On the wall to his immediate right - as he checked the cameras in each corner - was a large glass cabinet. Inside were these small sculpted heads, urban voodoo bracelets, handwriting on parchment, and very small pieces of amethyst.

Amethyst. The Ancient Greeks and Romans wore amethyst because they believed it prevented intoxication. Some of the pieces were also violet and some the colour of purple grapes.

‘Ah, there you go,’ came a voice.

He looked around, staring at the cameras first, but could not trace the source of this voice. He looked behind but didn’t see anyone there, either, only a chair, a lime-green, or possibly turquoise, chair.

‘Is that you?’ he asked the strange voice.

‘Is that who?’

‘Are you ... you know ... the one?’

‘You know the difference between your mountains and your city?’ The city man stepped back a few feet and listened. ‘The city, your city, is built on clay, and the energy, get it, the energy is absorbed, gets absorbed, right into the ground. Your mountains, however. The mountains from where you returned. The place where you say you saw this city’s enemies. They are all rock, the mountains ... all rock. There, there, in the mountains, everything pings straight right back at you, and doesn’t get absorbed at all.’

‘Is that it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘No reason for them to want to kill me, though,’ he said. Siren sounds passed through the street outside. ‘More prisoners?’ he asked, hearing them. ‘More people about to be absorbed into the ground.’

‘Somebody said to me that you wanted to know why these people wanted to kill you, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well they don’t.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘They don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Want to kill you.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No. There’s one more thing.’

‘What?’

‘They love your city.’

The Artist Makes Sense

2008-06-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

A better day. The artist worked on her two latest pieces and I finished a short story I was commissioned to write. The artist kept busy while I also researched the events I may encounter in the war zone when I leave. The artist paced herself, though. She stepped back, then moved forward again. Concentration. Pastel dust fell like snow, like dirty snow. The tall skinny legs of the stool scraped the floor and sliced the papers. Hopes were whispered again. Why should I expect every day to be good? The artist moves fast enough and it is not about me. Her gestures were scratchy but her thoughts were fleet. Even turning to ask a question is like a shot. Dedication. The tea is drunk fast. And made, again and again. Last night there was a documentary on a female artist not dissimilar in age. She made no sense.

Eight Days

2008-06-02T17:21:00.001-07:00

The impossibly famous artist has been in touch with the artist here, twice in the past few days, and now his assistant is in touch with her too, arranging a visit for him to see the artist's work. This has been ever since the artist wrote to him after he gave his email address. (And made my day by replying immediately.) This comes as some relief to all of us here, and for a variety of reasons too, including the fact I don't think the artist quite believed it when I said he would be in touch. I think she has been working so hard she has become creatively self-contained. She may have forgotten sometimes how to interact, and like many brilliant but retiring artists she can also mistake an art world that communes with itself, even celebrates, with a conspiracy against seriousness. Anyway, she now has eight days before he comes to see the work. This means eight in which to get her work in order. There are one or two things she must do with the two latest pieces, but she is almost there. I will be off to the war zone myself a few days later - I just received my new dates - so I hope it will be at least with some fresh hope for the artist that I take my deep breath and go under the metaphorical wire again. Since my sister died less than an hour after I landed a few weeks ago from my last trip, relations with the artist have been unusually strained. This has been partly my fault but it has also been as if the artist just wants the dam to break now and for her work to be allowed through, and it doesn't really matter too much about anything else apart from of course the children. This I suspect has contributed towards a kind of inner and outer rebelliousness on my part, which has not really been helpful of me, and has not been the case for almost a year now. At least when I saw the children's shining faces today before they were whisked off again, I saw something of a light within.

Esprit d'escalier

2008-05-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

I didn’t sleep at all well one night recently in the war zone and awoke to the syncopated sound of what was intended as a 21-gun salute to honour the country's victors in a war against recent foreign invaders. For security reasons, I had not been allowed to attend and had spent the night catching up with an old friend instead. As I rubbed my eyes, I took in the semi-darkness. My t-shirt was wet: wet with sweat. Then I began to hear some other sounds. They were of different weapons. What could have been machine gun-fire. Sporadic. Whatever it was, it was not far away. I stood up and slowly opened the shutters. The machine gun fire, different again, was more intense now. I knew something was up. I switched on the TV. Almost immediately, it was mentioned that the feed I had just missed of the nearby parade had suddenly been pulled. Something was definitely up. There was talk of the president having been whisked away and then they showed some replayed footage. What looked at first like a long distance, low budget animation of the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band filled the screen. A variety of strangely disconnected and theatrically attired people were sitting in the shade. Ambassadors, dignitaries, ministers, soldiers. Suddenly you saw some people fall forwards, others disappear towards the rear of the stand. It was redolent of the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat. I dressed quickly and to the sound of a swarm of helicopters made my way to the security of the main compound. I felt uneasy, unlucky, faintly fatalistic. I also felt like I should be writing this all down in my blog; I should be finding the implausible link between the drama of the present moment and the battles and survivals of an artist. I say this only because I am looking at the artist right now and it was impossible to write about this from the war zone. Presently, she is working, her expression serious, and I can feel the explosions in her head. She will make it to the security of the main compound.

Man Alive

2008-05-26T04:02:00.001-07:00

The artist sits with the children on the bright red sofa while outside it is raining cats and dogs. The three are watching a film - a possibly insipid family tale with a nonetheless perky mixture of animation and live-action - while I sit at the round red table, catching up on some correspondence, including emailed and reported reading, from, to, and about, the war zone. I suppose there is something deeply incongruous about these two elements, fused together as they are like incorrect wires in an impossible conundrum of good electronics and bad poetry, and yet it is because of the work in the war zone that we can pay for the film on the sofa - this makes me sound like a mercenary and yet nothing could be further from the truth. My work there, I like to think, is about grasping the nettle, grabbing the bull by the horns, confronting, along with many others, quite possibly the principal issue of the day, at the same time as being paid for it. Unprompted, the artist leans her head back on the sofa and tells me she will finish writing the email to the impossibly famous artist by the day's end. I feel like a traffic warden ensuring the correct parking of everyone's tasks and yet this also could not be further from the truth. Anyway, I tend sometimes to see nature as the best pattern for mankind to follow, not contrivance, compromise, self-murder, or selfishness. The artist, I like to think, is the same. Talking of nature, the cats and dogs continue to fall from the sky, their tails and floppy ears, whiskers and tongues, touchiness and tunes, cascading to the ground like rolling thunder. By the way, the speculating neighbour was caught by the artist popping his head round the property again, this time under an umbrella. Amusingly, as she opened our bedroom blinds and he guiltily pulled away, it looked as though he had been caught in the act of some kind of voyeurism. Closer to home, the desert lamp is now lit and the backs of everyone's heads are like gargoyles in a church. To my right, the artist's three present pieces are on the wall, made even more mysterious in the half-light, and for a few delightful seconds, it is seldom for longer in life, I feel like the luckiest man alive.

That's My Boy

2008-05-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

The boy sits on the floor. He has a pastel stick in his small right hand and he has just returned from playing at a friend's house. His friend's parents are artists too. The daddy is a painter and the mummy a sculptor. They make things. They have tolerant, interesting, open minds. As I write I can hear the paper the boy is using slide across the shiny bare wooden floorboards. I can also hear the pastel stick slide like a mushy skater across the surface of the paper. It is the sound of childhood and rain. Another sound I can hear is the firm prodding of the boy's mother's, the artist's, pastel stick, against the surface of her piece, of the boy's cousin, the artist's niece. I pick up a washed green grape from the plate with the painted illustration of the children that the artist designed and pop it in my mouth. Suddenly, as I chew, the boy is no longer sitting on the floor. He is standing beside me, alert, ready, with the flowerpot his friend's father gave us with several sunflower cuttings already growing in it. He wants me to plant them in the garden. He wants to do this now. Two hours later, we are still in the garden and the sunflowers are all planted and we have weeded four wheelbarrows of weeds. This time it is something else he wants. He wants the artist's no longer used sketching board from the shed. And now he is working on it with his pastel stick in his small right hand again. Circles. We would be square without them.

Infinity goes up on trial

2008-05-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

The four of us spent some of the meadows of the day in the reading library of one of the nation's leading museums, having spent the previous hour walking through its rooms, which were pregnant with artifacts and symbols of cultures and conceptualisms past. Anyway, at one point in this tall and deep reading room stood the artist by this one wall of books, pulling from the erudite shelves these thick and non-dusty and highly illustrated tomes of some of the leading practitioners of art these past few hundred years: her eyes lit like lamps at pages and drawings, many of which she had never turned before. Our delightful daughter, meanwhile, having taken herself away from one of the computers, moved soft-footedly to the children's section and pulled out a book on the Egyptians, followed by the plucking of a black and white outline for children from another shelf, and the taking up of the challenge offered by a box of crayons and colouring it in. Our son, meanwhile, sat at another computer - 5-years-old, imagine it, and already by the computer in the reading library of a major museum - determined not to be disturbed. In fact at one point I whispered him over to the fact of the children's books our daughter had already seen, but he had rushed back again to the computer and had already pulled up an image of a Corinth Civil War relic on the screen. No, these were good moments. All the lights in our heads were on, and the fact the room maintained its official silence maintained a kind of serenity over the occasion. I hope the fact I was frustrated with the artist on the way home for not having done enough herself to get people to see her work didn't detract from the importance of our time there. Or my anger with a neighbour for wanting us to persuade our landlord to let the neighbour buy some of the space by the side of the building we rent so that he can destroy yet another children's summer with ruddy building work.

Fear and Loving

2008-05-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

It has been a week since my sister's funeral and almost two since I returned from the war zone: I still have dreams about the former by the way. They are episodic and intense and never last very long, despite the rhythm of fear running through them all. (With my sister it is different: there is a kind of shroud of peace now across the face, if I can call it that, of her death.) Life can be fearful anyway but I guess the thing about war zones is the inherent permission they give you to fear. Perhaps art can be described as the same: isn't one of the things about art its permission to fear too? I spoke to an old friend on the phone today, not about this so much as the artist's work. As a professional critic he is probably better positioned than me to speak about the work, but he is a fan and I think likes the idea of familial loyalties, in creativities anyway. (His late maternal grandfather has just had a book reprinted and he is attending a literary festival with his mother this weekend to celebrate this fact; he is also returning here again in a month or so to celebrate a separate book by his father.) He has written well about the artist in the past and has always struck me as the sort of person drawn to art by its poetry rather than its careerism. The artist is working on the email she will send to the artist mentioned yesterday by the way. I spoke to this friend about this and he supported the idea. Rather kindly he has also potentially linked the artist with what sound like a great and interesting couple with an elegant space in the centre of the capital in which the artist can temporarily park her work if it helps in terms of making it easier to have people - potential gallerists and the like - come to see the work. Where we live, though ample for us, is off the beaten track, it would seem, certainly for your regular gallerist. They, too, it would also seem, have fear. A fear of the unknown street or artist.

Help The Artist

2008-05-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

I ran into an old acquaintance of the artist's from her art school in a fashionable media club the other evening. He is quite possibly the most famous living artist on the planet. I have been wanting the artist to get in touch with him for some time now and wasted none by asking directly for his email address. This he gave to me without any hesitation and it is now down to the artist to get in touch with what I have suggested should be an invitation first for the man to view the work and then to perhaps consider it as a potential part of the giant art museum in the countryside he is building. The artist knows, I hope, the importance of exploring all avenues. She is out herself this evening with three girlfriends, two of them artists and one an actress. The children are being creative.

Portrait of a Nation

2008-05-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

As I write, the artist is putting what may or may not be the final touches to a small portrait of her niece. It is screwed to the wall to the left of two larger, other pieces on the wall, and is like an appendix. Our children meanwhile have some friends here from school and I can hear their laughter and mock screams wafting without danger through the doors leading from the back garden. They are cheerful children, our three little guests, and I can well remember their parents when they first came to this country, though we did not know them at the time, only saw them from afar. They were refugees and the general area from which they had come I had visited a few years before. As I watched their severe expressions searching their unfamiliar way down the street at the time, I remember feeling familiar with their look, their haunted gaze. It was that same look of a lot of the young people from where they came - people who knew too much, too fast. Anyway, now their children are fully integrated and their father is working in a local bakery. The mother is a popular member of the community and her chief concern today is in sending sufficient funds to her family back home. 'They want bread, we have so much bread, from the bakery, but we cannot send it,' she says. We have all manner of refugees in this country. One man who hijacked a plane in order to get here not so long ago is now working at the country's leading airport. The artist is made exotic by being from here.

Eulogy

2008-05-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

First of all I would like to offer my deepest sympathies to ______ and ______. One of the bittersweet ironies I suppose of any close-knit family is the anguish and pain, disorientation and despair even, delivered whenever a family member passes away. The very thing which hurts is the very thing which tells us how much we loved a person. _____ was the second of ____ and ____ ____'s six children. She had four sisters and one brother, and it is on her family's behalf I speak. But what should I speak of? Is it _____ as a girl triumphantly leading over one hundred ____ ____ down a crowded village street? Is it her poignant success in bringing the family together at her and _____'s wedding? Or her loyalty, frankness, dignity, and giggles (not least, I am reliably informed, in church)? Is it her cutting off her thick pigtails, aged three or four, and flushing them down the lavatory out of sheer devilment? Is it ___, _____, _____, pigtails intact again, leaving __ ____ ____ together for __ _____ in _______? Or, later, _____'s visits to our grandmother's hotel by an inky-blue sea when, if memory serves me right, she would walk along the seafront, sometimes with ______, _____ and myself, and buy us all an ice cream? Later still, is it _____'s quiet pride at gaining a degree? How about the homemaking skills, extended to occasional guests such as myself, with echoes of one's own childhood - the carved wooden elephants and model rigged ships - all around? Or her devotion - returned in kind - to _____ and ______? Or should instead I speak of her keenness to read and to keep up to date with fashion, a love of shoes and handbags, not only when as a child she famously refused to take off her ______ hat when going to sleep, but, also, very nearly right up to the end, when with _____ she sat watching TV talking about fashion? When word first began to seep through of the severity of _____'s illness, we elected to have a small family gathering - just the six siblings - in a beautiful setting outside ___. _____, we will always remember, looked remarkable. In fact, she was positively glowing. Her blue-grey hair chimed with the ________ blue of her eyes. Inevitably, different memories were shared - I can remember for example _____ talking to ____ about the daily taxi and bus ride they would share to the _____ ______ in ____ after the family moved to _________ - and, all the while, of course, we raged against the prospect of her death, Dylan Thomas's "dying of the light". But, and here's the thing, we never really know someone. Not as well as we would like to think. I believe it is the thought of _____'s courage as she prepared to go over the top - the first of the six - which tells me most about her. As _____ knows, as _____ knows, as _____'s sisters and indeed brother knows, ____ was a loving wife, mother, and sister. We miss her badly already. I have just been to _____ again. I think she liked that. Nor was she one to shirk the idea of national responsibilities. Anyway, it was while in _____ this last trip that I received a text from my wife ______, telling me ____ had been returned home from hospital. I remember reading this over and over as a military _____ helicopter struggled to land, and a collection of dust and scraps of paper blew into the air. I was in a ___ ___ base - ____ _____ - and, no matter the protection, no matter the fact I was, among others, with ___ _____ _______ __ _____ that particular day, nothing could make me feel safe from thinking the worst. Which was why I was so determined to return to see ______ one last time. As it happened, she passed away within perhaps minutes of my landing, and it was too late. We all want to be happy and we are all going to die. Our grandmother had a solution. It was a phrase. 'To live in the hearts of those you love is not to die,' it read. Well, on behalf of _______ and _______, myself, ______'s four remaining sisters, ___, ____, _______, _______, their husbands, my wife, ______ in a church at this very moment in ______, our cousins, sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and good friends, I would like to propose to the House - for life and death is to some of us still a long and furious debate - that ______, sturdy, trenchant, loyal, courageous, beautiful ______, by living as she does in the hearts of those she loved, will not die.

Smoking Guns

2008-05-14T03:02:00.000-07:00

Writing the eulogy for my sister's funeral is not, as you can imagine, anyone's idea of bliss. I am keen to do my late sister proud, however, and feel vigilant as the words I will speak are slowly formed in my mind and then committed to the page. What has already been formed in the mind and committed to paper, is the new piece the artist has, in my absence, been working on. This time, for every piece is different, there is a kind of initial and deliberate indecipherability. A mass of thorny twigs and branches conceal a tiny figure parked almost at random towards the right. And just when you think you are entering into some kind of puzzle, you realise that in fact nature has you surrounded. You, too, are somehow entrapped. The silent valley down which you so confidently marched is in fact crammed with people. I met an artist in the war zone. He reminded me of the artist here. They share the same dedication, a kind of melodious absence of other options. Their work is an absolute necessity. The artist in the war zone used to do portraits, he was a portrait artist, something which at one time was illegal. Furiously, he would cycle through the capital with his latest piece rolled up tight and concealed in a bag on his back. One time after he had spent weeks if not months on a particular portrait, he was caught by a young policeman. Fortunately, they knew each other, they were old school friends, and so the artist's painting hand, as sometimes was the case, would not have to be chopped off. Instead, he saw the fruits of his labour lit and burned by his old friend and returned almost fearfully to the ether. I have asked my four remaining sisters by email if they have any lasting images of our late sister that they would like me to include in the eulogy. I would hate for those images also to go up in smoke.

Trigger

2008-05-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Strange to say, it is only now beginning to dawn I am no longer in the war zone. It is as if I am still waking from some kind of dream, a dream of fitful whirlpool sweats, one in which the mountains are impossibly high, the people uncannily wise yet poor, and the prospects as bleak as a winter's day, which some small part of me, some ridiculous principality within, still believes could end in sunlight. My sister's funeral is at the end of the week. There, is a kind of moonlight, not sunlight. I will be going with the artist. We will wear black mostly, but the artist has said she also wants to wear the blue shawl I bought her. This I purchased with a close protection team from a thirteen year old boy who has known only war. Wear it well, his brave smile seemed to say as I looked back one last time. The snows on the peaks were melting fast. The passes were clearing. Was that cordite I could smell in the distance? Or a twist of hope? I like to think my late sister would have known. Interesting, too, how we grant the dead wisdom.

My Sister

2008-05-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

My sister has died. I have been immersed in other people's problems for a good few weeks - assassination attempts, minefields, cross-departmental blustering, charity, military strengths and tribal weaknesses - and have forgotten about those equally important issues closer to home. She was a strong person, my late sister, a firm mind, and bore no humbug. I am told my other sisters were there for her, as much as they could be, but her husband will not have taken it well. He is a loyal man who nonetheless depended on her greatly. They had one child and he is with him now. I am hoping to receive a date for the funeral and perhaps I will find it appropriate to say something there. As the only male member of my immediate family since before my voice broke, I find it important to speak on such occasions. I only wish I had the power to bring people back to life.

Onwards

2008-04-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-03T11:26:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Death on the Mountain

2008-03-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

Someone the artist knew at college, a pretty high-profile artist, committed suicide on Saturday. He had been walking alone through some woodlands in the mountains to the chilly north after parking his car by a roadside. There were no further details but I have since discovered he was found hanging from a tree. It was the last day of his exhibition in the capital to the south. He was only 41. The artist here was shocked when I told her by phone and very sad. I had just read about it on the train as the sun came out and slapped a brilliant and perhaps incongruous light on the suddenly fragile glassy skyscrapers across the river. I met the artist in question a few times myself. I remember his vagueness and slight discomfort as he leaned against the bar like the man our 5-year-old son stitched together the day this artist died. It is all indeed very sad and must be particularly gruesome for his surviving family, in particular his mother and brother. There have been a few mountain suicides in the news lately. Unhelpfully, I always love walking the hills alone. OK, you are disconnected from one major aspect of life, namely your network of friends and family, but for me this is more than compensated by the even deeper connection, arguably, with nature and epic space. Additionally, you are put into some kind of mercilessly true and ultimately helpful perspective. Anyway, the idea here is not to be morbid. The victim was part of a famous group of artists and on one level had everything an artist could wish for. He was successful. He was loved. He was not poor. Or was his problem deeper than that? Was he the victim of too much hype? Did he see through the unscholarly adulation and come to believe the critic who described his work as frustratingly slight? There is perhaps only one thing worse than being a great artist who is not recognised and that is being a poor one who is considered great. 'I wish someone could have reached him,' said the artist tonight.

A Day of Rest(lessness)

2008-03-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

The sheets felt pleasantly chilled when I awoke. There was a hint of sun outside. I could hear the birds - these city birds never stop. (So much to say.) The children were asleep and I could hear their breathing, which was soft and dreamy and full of the chimes of innocence. The artist's body was turned away from me, in a gentle clump of sleep. I noticed a faint smile on her face and smiled too. I didn't want to get out of bed. Eventually I took a deep breath and pulled myself up and stepped like a passenger from the foot of the bed. I parted the blinds, or at least some of them, to check it was in fact sun. Affirmative. I fumbled for my tracksuit bottoms and trainers. I poured myself a glass of water and drank half of it. I stretched a few times and unlocked the door and went on my run. A man with a cowboy hat was walking past with his dog. He was the person who picked up an old bed of ours that we were throwing out one night. He probably sleeps in it now. Either him, bless him, or his dog. I picked up speed. Well, my rather cumbersome idea of speed. Two fellows were walking on the other side of the road by now with their hoods up. Instead of feeling threatened by their slightly intimidating gait, I chose to think I knew what was going on. They had been to a party the night before and hadn't made it home. Without enough money left to get the bus they were still walking. I did a kind of circle and eventually passed the bench where the poet sometimes sits. By 'poet' I mean the troubled man with the swept back hair who sometimes listens to classical music on an old radio while writing tiny notes. He never says hello but his presence is always appreciated, certainly by the likes of the artist. I then passed the sheltered houses where mostly the elderly stay. Those whom we must always protect. All was still. They, too, perhaps, had had a hoolie last night. As I turned the corner, already out of breath, I looked up again and marvelled at the range of clouds in the sky. I could feel the dampness rise from the ground as I took deeper and deeper breaths. I made it to the shop in the end and when I saw all the newspapers lined up like soldiers on parade I was reminded there was a war.

The Halves and Half-nots

2008-03-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

It has been a day of three halves. A kind of mathematically impossible, yet cerebral, as well as emotional, ride.

1) I contacted an old friend yesterday who lives and works on a tropical island with what I quaintly imagine are windblown palm trees and low flying clouds and deep blue skies. (We went to school together in the chilly north.) I had written to him in order to alert him to someone else I knew, a painter, a successful one, and someone I have written about before on this site. I had just read that this painter was living and working on the island too and I thought they might benefit from each other's company. (I was also keen on finding a route to the painter for some advice.) Anyway, this morning I received a reply from my friend from school, stating that they were in fact the best of friends. They surf together. They play racquetball together. Their families know each other well. Indeed, they were all with each other only last night.

2) According to reports today, a prominent female artist has disappeared without trace in one of the major capitals of the continental mainland. She was from a third country, a large one, famous again for eliminating its opposition. Though there is no evidence of foul play, and her husband does admit his wife's disappearance remains a complete mystery, one or two experts already point to a conspiracy. They also point to the mysterious ransacking of the museum where she last exhibited, and to the many recent serious threats.

3) The 5-year-old filmmaker of this parish placed down his camera today and picked up a needle and thread. He proceeded to create a life-size figure. He made a man with hands and facial features, a bag, long octopus-like arms, knees like boils, clothes like a fashion king of grunge. He spent most of the day making this creature and while he would place it down every now and then, it was never for long. I have now just been told the aforementioned creation will be accompanying him to bed. He also wants to take him to the beautiful foothills where his grandparents live.

Diverse and ongoing.

Interface, Setup, and Input: Action!

2008-03-28T03:32:00.000-07:00

The day has been much like a river - and not just because of the sky-sliding downpour - and this river has flowed with about as much technology as a brain like mine can take. If I am honest, I am probably trying to grasp too much too fast, and yet, because I have no choice, because the clock is ticking so fast, or digitally morphing, I have to go along with it, swept away downstream, on the jetsam and flotsam of some other, deeper, but not necessarily darker, current. Obliged, exhilarated, I feel all manner of gusts of new information blow into my face like spice. Then, occasionally, just occasionally, I see the overhanging branch of some particularly nasty and complex conundrum coming my way - 'playhead controls' or 'generator pop-up menus' - and just when I've ducked, made it through, something else comes along - 'zooming and scrolling in the timeline' or 'using a breakout box' - and whacks me on the back of the head like a pretty serious bear-hunter from behind. Still, I have probably learned more in the past 48 hours about this one particular craft, which is to say filming and recording and editing again under hostile conditions, than in all of last year. Now, momentarily, I stretch my back and feel the muscle I twinged while running this morning. But it is late evening and because the children are asleep an air of calm impertinence caresses the room. Also, because it is late, I feel like I am slumped somehow on the riverbank. Not as a fish out of water: rather, as a happy, wet spaniel, or drowsy bather, or soaked compendium. At least I can dwell more calmly on the artist now. One of the things I filmed today for example in order to ascertain whether I was 'importing' images correctly was to move in slowly on the artist, zooming with grooming so to speak, as she tackled the last few stages of her now almost completed latest piece. Playing it back again, an hour or so ago, was a pleasure. Aside from the one or two technical glitches, in terms of what I had shot, I was able to study the artist. There was something captivating about the concentration. What was she thinking: that I should stop filming? The chiseled excellence of her small right hand, clutching what she uses to work with, spoke of unsentimental dedication, though that sounds too pretentious for the artist. I tried to play what I shot back again, in slow-motion this time, but this made her look even more intense. I fast-forwarded it: she looked scarily industrious. I froze it: an intimidating picture of ardour. Now, I ask the non-existent members of the editing committee, who would wish ever to edit out that?

Interview with an Artist's Daughter

2008-03-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

An 8-year-old girl picks up her reading books from the round red table and places them with freshly discovered pleasure in her thin blue book-bag.
I haven't interviewed you for a while. How are you?
Fine, thank you.
She hangs the book-bag on the back of the chair.
Anything new to report?
Apart from reading? A smile. Actually, as a matter of fact I did some drawing in the morning recently. And my mother has been doing the most detailed and exquisite drawings about two meters long. She's been working very hard. She's also been working at my school. It's really weird seeing her walking into class and saying 'How are you?' and doing art with us.
How about your reading?
Again she smiles at the thought of it.
Well, I have been reading this amazingly fabulous book. Actually I've never read this kind of book before because it's a kind of an animal story ... but not only an animal story, it's also teaching you about the army and the war.
Which war?
The big one just over sixty years ago. She looks at the TV screen: images from the war zone. It's also quite a sad story.
Does it have illustrations?
It's got these quite small and detailed little drawings, which I think are really good.
Has your mother made you appreciate drawing more?
Definitely. She also inspires me. She took me to one of the biggest galleries with a friend the other day. I was drawing while we were there. My mother helps me lots. She always gives lots of tips. Before you do a face, for example, she always tells you to draw a line down the middle longways and then a line across half of the face sideways, then she tells you to draw the eyes on the middle line, and ... one hint ... add a fringe otherwise it will look a bit silly.
What about your 5-year-old brother's art?
Well, my brother's art is like real life drawing these days.
Thank you.
Can I go now?

A Projected Future and a Blast from the Past

2008-03-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

The artist is already thinking of the piece she will begin when I return to the war zone, which I guess isn't so far away in time now. I was thinking: this is another of the reasons I admire the artist so much. For some it would be a cloth, a garment, a drink, an affair, emptiness, relief, drugs, obsessive behaviour, news-blanking, becoming reclusive. But not for the artist. For her, whatever the situation, it is always work. Not as a distraction. Not as a means of avoiding the facts of life. (Never.) But as a sure line before her. Her mothering skills for example never waver, though nothing to do with work will see her avert her eyes. Where others have a kind of laughable success - in which minor talent possibly is over-rewarded - the artist has nothing to say but industry and exquisite skill. This is why I contacted one of the most important art dealers again in the country just now on her behalf. (I should also have sent him a link to this blog.) I contacted him again after many years twenty-one days ago. He never replied. He used to know me when I worked in the art world myself and I think he enjoyed some kind of professional resonance from this. He also came to see an admittedly minor play I wrote but which was nonetheless produced and performed in the city of the scraped skies with some kind of fanfare. In fact he asked if he could meet one of the actresses afterwards who just so happened to be my girlfriend. Anyway, now, successful, loaded, powerful, he doesn't seem to want to know me. Instead of asking myself what this says about me, it is what it says about him that occupies me most. I just wanted him to look at the artist's work. I didn't want to tell him what to think. I didn't wish to influence him into offering a show - that would have to be his choice. I just wanted a nod from him in the artist's direction. Just like the nods I gave him when he was starting out. I tell you, gallerists are the only people I know who run a mile in order not to do what it is that they are best known for doing. Their loss, I guess. We have our art and the war zone. We are ugly but we have the music. We are not ducking any issue. They, it would appear, they whom we need but wish we didn't, have only money. (Go on, surprise me.) I can't wait to see the artist's next piece.

daffodils, That come before the swallow dares*

2008-03-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

I bought the artist a rubber-banded bunch of unflowered daffodils the other day. They sat in my hand like a sad clump of long and lanky shrivelled vegetables of indeterminate origin. There was something damp-dry and slightly previous about the stems. The disc-shaped corona was just a dream. Narcissus is the botanic name of the daffodil. Well I hardly felt narcissistic as I unpeeled the skinny, snappy rubber bands, filled a bright red vase, and dropped them in. Wordsworth ...

"I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze"

... did not spring to mind. In fact, I felt like an unpoetic oaf. I felt as though some cynical hand had dispatched these bulbs back to these shores, charging so little that the person who broke their back planting them must have been paid a pittance. But then when I walked into the flat this afternoon after a tumultuous time in the centre of the capital, they were all laughing at me, all twenty of them, bright and yellow and slightly mad. They had flowered. The pigmentation was like the meaning of the word yellow. I was reminded of E.E. Cummings - or ee cummings - this time, a favourite poet when I was fourteen ...

"in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me"

It really is almost as if the daffodils are having the last laugh.
* William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

Tie a faded ribbon round the old typewriter

2008-03-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

I finished my main document early afternoon today. It is a blueprint really. The project, the shape and the design of the building so to speak, will be affected by this. Afterwards, stretching my back and straightening my shoulder blades, I did something very old fashioned. I printed it out. I had to hold it in my hand, you see, and read it as print on paper in order not only to verify its existence but to judge its stamina, its ability to withstand a traditional eye. So much of what we do now is in the digital ether. Engines are concealed. Computer architecture is closed. CCTV is forgotten: yet always there. It is refreshing sometimes, is it not, to go back to basics. Perhaps this is why I trust the hand of the artist so much. It not only shows us something important: it reminds us all of what we have forgotten. Still, the advance of science can be an extremely helpful thing. I think of our battles against disease, some of which we really do win. Meanwhile, I pause a moment and take in all the sounds appreciatively and far from the madding crowds. Our daughter is in our bedroom wittily putting on an accent which is not her own. Even closer to home, I can hear my fingers punching these keys. I have an awkward typing style. I am told it is quite fast for someone who only uses two fingers but I know I over-punch. This probably comes from writing reams of largely unread nonsense from about the age of ten on an old fashioned typewriter. After about the age of twelve, I think, when I had my own, the using and re-using of typewriter ribbon became par for the course. As a prolific writer of nonsense - some things never change - the dear ribbon kept coming to an end and, of course, I would have to rewind it. The harder my fingers punched the keys the rewound ribbon the clearer the words. That, too, was physical, I suppose, and therefore 'real'. Anyway, I can now hear our son teasing his sister. Cars, and sometimes larger vehicles, hum weightily along the road outside. The table creaks. Someone in the other room is sorting through books. I can hear them being stacked on shelves. Our daughter has a new book, I am reminded by this sound. She bought it this morning with the artist. She says she likes holding it in her hands. I take one last look at my printed document on the round red table. I turn in the chair. I look at the artist's work on the wall. Then I zap the TV on.

Ernő Rubik's Fair

2008-03-23T10:32:00.001-07:00

We made it to the fun fair. The grass was waterlogged, the wind cold, and hardly anyone was around. (Only the ghost train looked like it belonged.) I took our son and daughter to the fair in order for the artist to work. (Almost literally, on the rockface: she is still finishing a piece with the dramatic remains of a hard-earned slate mine.) Anyway, we leaned into the aforementioned winds and I was the father in the middle. We were holding hands. We were like sailors on a blasted deck negotiating our very own Roaring Forties. After a while, our hands parted and the children ran ahead of me. I filmed them on the phone, careful to adjudge how best to fill the frame while trying not to think about my imminent return to the war zone. But what I was really also doing was feeling these golden moments. It was eerie a few moments later within the so-called walls of the makeshift fair, or money-hungry lair. It was like entering an encampment of dubious loyalty some two hundred years ago. Unfamiliar faces looked up from steaming drinks. A seagull picked at some soggy chips. We passed some spinning vessels, loud blasts of music, dodgy constructions. 'You should never go on a spinning cup,' said our daughter, pointing to a kind of hostile version of Alice in Wonderland. As the wind hit my face again, I thought about the city I am in and the extremes people go to find themselves. Creativity no longer feels like a serene act and most trends these days are based on the idea of short attention spans. Wildness I have never had a problem with, but a lack of manners? Our culture has mislaid them. It is puzzling. Anyway, when we returned the artist looked just as refreshed as we had been made to look by the wind. Her work, to paraphrase Dylan, glowed like burning coal. ("Pourin' off of ev'ry page like it was written in my soul ...") Furthermore, the children had both won something and had had a choice of what to take as their prize. A blow-up cartoon character? A target? A cuddly toy? All manner of choices. So what did they choose? Two Rubik's Cubes. Well, 300,000,000 have sold worldwide, before I get too proud.

The scrubber's wife

2008-03-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

The rain today became sleet and the sleet briefly became snow. The sun popped out only occasionally and the clouds slammed into one another like puffed-up jousters. The local fun fair must have taken one hell of a pounding. In between working on what I must be working on right now, I took my frustrations out on the bathroom. I scrubbed and I scrubbed like a person with nothing to do. And yet the scrubbing made a kind of puritanical sense and eventually my feelings, like the bathroom, became clean. I still go back to it. It took me hours. Anyway, I have been thinking about what this may all mean. It could be to do with the artist and her dilemma about showing her work. For almost a year I have defended the artist's right to fail spectacularly at self confidence when it comes to an ability to hunt socially for an exhibition. But now - maybe only today - I am not so sure. It may be about scrubbing too, I am thinking, elbow grease, doing what you don't want to do. I am not talking about the work itself. That is amazing and indisputably diligent. I am talking about physically making contact. After the long weekend we will discuss strategy again. In the meantime, I will continue to admire the bathroom.

Here comes the son

2008-03-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

The artist is out with our daughter and her friend and mother today, though not the mother who has just given birth, while I am at home ostensibly to work. Only, that is easier said than done. I still have the 5-year-old film maker with me. His energy is like that of a dancing baby bear and the goods in the woods he wishes me to explore are kept from us both by my many tasks at hand, including this. A document I must finish as soon as is humanly possible is a struggle when a boy with a camera is wandering through and round you. Oh but what a boy. I am a lucky father. Presently he is - ooops! - the balloon he was playing with has just exploded. (See what I mean.) Red-cheeked he has just come running up to me declaring almost too convincingly that he is suddenly tired. Now, seconds later, he is examining the pieces of bust balloon spread across the floor like the leaves which blew in when the man here earlier came to fix the broken light responsible for our snapped electricity. (The man began talking about his love of time machines as he slammed his hammer into some electrical wire.) No, my son has recorded an amazing 60 minutes of filming today, using the smaller camera, I hasten to add. He seemed to find his metier most of all when he realised he could record in mirror mode, in other words with the monitor rotated 180 degrees toward the lens so he could see himself while recording. He lost all subconsciousness for a moment. He even began leaping back onto his grandmother's beautifully crafted cushions like a superhero. Now all I need is to enlist him to help me with the artist, to get him beside me as we try to coax engagement again with the so-called big bad world. With him as her ally she really should have nothing to fear.

Born To Be

2008-03-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

A baby girl we look forward to getting to know was born today. Not so very far from us. Her sister was staying with us last night while her parents remained in an induced, expectant state at the nearby hospital, one of the busiest in the land, with one of the most diverse and expanding populations, too. Our guest is two years older than our 8-year-old daughter, but they laughed in equal measure. I could hear them quite possibly far too long into the night, as they giggled and whispered and swapped stories like people with baskets of fruit, but it seemed churlish to ask them to be quiet. The excitement was a life-force, lucky, and our guest's mother was about to deliver. I had spent the latter part of the day with our son, a new camera, and a 150-page manual. It is the new camera I will be taking to war zone and I have never experienced apprehension so stilled by so few years. The companionship. The attention to detail. Our son was a shining revelation to me. Anything from attaching the supplied microphone and the lens hood with lens cover, to locating a scene on a tape with the remote commander, became like skating painlessly across what had until then felt like a vast and unfeeling lake. At some stage in the night I heard our guest talk in her sleep, something about flight. In the morning I could hear our guest declare that the baby had been born. At first I thought it was a reference to our daughter's Tamagotchi, but then came round. The baby, according to the text parked with pride in her phone, was born at 1:30am. It is a girl. The proud and beautiful father picked up our guest shortly before the school round. He looked well. Everyone was well. And the artist had looked after everyone with consummate love. Well done the mother in the hospital.

Power

2008-03-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

I have been enjoying a short break for a few days. This has meant a break from the blog too. The next few weeks will be very busy indeed for me and like everyone else I do need to switch off sometimes. That said, now I am here again, it is not a bad feeling. The artist and our daughter are out with another mother and daughter and I am at home with our son. Part of our electricity is not working and the man who came to look at it yesterday is now returning tomorrow. Electricity is one of those things foolishly I take for granted, though I can remember the power strikes we had during my time at school in the chilly north. I may have mentioned this before but it fell to me to go round all the switches in the two main buildings in complete darkness aged thirteen with a torch and switch off everything so that electricity would not be wasted when the power came back on again. I have also spent time in the desert where the sun is your only power, and the water you carry - though it gets very warm, almost too warm - assumes a life-saving potential, which is a power in itself. In the war zone as a young man I was without electricity too. At night this was no bad thing as lights didn't therefore give your position away. (Fires, too, were seldom used.) And the need for power, electricity, petrol, as we all know, is a source of so much tension these days. That said, though maybe I am too laid back about it, I never have a problem making do instead with what one has. Most of us have far more than we need anyway. Mind you, had the cut extended to the sitting room where the artist works, indeed where I am writing now and our son is watching his favourite TV programme, my attitude might be different. As it is, I can make out quite easily for example the piece to my immediate right that the artist has been working on. She has broken through now. A few days ago she was struggling, also with the anti-climax after the first private gallerist came. Now, however, the piece is looking accomplished. I have someone new in mind I would like to see the work. A man who years ago made it possible for me to travel with one of the most famous living painters of the time, only to have him pull out at the last moment because he felt he was being used. Not by me but by his government. It was to have been a trip to one of the great former tyrannies of the world. (Or no longer former?) I was going to write about it for a well know magazine. Anyway, the artist in question is dead now - though his work still features regularly in both the news and cultural analysis - but the man who arranged it is not and I saw him only two days ago. Perhaps if the power is on by then we may well be able to extend to a cup of tea.

On The Road

2008-03-13T03:30:00.001-07:00

After my solitary run this morning - I call it a run but there are runners and there are runners, and I am not really a runner - I checked the news from the war zone on my computer - as I write, the artist is giving a two-hour art lesson to our daughter's class - and saw there had been a suicide bomb on the very road I remember travelling down perhaps most only a few weeks ago. Travelling this road was like a race against the unknown. It goes back to the security dilemma of what is risk and what is threat, and whether your strategy should be based on both, or, as some mavericks suggest, threat alone. It seems to be both at present. As a result there is not a great deal of movement or traffic and that is bad news for some of the aid. I was telling the artist about this road shortly after I returned. I didn't want to say too much but I remembered for example the man standing on top of his cart as he whipped a slow and slightly morose-looking mule into action. A woman was huddled in the back, bouncing up and down and shrouded in grey and black. You could not see her face, which for security rather than religious reasons alarmed my protectors, and they surveyed the vehicle with a professional vigilance. Another moment of concern came when a people carrier drove alongside us and one or two black-turbaned faces stared out at what they could see through our vehicle's darkened windows. We sped off. Later, a man was spotted on a mobile phone. He immediately looked away. We turned sharp right, and sped off again, the medical kit bouncing in front of me and the trauma kit on standby behind. Just then, two children rushed across the road and one stopped directly in front of us. Because the older boy obviously did not know what to do he just froze and looked even more of a threat, but on this occasion the driver just drove round him, a cloud of dust still floating slowly back to earth as we disappeared towards the airport. At the airport I was told one story about a group travelling in a similar vehicle when a suicide bomber suddenly leaped on the bonnet. He didn't explode, the bomber. For a few bizarre moments, the driver and him simply stared at each other, until, coming to his senses, or so he thought, the driver did what he felt to be the most natural thing in the world. He switched on the windscreen wipers. Anyway, six people died in the blast this morning. (How green, how fresh all that grows.) This is not good news. Like our driver, we must protect the children, as the artist is doing in class today, but we must get there, too.

Disembodied Voices

2008-03-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

The artist is attending the opening party at an exhibition this evening and the two children are half-asleep on the bright red sofa. It is good for everyone that the artist is out. It took some persuading, a few moments in which she seriously considered cancelling, but she looked positive when she left and is now - I hope - enjoying herself. She knows many players in the art game and owes it to herself to explore these connections again. No matter how much it may feel like several steps removed from the art itself. In truth, there are no steps back to be had. It is all forwards. I can imagine the sounds. The disembodied voices. I made a film once about an artist. The scenes I hated most were the ones at opening parties. This was to do with the sound as much as anything else. The camera would pan with pretentious seriousness across what it hoped were interested or interesting faces, but underneath it all, on top of it all and through it all, was this inaudible and complacent din. It was the din of voices, laughter, clinking. Nothing of any sense was being espoused. But there were moments of delighted innocence. Art-loving at its purest. Only when the main subject spoke - the son of a tuba manufacturer, bizarrely - did we hear anything we understood, and this only because of the wireless microphone pinned to his shirt. (As it happens, I am in the process of purchasing a set right now, which reminds me - I must look into frequencies.) Anyway, just as I was about to check up on the children a few moments ago, the artist has just phoned. ('They are asleep,' I told her.) She said she was on her way home having enjoyed herself greatly. I was annoyed with myself. I had meant to text earlier, having wanted to say the most recent piece on the wall worked well. She wasn't so sure when she left. I hadn't wanted this to debilitate. Don't tell me I was underestimating the thickness of the artist's skin.

I couldn't even remember the punchline

2008-03-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

As I said to the artist on the phone as I was walking past the garlic, cannellini beans, pinoli, focaccia, biscotti, and pancetta for sale in the innards of the mainline station, my sister wants so badly to stay alive but knows she is dying and the two facts simply are not compatible. My sister looked like she'd done fifteen rounds too many with the cancer. The mind looked like it wanted to ditch the body. The lights looked like they were going out, though a kind of obstinacy remained, a glimpse of something sturdier than it should be. This is not me being morbid - I have never felt so life-affirmative - but this is how it is for my sister. She shook her head one time when I was with her and stared at the floor. It was as if it was the unfeeling doctor saying to her she had only weeks to live that had done it in the end. With the cancer she was almost fine, or at least she knew it and somehow managed it, certainly keeping it down with the regular doses of chemotherapy she hated so much. But the stark and unsentimental timeframe she was so suddenly presented with, the fact it was put so bluntly, I think surprised her to a degree that it was as if she'd always given doctors the benefit of some kind of mortal doubt when it came to manners, but now, as she sat dazed in the corner of her living room, punch-drunk and against the ropes, I don't think she was sure about anything, except that manners perhaps were more important than death. With great effort she raised her head again and looked at me. Was I the referee come to call the whole thing off? A long-lost component of a divided self? Or an irritant, a fly on the windscreen, as she struggled to enjoy the view? The daffodils bobbed in the wind as we spoke. The carved wooden elephants and sailing ships all looked so terribly familiar. The mantelpiece was crammed almost boastfully with cards. But they were both hurting, my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law said to me later that he wouldn't see much point in surviving my sister. I reminded him he had a son. Just before I left - my sister was tired - I stared deep into her indigo blue eyes. I lost her briefly but then she returned again as if slowly getting some joke I had told but had long since forgotten. (I couldn't even remember the punchline.) Anyway, the artist listened sympathetically as I told her briefly what I could on the phone about my sister and then I elected not to buy any of the prosciutto and caught the train home.

Oh Sister

2008-03-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

I am visiting my ailing sister tomorrow. I have mentioned her before. I may also have mentioned I have five sisters. Anyway, this sister was the reason for the reunion a number of months ago and I now gather from my eldest sister - a former doctor who worked for many years on the world's poorest continent - that this particular sister's health has taken a sudden downturn. She isn't well at all now and it seems death is trying hard to stalk us again as a family. Just as it did when our parents died prematurely, in my case before puberty. Sometimes when I am relaxing on a train, or staring out the window of a plane, I wish I knew more about my parents. I wish for example that they had left some kind of articulation of their being, especially my mother who for many months knew she was dying. This regret is perhaps one of the reasons I am glad of the opportunity in this blog to express feelings not only for the artist and her art but for family life too, and indeed for life - and in this instance death - itself. My ailing sister is probably too discreet to say much at all of any personal note about her predicament except with those closest to her. I can say a few things. For all of her working life she looked after others. Now she is a recipient. No one can quite stamp out the merciless march of cancer when it gets going I gather. I was going to say it is like the largest army in the world marching into a tiny country. But there is a fairly recent precedent of the tiny country winning. (Only to have another illness?) Can this really be a good omen? All I know is that with any luck I shall catch my train tomorrow and stare out the window and think not only of my parents but of my ailing sister's unailing dignity. Because of the fragmentation, the shattering almost, of family unity when our parents died, I never got to know my sisters - all older - well at all. But our love is indivisible, in sickness and in health. I am proud of this fact.

It's A Girl *

2008-03-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

Shortly after having our daughter, giving birth to her, releasing her into the big broad world, the artist set about working on a piece, a large work of art. This she sold in the end. She sold it through her art dealer at the time to a collector across the ocean. The piece was manifold. It contained about as many as twenty-seven or twenty-eight individually framed and small re-rendered items. These were each taken from in and around our daughter's early life, or first few months, and reproduced like loaded joy. I sometimes wonder where on earth this piece now is exactly: on which wall, in which house, by which people. (The artist's gallerist at the time discovered the artist by sneaking into her studio when she was out and offering her a show when she was in. Now he is a selfconscious supporter of esoterica.) Anyway, right now slides of the piece lie on the table in front of me. They feel loaded and are vividly coloured, though minimalised. If I hold them to the light, these perfectly executed objects from our daughter's early consciousness stare back at you like cerebral trophies on some memory shelf. From the top left, as if reading them like a book, I see the following. A perfect pair of grandmother-knitted small red and white and blue socks. The inside figure from a Russian doll already featured in one of the entries in this blog as having been also a page in a literary journal. A saggy toy lamb. A Champagne cork from the bottle opened at the hospital on the day our daughter was born. A sepia-tinted drawing of a photographic portrait of my mother as a baby sitting on an old carved chair. A nipple with a bead of milk, the artist's nipple, also featured in the aforementioned journal. A tall giraffe-like toy which used to play a tune I hear now looking at it. An unidentified greetings card with a Madonna and child. A baby fist, also featured in the journal. A kind of ball of socks. A bare, unwalked foot. An ear. A sleep-suit. A toy duck. A grandmother-knitted white cardigan. A squeaky elongated toy from a couple met on the continental mainland. Another sleep- or dream-suit. Two pairs of baby tights. A giant ladybird, which used to droop over our daughter like a bent flower. A nappy, or diaper, with evidence of success. Two mittens. The handwritten ID tag from the maternity ward. A crib. A giant butterfly. A hooded cardigan. A small teddy bear. As ever, the detail is incredible. I don't know what to say about it now, other than wanting to laud it. Maybe I am impressed most by the lack of sentimentality. You would think that with a list like this we would be entering into saccharin mistrust. But this remains and is art. It goes back to this business about the artist being a mother and artist simultaneously. It's not just art; it's life.
* Title of the piece

A Work of Family

2008-03-08T09:26:00.001-08:00

Conceptual art runs deep. While the artist knows she must examine her strategy again next week, a kind of ingrown creativity continues to yearn and promise like a kernel among her offspring. Our son coughs. The desert lamp shines its lamp across the polished bare floorboards in front of the fireplace and unlit candles. In this space come the two large and white cardboard boxes. With one now perpendicular to the fireplace on the floor our son crawls inside it, slowly lifting the other box on top and disappearing. Over and over he does this - it is an open and shut case - hoping someone will notice him, and continuing quietly until they do so. It is like a work of art, a cardboard womb, a fictitious nest, a comic kind of cavity. Eventually I acknowledge to the 5-year-old artist that I see him and soon he is leaning against the back of the bright red sofa like an amateur golfer admiring another person's swing. Then he starts asking questions. Why for example can you not fill the cardboard box with water? He has been skateboarding with his sister today and his cheeks are red as blushing fruit. This afternoon I could see the artist watching him grapple with the gravity and physics of it all and saw her smile when he slipped and fell and immediately screamed out: 'I'm all right!' In some ways our whole lives could be transmuted into a single work of art. Conceptualism may run deep but it also runs through this family like a blog running through a major artist's journey towards fresh recognition. I would say watch this space. But this isn't space. Space suggests something unfilled. This place is jammed to the rafters. And we love it.

Friday's list

2008-03-07T10:37:00.001-08:00

My phone wakes me. The artist is warm beside me. First our daughter then our son make their presences felt. The artist's sister is asleep on the bright red sofa. Later I hear her voice as she speaks to her nephew and niece. I am on my back. The artist flicks the switch on the kettle. I see heavy rain through the blinds and briefly listen to the news and a song. A sock falls to the floor. A magazine glistens. After some tea I unlock the door and bid goodbye to the sister. The children meanwhile dress for school. Daffodils shine in a vase. Scraped cereal dishes sit in silence. Taps continue to gush and then are switched off. Silence. I am alone again. I re-check the news, this time online. The war zone has dropped in profile but not in reality. I switch all the lights out. I vow to make a list of my day. I deal online with processors, memory, hard drive - with speeds of up to 7200 rpm. I have also been reading a book written by the man I bumped into the other day. I enjoy his pages and feel comfortable there. It is my kind of place. I check a borrowed camera for quality again. The images I am examining are the ones taken in the park. I am reminded when looking at them that I unwittingly filmed where the other person I met that day actually lives. This I filmed before knowing he was in the neighbourhood. It is strange when something so emotionally prosperous as an image is reduced to purely technical analysis. Illegal colours. That phrase again. I first heard that getting a film approved by an old quality controller for the most famous public broadcasting company in the world. The artist comes and goes without talking of Michelangelo. I buy fish. I watch the funerals of massacred victims on TV massacred because of massacres because of massacres because of massacres. ('Without any solution there's only action and reaction,' said one figure.) I look at some new ideas by the artist. The sun is out. The rain has gone. A siren passes the window and disappears again.

Radar Love

2008-03-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

The artist was with our daughter's class at a national gallery today. I felt aware of them as I passed the area they were inhabiting for the day. It was like picking up on something held like a fly or flies on your radar. Or a small cluster of lights. You knew exactly what the radar was picking up on, but it still held your interest, as if you had never seen their like before. I was on my way to an old colleague whose advice I was seeking. (I have been doing this a lot lately.) Actually it is a liberating feeling knowing the enormous gaps in one's knowledge can to some degree be filled by other people's expertise. You simply need to know how and where and who to utilise, find and ask. This is perhaps the truer expertise - knowing who to ask. Because most of my questions are tied up in what I am told should be called global conflict prevention - some kind of attempted rollerball of solutions - I suppose I shouldn't feel too self-centred as I hunt for answers. My own personal needs these days are certainly smaller than those living in the war zone. It gets you thinking, though. Wouldn't it be strange if everything was maps, beeps, blips, zones and radars? Maybe there is a grid of all the capital's galleries to be created, for example, in which certain flashing lights denote availability, aesthetics, manners and the like. Perhaps lovers can find an equivalent. Phones detecting interest. (Actually people and phones can do this already.) Anyway, when all my errands were done and it was time for me to return home, the artist and our daughter and her class had already left the station. But my train was right behind them. I could feel our two separate groups moving in a kind of familial tandem. It was frustrating, though. No matter how fast my train travelled, they were always a few stops ahead. My radar didn't like it. That got me thinking too. It was like being an artist in search of the right exhibition.

Scene from a marriage

2008-03-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

INT. LIVING ROOM/STUDIO. DAY.

SUNLIGHT pours through two half-opened window blinds, casting shadows across two works of art - detailed, worldly, expansive - on a long white wall. A female ARTIST, attractive, dark hair, sits anxiously on a bright red sofa. The ARTIST'S HUSBAND sits typing by a laptop on a nearby round red table. The phone rings.
ARTIST(answering): Hello? Oh hello. Hi. I missed your call. How was your holiday?

A MONTAGE of small talk, the words REVERBERATE and ECHO, the images begin to BLUR and WHITE-OUT, the ARTIST taps her fingers impatiently.

ARTIST(cont.): Good. Great. (a laugh) Oh. (a long pause) Right. I see. (a sigh) No, I know. Yes. Pardon? No. I see. Never mind. That's just the way it is. I completely understand.

The ARTIST stares defiantly, admiringly, without vanity, at her work on the wall, and shakes her head.

CUT TO:

INT. LIVING ROOM/STUDIO. DAY.

The ARTIST'S HUSBAND opens the blinds completely and leans back on his chair. It SQUEAKS.

ARTIST'S HUSBAND: She was the first private gallerist to see the work. She loved it. She said so. She wanted to show the work. It's not her gallery. It's her father's.

The ARTIST smiles bravely and picks up the phone and dials a number.

ARTIST(into phone): Yes, hello. I'd like to order another board. (another smile) Yes. It's me. Oh, one hundred and twenty-two centimetres by eighty-five? No. No, it's for a new piece...

The ARTIST looks at her husband. The CAMERA crosses their faces, passes slowly over the work, encircles the room, moves into the light and out the window. We travel through the window and through the foliage of a line of trees, and across the road, across open land, above a park, where we meet a balloon and float, float HIGH above the city skyline and river.

Take what you can gather from coincidence

2008-03-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

A curious but ultimately hopeful day with a fat cold sun. For example I bump into two people I have not seen in years. The first is a writer whose work now features with fetching regularity on many a bookshelf. (I knew him when he was a supportive but distant figure generous enough about something or another I wrote about my first experiences of the war zone.) The second is an artist, a painter, who painted the tall sets in my attempt at a play set on a fictitious and freshly invaded Polynesian island in the city of the scraped skies across the ocean. (He was also a boon companion.) It was strange, because I wasn't thinking about myself. On both occasions, I was actually gunning in my mind for the artist, who was still perplexed, like unrewarded talent, by the lack of communication on the part of the gallerist, the only gallerist to have been allowed to see - and who enjoyed - the new body of work. I was in the centre of the capital when I bumped into the writer. He approached from the left, a tall silhouette, and exuded the calm authority of someone who knows he is read. We talked about the war zone and I gave my opinion. His eyes had the sparkle I remembered and his wit was warm and melodic. It was a bit like having your brain coated with words. We talked about someone we knew in common, a good friend of his and someone I admire. This person works in film and TV. The writer at this point said he could never work in film or TV because there were simply too many people whose permission or blessing was required in order to get anything done. No, he said he much preferred being a writer and could for example go home now and write a novel about the war zone if he so wished. There was an element of mischief in his words and I enjoyed them all. I spoke about the artist and said with a tight gesture of my hand and fingers her work was extremely detailed. Again playfully he asked if that meant she drew everything on a grain of rice. Anyway, a few hours later, after a meeting with an animator and director whose measured opinion I sought on some technical matter, I am walking out of my local overland railway station and about to climb the slow steep hill home when slamming into me at speed comes the second blast from the past, the artist, the painter, like a missile. Amazingly it turns out he is now my neighbour and when we walk across the open land between the station and our flat together it is as if I am having a dream in which my old friend from across the ocean is walking with me across the open land between the station and our flat. I talk about the artist and he tells me about his partner. (They share the same name.) When I get home I tell the artist about all this but she is still at a loss about the gallerist. I suggest she texts her.

'So sorry i haven't got back to you yet,' the gallerist texts back: 'if it's okay ill call you first thing tomorrow. Hope alls well with you and the family, all the best.'

And then she leaves her name.

The while we keep a man waiting, he reflects on our shortcomings *

2008-03-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

Last night's vegetables were burnt in the end and it has not been a good day today for the artist either. She has left several messages as requested with the gallerist but has to date received no reply. I suggested to the artist this may be because it is the woman's first day back, but the artist is now being hard on herself for not having checked her emails and picking up on the fact the gallerist before her holiday was trying hard to get in touch. This may be in part my fault. In my own frustration I may have laid it on a bit too thick that the instructions I had left before going to the war zone were not taken up and should have been. I am sorry for this. Now, to make it worse, the artist has lost track of whether it is a positive or negative that the gallerist wanted to get in touch in the first place. As a result, it was impossible for her to work today and she watched the brilliant and heartfelt German film 'Das Leben der Anderen' instead. ('The Lives of Others' in English.) It is not that the artist is frail. It is not that she cannot handle all this. Early success as an artist and a former successful career in TV prove this. It's just that she holds this woman in high esteem and is still - albeit painfully - clinging to the ideal of working together. At least she seems more relaxed now sitting on the bright red sofa with her sister, staying with us again, leafing through a catalogue of a favourite French clothes designer. Also, tomorrow is not a cliché, it really is another day, and we must remain positive. Just as I try to be today when I learn I am to return to the war zone on the artist's birthday.
* French proverb

Food for thought

2008-03-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

Butternut squash, sweet potatoes, green and red and yellow peppers, mushrooms, carrots: all are roasting in the oven. Wild rocket, spinach and watercress leaves sit in a salad bowl. Our son laughs with his mother in the bathroom. Our daughter watches a cooking programme on TV. The kettle boils, ready to accompany the rice on its eventual journey to our familial stomach. It is like a self-generating Grand Central Station in the kitchen. We went swimming today. On our way to the pool on the other side of the park - one of the lungs of the city as someone once put it - we stopped to watch the beginning of the race in which I thought my acquaintance from the war zone may be participating. If he was, I did not see him. In the pool, I noticed, we were pretty much the only people speaking our native tongue. There was many a consonant cluster used. At one point I lay on my customary back and stared up at the rusting beams as I floated like a leaf across the surface. In one arm our son was grinning away, safe therefore, and our daughter was tearing through the water in front doing the crawl. Unusually for her, the artist wasn't feeling up to a swim and I turned to watch her through the tall glass windows separating her from the pool. She was reading. Her head looked deep in thought and was part-obscured by the reflection of the people in the pool. It was like a bad collage made by a painfully bad artist. Most unbefitting. Anyway, I pulled our children across the pool again and listened to their laughter as I narrowly missed the other parents and children still caught up in their gushing waves of consonant clusters. These are precious moments, I was thinking. This is the peace zone. Here we make people welcome. And the gallerist returns tomorrow.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing *

2008-03-01T12:26:00.000-08:00

I really just feel like wishing everyone a peaceful Mothering Sunday. (I never knew mine but that's another story, a lifelong blog in itself.) It's just that the more you look at the state of the world today, if in fact you look at all, the more you can despair at the breakdown of communication, and the more you want just to concentrate on what you at least perceive to be the good in most things. Keep talking. Keep mixing. Keep it open. And don't let the bad bugs bite. That's about the sum of it. I spent much of the day with the artist and the children in the park. I had a camera with me. I filmed them all, I filmed them a great deal, plus dogs, lots of dogs, planes, tree bark, flowers, a broken mirror, a collapsed wall, a boarded-up building, more dogs, a skateboarder, a jogger, a magpie, a keep-fit team, different clusters of trees, domes, a wedding. Everywhere you looked it was as if nature, or just life, was trying to tell you something profound, and it was simply a question of whether you had the patience to understand what exactly it was it was trying to tell you or not. I filmed another plane. At some point we passed a sign for a race from the park tomorrow and it then crossed my mind that this may well be what the man at the airport of the other capital with the helicopters and mountains in the background had been talking about. The one who surprised me by the candid explanation of what he did. It would be funny to see him. A small part of me obviously is not really here at all. It is still there in the other capital. Another part is simply waiting for the gallerist to return from holiday and cast her judgement. But my Mothering Sunday wishes are here. Respect. Which may, the more I think about it, be presence enough.
*Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Faith, A Leap of

2008-02-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-27T07:59:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-26T10:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-25T09:27:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-24T11:21:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-22T05:33:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-15T17:45:00.001-08:00

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

What can I say?

2008-02-15T15:31:00.000-08:00

Sturdy.

Happy Valentine

2008-02-14T03:13:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-13T06:02:00.000-08:00

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

Never Give Up

2008-02-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-10T13:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-08T14:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T14:53:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-06T15:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-04T12:18:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-01T15:26:00.000-08:00

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.

No Pressure

2008-01-31T14:40:00.000-08:00

The gallerist is coming to see the artist next week, not this week as it happens. I met the gallerist myself today. I met her in her gallery. A broad, refined space which literally gave me shelter from the storm. (My light brown cordoruoy coat looked like a cammy leather afterthought.) Immediately, I thought the gallerist charming, bright, unaffected, and the gallery measured, respectful, epic. Her thoughts stroked the work on the wall, which were largely contemplative and contemporary landscapes. I enjoyed talking to her - we even discussed the seventieth birthday celebrations last weekend - and I hope the meeting next week is a success, because as people alone the artist and the gallerist seem a cut above the rest, and they could be good for each other. A good service. This in fact is one of the things with the artist's work. It requires an unlazy mind to appreciate it properly and the artist's journey to date is not one in which the participants are particularly required to party, talk 'dosh', or deliberately lack cohesion. Its society should bubble, yes; the talk should prosper, certainly; but it also needs the right space and the right person, and this one person I met today was impressive. Meanwhile my trip grows closer and my running in the morning marginally less cumbersome.

On Natural Selection (Music)

2008-01-30T12:54:00.000-08:00

I start this with http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cn7ZW8ts3Y playing on my headphones. Click on it if you like. Minimize the image and listen to it while you're reading, if you can. Otherwise welcome back, over 10 minutes later. The artist has been listening to it. She has been quite literally attacking the rockface of her new piece more than just a little motivated by the piece. I have had it on my headphones a number of times as I've surfed the topics and regions I'm most interested in at the moment. This piece of music - 'a tapestry of voices,' someone has called it - was written over 500 years ago. Can you imagine such a thing? It sounds to me so contemporary. Turn up the volume. Go on. As I write, the artist is sitting on the bright red sofa with her sister, who has come to stay, and they are both giggling as they try to find a film to watch. I can see the backs of their two heads and they are like characters in a cartoon to me. I suppose the caption could be something along the lines of ... Sister 1: "How about the Sound of Music?' Sister 2: 'No, I want to watch a film.' Actually the music has stopped because I paused to drink some tea and briefly joined in the conversation. What shall I play now? I know. Wait a moment. There. Now I am listening to http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1oitSlHi3MY. You will probably have gathered but it is by the late great Nick Drake, and it really should be played loud. A few times. Play it again. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1oitSlHi3MY.

Our Daughter's Friend's Artist Father

2008-01-29T12:40:00.000-08:00

Our 8-year-old daughter played at a friend's house after school today. Her father rather kindly brought her back and accepted an invitation to stay for some tea. Also helpfully, he is an artist with a studio in a creekside warehouse not so very far from here and responded immediately to the artist's new piece on the wall as he stepped over the shoes into the living room. I took one or two steps back myself, knowing how much it means to the artist to have an in-shop discussion about her work with a fellow artist, no matter how different each artist may be, either in exploit or ambition. Actually I have mentioned this person before - the mother, whom we like very much too, is also an artist, and a teacher - and it was good to see him relax and enter fully into a rich vein of thoughts about all manner of works. What really took off in the conversation was the topic of the artist the artist of this blog had recently seen - and spoke about - with our daughter. A woman in her nineties, no less, still making work often fuelled by memories from her childhood, and not all of them good. While the artist of this blog would be the first to admit to a happy childhood herself, it is fair to say she is quick to acknowledge the potency of childhood, whatever the shade, as a source of inspiration. No, our daughter's friend's father is a gentle and thoughtful man. His kindness reminds me of the opposite, namely that so many people one encounters these days can come across, intentionally or otherwise, as selfish in comparison to someone like him, and, though I feel pompous saying it, generally unengaged by a social conscience. I don't quite know where this comes from, this disengagement, but there are so few people taking an interest in where our culture is going, or indeed what kind of a world we now live in. No, the conversation was good and went some way towards reminding me once again of why it is I like certain artists. Yes, it is their singular need to create something beautiful. But it is also their keen awareness.

"When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country: I make up for lost time when I come home."*

2008-01-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

We are back now from our successful long birthday weekend in the countryside. The children have just had their hair washed and are supposed to be in bed. But I can hear them whispering from their bunks, like softly mutinous bedfellows. The artist is in the kitchen making hot milk and wiping surfaces. I am at the round red table and have been going through numerous details relating to the fresh confirmation I have just received for my imminent trip to the war zone. It is strange being back in the city after the beautiful segue we undertook to the countryside. The traffic outside our little flat sounds louder than I remember and the footsteps from the flat above seem almost intrusive. But footsteps are the least of my issues. I have a lot of sorting out to do. Meanwhile the artist now puts on the kettle, having given the hot milk to the children. It is funny how something as seemingly inane as the particular sound of a kettle signifies more than anything that feeling of being home. (A few minutes later, I take a sip of hot peppermint tea.) I must go running tomorrow morning, I am thinking. The artist will no doubt return to her new piece in the morning with a kind of unharsh vengeance. She will be remembering again that she has a visit - we hope - from the elusive but important gallerist in a few days time. I must admit, the greatest rush I felt when we stumbled in after our journey was seeing the artist's work on the wall again. For example I was impressed by how much of the colour violet she has managed to incorporate into what is a dramatic piece. In fact, the pet name she has given this piece is the name of the country I am bound for.
*Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

The Street Lights of Eternity

2008-01-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

I gazed at the stars with the artist tonight. No light pollution. No urban mesh. One constellation that was particularly outstanding was Orion the hunter and his famous 'belt' and the great cloud of dust and gas known, I have read, as the sword of Orion nebula. It made our viewing playful as well as instructive. (Anything beyond the earth's atmosphere is an impossible distance; but at least it teaches you scale.) Earlier I had worked out without much pleasure that we were located close in the valley to where a woman who once commissioned the artist to do a portrait of a wealthy poet's wife committed suicide not so long ago. She died from drinking weedkiller. It was a terribly sad story. As I held the artist and we continued to stare at the sky, I saw what I think must have been Mercury to the east. I was also remembering the history of suicide not only in the woman's family but in her husband's too. I remembered climbing the side of a mountain in the land to the chilly north once with three people after a hearty lunch, one of whom was the daughter of one of the most renowned novelists of the last century who famously committed suicide. Later, years later, alas, so did she. 'Self-murder,' it used to be called. That would just about sum it up were it not for the other people such as her it can kill too. I don't know of any suicide in my own family - I champion, however clumsily at times, life - but ghastly it must be when it comes. A man from the small valley where we have been staying responsible many years ago for weaver's jobs eventually committed suicide after failing to preserve many such jobs after the introduction of the mechanical loom. Furthermore, not so far away, in a neighbouring principality, there has been a spate of over a dozen suicides among a group of teenagers. (I even spent time once writing an article about a group of people working for a well known charity created to stop people from killing themselves - http://www.samaritans.org/) That was a lesson. Anyway, I returned indoors with the artist from looking at the sky, both of us lit up, alive, glad to be alive, wary, strong, aware. Life. Sweet life.

The Lights Above And The Valley B'low

2008-01-26T14:05:00.000-08:00

The artist awoke for no particular reason. Perhaps it was a jolt in a dream, the imaginary thud of huge and heavy hand shears, or the sound of ancient spindle and bullrushes. I was already awake, thinking a thousand thoughts. (Many of them good.) I recommended the artist get out of bed, just as I had done, and walk to the French windows. As the artist crept across the room, our son continued sleeping in the sofabed beside me and our daughter in the large double-bed. The artist paused and parted the thin linen curtains. It must have been about three in the morning. I watched as she stared gently out at the moonlight illuminating an entire valley. A single electric light shone like solitude from about a mile away. Other than that, it was as if we were the only people in the world. With a silhouetted nod of the head, she agreed about the beauty and returned quietly to bed. There used to be so many clothiers and millers and shearmen and weavers round these parts, some of them the best in the world. Streams ran with scarlet dye where the military uniforms were made - it was also the colour of royalty - and someone somewhere must surely have seen the colour as some kind of prophecy of blood. I saw no such menace when I looked out, nor I believe did the artist. I can admit to a feeling of brief sadness but felt a presence of greater authority too. Round these parts, weavers regularly worked sixteen or seventeen hour days and mothers and children often lived in bare, cold and empty cottages. A famous soldier sent to quell the increasingly angered workforce wrote uncomfortably of their hardship. Last night, though, the light was magical, transcendental, and I saw the artist in a new - moonlight they call it - light.

Three Score Years and Ten

2008-01-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

I have the unusual pleasure of writing this entry on my laptop from the lap of what I can only see as dark countryside. My son is on the bed beside me playing with a toy diver in a frogsuit while voices drift like bubbles through the old and commodious farmhouse. We have begun celebrating the artist's father's seventieth birthday and it is already a fine and handsome occasion. I am still feeling for the artist, though, as the gallerist, I am afraid to say, cancelled again at the very last moment. I had already blown up the balloon the artist promised would be flying as humorous indication of where on the busy road we lived. In fact I had just tied it to the tree outside and was about to disappear when I saw the artist on the phone looking dejected. Twice the gallerist has done this. She has rescheduled for next Thursday but still it gnaws. Again, I suppose, the party-line must be to be patient, to make allowances, but deep within I know the artist is disgruntled as well as disappointed. At least she knows it is no reflection of the work, I hope. Meanwhile my son tells me that where we are staying is no one's house because no one lives here, an absence not dissimilar to the one experienced by the artist today. Still, her father's seventy years are being celebrated and this is why we are here. A special person. Very. The type who would be embarrassed by such accolade. The artist's mother read out an accurately sprightly and endearingly unpretentious poem by the fire. Our daughter read one too, full of the cadences of the right kind of hope. The artist for her part has made a beautiful book, each of the drawings depicting various moments of the father's impressive and intelligently constructed life so far. (I watched her draw them with bowed head as if in a kind of melodic trance.) Now, I can smell the firewood on my hands from the fire I made and will return upstairs to the firelit party. (We are sleeping downstairs.)

Lighting tomorrow with today

2008-01-24T11:06:00.000-08:00

The artist is expecting a visit from the gallerist tomorrow after which we go to the countryside to celebrate the artist's father's seventieth birthday. (The children have been virtual tourists this evening, exploring the rooms in 360 degrees on the computer.) This may also mean being separated from the blog as I do not think the farmhouse where we will be staying, generously rented for three days by the artist's parents, has internet access. I feel mildly uncomfortable about this. It is as if underneath the neo-literary and pseudo-diaristic pleasure of writing it, some kind of useful if not too metronomic irrigation also takes place. Still, I will have to get used to being without it anyway as I doubt I will be writing one in the war zone. It might be interesting advertising creativity as a life force where many lives are threatened but I am convinced neither of its practicality nor of its tact. In the meantime, the artist is being incredibly relaxed about the gallerist's visit tomorrow. This is not arrogance on the artist's part and for me is reassuring. I think it has finally begun to sink in that this work really is as special as I drone on about. It is a wonderful thing self-belief and I understand any natural inclination towards modesty. I have touched upon this about the artist before and admire greatly hre absence of loud and garish pride. In the end, it is a fine line between modesty and invisibility and we shall just have to see what tomorrow may bring. ('Yesterday is but today's memory,' as Kahlil Gibran said, 'and tomorrow is today's dream.') Two weeks ago we had a dress rehearsal for the visit, a kind of useful false alarm, so it may be a winning performance.

Working towards a wholeness

2008-01-23T13:25:00.001-08:00

As I sat on the bright red sofa an hour ago and turned my head, instead of it being my tireless son's eye I caught - he had ducked behind the sofa - it was the artist's new piece on the wall. Like our son, it is still in its infancy, no longer teething but still early-glowing, and the ambition of detail is not only apparent but arresting. This is a good thing from the point of view of the piece, but also in the way it informs all the other pieces. With each piece, in other words, the artist gets closer and closer to a kind of collective detail. Where before the chief characteristic was content, it is now also detail. I have suggested this before but never have I seen it so clearly. Detail as a form of visual respect. Industry as a representation of character. Time as proof of commitment. I wish I could go say more but I don't want to give any kind of game away; not at this early stage. Nor has the artist been lending her hand simply to that: she has been busy on another project and is now the deserved recipient of some early sleep on the aforementioned sofa. Indeed, her head is pressed against a cushion made by her mother and all is still in the house. At least I thought it was until I turned my head a few moments ago and saw our son pop daringly around the bedroom door. He was in his pyjamas and cannot sleep. I hand-signaled with a finger across my lips for him to be quiet. It seems to have worked, leaving me now to rest my eyes on the new piece again. I am entranced, pleasantly puzzled, avid. Physically, I am thinking, while there is nothing strictly speaking of the mandala* about the work itself, it does establish a kind of sacred space and is an aid to meditation.
*Any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.

The Artist's Swan

2008-01-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, like one of those Bewick's swans that breed in the Arctic in the area surrounding the Kara Sea and now reside on the small gentle pond I pass most days, you just want to build enough momentum to get those big old wings flapping again and take off. It's not that you don't like the pond. In fact you care about the pond more than anything else in the world - it's where your family stay. It's just that you need the big picture and you need to hunt. Now, hunting isn't exactly what you might call particularly swan-like behaviour, but when there's not much in or on your pond and you know where to look, you must go there. Especially when you've an important artist and mother by the pond, who needs time to make one day what may be a priceless picture of that pond, let alone two beautiful cygnets. Thankfully, I know it's important to look around, to check the temperature, to be informed. This old swan likes to do that anyway. Take that talk I attended the other day, the one given by the principal spokesman to the largest military alliance in the world. One hell of a smart swan. But what wasn't mentioned then and maybe should be mentioned more now are some pretty salient facts, namely what have just been deemed the four key threats to the security of this planet.

1. Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

2. The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

3. Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

4. The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.

Now, few of the other creatures I meet flying around this small airspace here seem to care much about these points, though they do have beautiful nests. Especially the politicians. I don't know, even in a powerless kind of way as I peer from high above the pond at the horizon, I'm sure I'm a better swan for being informed and this will make me a better hunter.

The Artist and her Daughter

2008-01-21T04:52:00.000-08:00

You seem to like wearing clogs when you work.
They have such a history behind them ... (stepping up to work) ... good working shoes too.
Tell me about your day out yesterday, just you and our daughter.
It was lovely, lovely to spend time with her ... just the two of us. She's only eight but she's so receptive to things. (stepping back from work) We went to see a show.
Did she enjoy it?
Well, yes ... (working again) ... In the first room were all these paintings with female bodies trapped by houses. Also, a huge cage-like box or cell with a replica of the artist's childhood home in it ... (light chuckle) ... I was laughing with her. Explaining how it's not good to feel trapped at home with no way out. That it's good to find something you really want to do in life. Something you care about. And not spend all day cleaning ... (a smile) ... unless it gives you a huge amount of satisfaction ... (stepping through mess) ... No, home, I said, is a good place but that for some people it can be a trap.
How are you getting on with the new piece?
Very good. I've just removed something from it which helps it greatly ... (angling head; working away at surface) ... but I want to talk more about the show we saw.
Go on.
The rooms were like dreams, bad dreams, and memories ... (stifled sneeze) ... I talked to her about how memories aren't always truthful. One room had all these chairs ... a torture chair, little chairs. And it was all about the artist's background, her father's job, and something that had happened in her childhood, which she was very angry about. Which I think is extraordinary, because she's in her nineties, this artist. And to be still making work about it? It's incredible.
What effect does a show like this have on an 8-year old, do you think?
A good effect, it's good ... (sitting down) ... She was fascinated by the fact the artist used so many different materials. (standing up) And that you could literally walk into these imaginary worlds. I think it was also very significant that it was a woman artist we were seeing. No, she was very sweet. (a beat) Inquisitive. Just really enjoying it. We had a really good time. (looking intently at work) And because she's been exposed to art from such an early age, she never wonders what it's for. (working hard) The other thing I loved ... is the fact it was also about motherhood.

The Quote of the Day

2008-01-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

'I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for,' said Georgia O'Keeffe. 'Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in,' said Amy Lowell. 'We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies,' said Picasso. 'All art requires courage,' said Anne Tucker. 'Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail,' said Theodore Dreiser. 'Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do,' said Edgar Degas. 'Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art,' said Wynetka Ann Reynolds. 'It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work,' said Henry Moore. 'Pictures must not be too picturesque,' said Ralph Waldo Emerson. 'Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better,' said André Gide. 'Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass,' said Fran Lebowitz. 'Great art picks up where nature ends,' said Marc Chagall. 'When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?",' said Howard Ikemoto. 'What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit,' said John Updike. 'The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life,' said Henry Miller. 'Erm,' said the artist of this blog, interrupted by her 5-year-old son who was refusing to go to sleep, 'art is something you need so badly but don't realise until you see it.'

On A Winter's Afternoon

2008-01-19T13:51:00.000-08:00

Our son was asking me so many questions on the train I had run out of answers by the time we reached our destination. As a further token of respect for the artist, I had disappeared with the children into the centre of the capital with some tokens of another kind to spend on clothes. Our daughter was serene throughout, enjoying her brother's inquiring, and watched everyone and everything as the grey clouds and threatened rain competed later with the sales and aimlessly wandering couples. We talked about the artist as we walked, each agreeing she was really committed to what she was doing. It is a curious but compelling thing, the artist locked like a hermit into her work like this. Any time spent without something to work on must be hellish for her and though she leaps like a rare grasshopper from one blade of work to the other she always seems to make it across. Presently the large green blade she has landed on is swaying slightly, but she is safe, her strong paws clamped gecko-like on the flat but expanded part of the leaf that is above the sheath and away from the stem. Is art insecurity or security? I suppose it is a mixture of both, though to the children, I suspect, it still appears as natural as breathing. But I am certainly aware it involves for the artist pain as well as pleasure. At one point while still walking we passed a large group of people chanting against the tyranny of their country, their foreign voices filling the street with chatter. As we drew closer, we walked faster, though the children at no stage appeared scared. When we returned home the artist had been working for over four hours. She didn't say anything after giving everyone, including me, a kiss and warm embrace, but I could tell she was more than a little curious about what I thought of the work to date on the new piece. I was deeply impressed by the work and intimidated by it too.

A Good Place

2008-01-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

The artist's brand new piece on the wall still looks very abstract. The precise subject matter, the mood, tone, allegory - call it what you will - is not yet fully revealed. And yet we know it is there. Whatever it is, we know it exists. We have seen this happen before. It is part of the endearing - and enduring - ritual. As for the artist herself, we most definitely have lost her. She is a good mother, a great mother, and doesn't miss a trick, but every time she begins a new piece it is like watching someone disappear through an invisible curtain into another room. Imaginary candles are lit in skilled silence. Chaos is left like a pair of scuffed shoes at the door. Surfaces, like emotions, are smoothed. Hope, perhaps, is reinvented. Added to which is this surreal image of the artist herself standing on a small blue plastic stool in order to work on the upper section of the piece. Her right arm stretches up like a waving dancer frozen in mid-wave. The index finger and thumb work with incredible detail, but the entire body is straining. From over here by the round red table, the artist looks like something conjured up by Rene Magritte. The red clogs she wears add to the confusion, as does our bare-chested son passing with an impossibly intricate pirate ship pointing from his belly. (To me, you can almost hear the whirr of Ingmar Bergman's cameraman.) Of course, I realise that by deliberately not releasing any of the artist's work on this blog I am in effect talking to a blind person by half-describing - and never showing - what I see. It is not my job at this stage to show the work; it is for the artist, when she is ready, and has found the right person. But, who knows, you may not be disappointed. Besides, we live in an age where everything has to be instant, there is no foreplay, and as a result no one is relaxed when conclusions are drawn or opinions are formed, if we can even remember what our opinion is. Our daughter meanwhile has fallen asleep on the bright red sofa ... and our son is in his bunk with his pirate ship standing by. As for the artist, she is a million miles away, in a good place.

Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace within it

2008-01-17T14:54:00.000-08:00

I have just returned from a talk given across town by the principal spokesman for the largest military alliance in the world. When I walked back into the living room at home, where the artist had just stopped working, our 5-year-old son popped his little head up from behind the bright red sofa, and let out a sigh of relief. There had been a severe electrical storm and he had been worried about me, and was still a little worried for himself. I looked at the artist, then back at our son. I placed a hand on his warm shoulder and kissed the top of his head. Where exactly studies of conflict fit into this is debatable. Maybe it is some kind of weird muscularisation of a strong sense of peace. A feeling of unfinished business. An appetite. A new career. A craving for content. An affirmative thirst for knowledge. A working hunch. I am sitting at the round red table now. The artist is on the sofa. Her new piece is on the wall, to her right, and looks as abstract as camouflage, especially as it begins only in places to take shape. Anyway, our son is asleep next to her and the news on the TV shows a plane looking sad, broken, deflated, next to its intended runway. There must have been, oh, two dozen nationalities in the room where the talk took place. It was a public discussion, open to anyone: there just isn't that large an appetite these days for subjects such as agreements to mutual defence in response to attacks by external parties. Only, external parties weren't really discussed, not in the intended sense, as the organisation in question is a kind of external party in itself in the theatre of operations where most of the discussion was centred. I stare at my son still asleep on the bright red sofa - a gentle smile on his face - and think about the children in the war zone who never wake up. The idea, lest we forget, is for that number, that figure, to come down.

Note of Many Colours

2008-01-16T14:41:00.000-08:00

I was given the rare privilege of selecting some materials for the artist today and as a result was confronted upstairs in the art shop by a blizzard of colours. There were so many to choose from I felt like a trapper walking into a psychedelic colourstorm. A colour freak told there were 16.8 million colours. What I hadn't anticipated was that the precise ones I had been asked to zero in on for the artist would end up taking me back with equal melodrama to when I was sixteen. I really was right back there hitching across the continental mainland into the very same colours, slowly making my way through one of the great mountain range systems. Witnessed from the passenger seat of a silent stranger's truck were sun-violet peaks and what I could now read were ultramarine violet rockfaces, cool grey road surfaces, purple brown road signs, phthalo blue wild flowers, and, when we stopped, blue grey salamanders and choughs. Flights are very cheap for the young today so the need to hitch in order to see the world is perhaps less intense. Every time I was to hitch across that continent, however, I was always exposed to the same degree of beauty, the picturesque and picaresque. I am obliged today to wonder just how much of that is lost to the modern young traveller, or does nothing really change? It's just that we seem only to court airports and lookalike franchises these days. A journey seems no longer a journey, just a means to reach a destination. Furthermore, never knowing where your next lift was coming from meant every day feeling like you were an artist in an art shop. Anyway, I returned with the colours the artist had requested and am watching her now. She is on the floor by the wall. It is shortly before midnight. She is beginning her new piece.

"Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing 'Embraceable You' in spats" *

2008-01-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Allow me to tell you something about one of the artist's pieces on the wall. It is placed to the right of the one being worked on presently, though it feels just as present. Basically it is a wilfully executed image of a tree, a laurel tree, in a fertile garden. It is like the garden of life and most of the image is like a controlled explosion of leaves and plants and ... well, life. There are flowers - yellow tulips, one or two red - and leaves and shrubs, and herbs, everywhere. Running through the piece is a lazy and lyrical half-hidden old wooden garden fence, not unlike a toy train pushed together by a child. To the right in the image, if you look closely enough, is a child, a boy, pulling a face. And yet the piece is not about him but about the tree, the garden. He is perhaps simply our chorus. And there is more. Through some of the laurel leaves you can see a hint of blue sky, but this is so framed by even more leaves and branches you have to work very hard to identify it as sky at all. I can remember the day the artist hunted out this image. Now it is on the living room wall awaiting the visit of a gallerist in a week or so. But it is reminding me of something else. Not just that you can be both orderly and wild, creative and masterly, at the same time. It also reminds me that what you see is not always what you get. (As if it wasn't enough in the first place.) I say this only because something was to happen we did not know at the time. You see, the laurel tree was a foot or so over the fence from the garden of the basement where we used to live. That is to say before we moved into the basement next door - yes, the very one with the garden housing the laurel tree in the piece on the wall. But wait for it, there is even more. Within a few days of moving in - almost a year ago to the day as it happens - the tree was blown over in a forceful gale and filled the entire garden like a beached whale before being chopped into pieces and taken away.
*Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Königsberg on December 1, 1935)

The Husband's Artist

2008-01-14T11:17:00.000-08:00

How are you?
Bit tired.
What were you doing today?
Working on my roots piece.
Did it go well?
Yep ... (long pause) ... very enjoyable ... (yawn) ... very.
Do you like the phrase 'squeezing water out of a stone'?
I do. Why? (a smile) Is that how it feels talking to me at the moment? (another smile) I'm sorry ... I feel a bit like I'm still in hibernation ... I'm hoping the person I know I am will be out by the end of the week. (a beat) Roll on spring. That's what I say.
What was the last good film you saw?
'Sherrybaby'.
What do you learn about yourself through your children?
That the calmer I am, the calmer they are.
What are you reading?
'On Chesil Beach'.
Any good?
Not sure really ... (gently placing down book) ... it doesn't feel like a rollicking read.
What are your thoughts about your next piece?
I'm really looking forward to starting it. (more alert) It's going to be quite a hard-edged landscape. Quite different to any of the other ones. It's going to be very strange ... but colour-wise very beautiful.
What are your greatest strengths?
My persistence. Following my work through. Sticking to the point, I think. Really thoroughly trying to work things out through my pictures. (relaxedly staring at desert lamp) I'm just trying to challenge myself the whole time.
What is it you notice?
How ... (much thought) ... people treat their children.

The Artist's Son

2008-01-13T09:45:00.001-08:00

Do you like being interviewed?
No.
Your sister said she wasn't sure if you would be an artist one day. What do you think? I mean, do you want to be, would you like to be, an artist?
No. (long pause as enigmatic 5-year-old continues working on a picture using a pair of scissors, green, red, and black card, white paper, some ink drawing, some writing) I just don't.
Why?
Because I don't. I don't know what I'm going to be. (shouting) Mum, do you have to do something when you're older?
What's that film you've been watching online a lot recently?
It's called 'Wonderful World of Weird'. I like it because there's weird things on it ... (excited; obscure) Instead of birthday cakes you can have a pie and inside there's a letter ... it's just a card.
You draw a lot but when do you like drawing most?
I just do it when I want to.
Do you know what a blog is?
No.
What's your favourite colour?
Black.
What's your favourite painting?
I'll show you it ... (he leaves the room but soon returns) ... I don't know where it is. Anyway, it's all brown, like a square, and there's a black square too. It's in the Rothko Room. Mark Rothko! Stop asking me questions ... (working on picture again) Mummy, if I put this on top of the page it'll be like an aeroplane ... (placing cut-out plane on picture) Can you write 'Aeroplanes'?
Do you think it would be different if your mother wasn't an artist?
Stop.
What's your favourite music?

The Artist's Daughter

2008-01-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

I'd like to talk to you about having a mother as an artist. For starters, what's it like for you living with an artist who is your mother?
(Artist: You can be honest.)
It's exciting. It's ... wonderful. (eating melon) It's very different from other houses here. And it's also quite weird because other artists have studios but we have a sitting room. Also, when she is working, sometimes I like to watch what she's doing. But I don't want to bother her while she's working. And I just like doing normal things like drawing, reading ... just bits and pieces like that. Can we go to another question?
What do you think is the main difference between artists and other people?
Um, I'm not being rude to people who aren't artists, but it's more exciting having a mother who's an artist.
What do you think of the mural your mother did at school?
It was quite strange having it at school at first. But when I got used to it, I thought it was a brilliant idea. And lots of other people in my class loved it too.
When do you feel at your most creative?
It depends obviously ... on what I feel like. But, um, I most prefer being creative when I come back from school ... and at the weekends ... and the holidays.
Have you thought any more about whether or not you might become an artist one day?
Em, I would, but there's lots of other things I'd like to do as well. I'd like to be a gymnast. A swimmer. A journalist. But I can't name them all because I'd like to do lots of different things.
If you had a blog what would it be called?
The Artist's Daughter.
Do you think your brother will be an artist when he's older?
Not necessarily. But I really don't know.
Describe the room. You can type your answer if you want.
Its nice ... (typing) ... to have all of the pictures up when she is working but sometimes the floor gets a bit dirty.

A Plinth, A Plinth, My Kingdom For A Plinth

2008-01-11T15:35:00.001-08:00

A darting train through the rain on a trip into town to see an old friend of mine with the artist. That was how the day began. Once the children were parked with poise by their mother at school, that is, and after tending to other more singular responsibilities. This friend, a rose of a leader in her field, a guardian with tact in fact, once commissioned the artist to do a portrait of her first set of twins - she has six children now and is a wonderful force of nature. Anyway, the three of us were keen to get together again. After sorting out some business to do with the artist's next piece, we arrived early and I watched the rain lash the famous plinth in the nearby square with a pinch of disdain for its notoriety. A plinth famous for its controversial visiting sculptures no less, in this instance a kind of unloved stack of architectural glee. Indeed a debate still rages about what should or should not feature there, and more and more outlandish ideas are generated like self-conscious scarves around the necks of precisely the sorts of people on a bad day you might secretly want to wring. Actually, that wringing bit doesn't sound like me. More seriously, the fear of doing something to match the other sculptures in the square has left grown men and women confuse art with petty squabbling to such a degree that the whole house of contemporary art comes down once again, and I must admit I am reluctant to do the same now, though I fear it may be too late. I know what I would put there. An impressively vast sculpture of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. You may know who he is. He was the man who created the World Wide Web. This for example. Which he did to allow simple folk like me to share information. Also, instead of having it patented, he actually insisted on it being free and therefore available to all. Anyway, over three large bowls of soup, the world was dissected and found to be whole. Haiku-like, families and friendships were discussed. One or two complexities were explained. And a kind of unquestionable warmth ruled the roost, which, given the weather, was practical as well as a pleasure. Outside, meanwhile, one or two hunched and lonely figures, drenched by karate-chop rain, passed by. (I even knew one of them.) But when we were outside again ourselves, the sun had come out, most of the lonely figures seemed to have mysteriously dispersed, most that is, not all, and even the art on the plinth looked ... well, still pretty weak.

The Artist's Perspective

2008-01-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

So the gallerist couldn't visit as arranged to view the new work because too many people at the gallery were sick. No argument there. The artist herself was sick for two weeks. A new date has been fixed. You have to be philosophical. I'm experiencing delays too. But there is no point in either of us acting like the only people on the planet. Good has already come out of it. Before I left the flat this morning we cleared and cleaned the living room, sliding the bright red sofa against the wall and getting out seven of the pieces. We sat down on the sofa together and viewed the work. The work to me looked formidable in the morning light and it's obvious that the consistent line of detail in the pieces has become its chief characteristic. The artist was fine about the cancellation. We never used to be as reasonable about pitfalls as this. Perhaps we are turning a corner. Impatience can thwart. Besides, exposure to other people's problems can soon put your own into perspective. For a country with so much wealth there is an incredible amount of poverty here alone. I was thinking this on the train today. But apparently half the world - nearly three billion people - live on less than two dollars a day. According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. Thirty thousand. Anup Shah of Global Issues states that some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Incredible. So, I guess, the gallerist postponing her visit by two weeks because people have flu is what you might call, in this light, or dark, acceptable.

The Barber and the Tramp

2008-01-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

After awaiting more kind words from the war zone, something I suspect I will have to cease talking about shortly, I left the artist by the wall in the living room working on her latest piece. I then walked with a kind of studious but uncomfortable gait under what I call the city's biggest sky - it is across a vast and urban stretch of grass pocked only with crows and history - before dipping through the shops and houses by the station and having a haircut. Only the first woman who began cutting my hair cut her finger so badly she couldn't continue and another woman eventually had to take over. Beforehand, blood kept pouring from this poor woman's index finger, and as I was the only person in the shop with her at the time, I felt especially responsible. With one of those ridiculous hairdresser's sheets still across me, I quickly turned on the tap and asked the poor woman - by now threatening to faint - to sit down and place her finger under the tap, which I now had running with lots of cold water. As she sat there as pale as a ghost, diluted blood spun its bright red and irritably cheerful way down the plughole. I gave her lots of paper toweling to shore up the blood. But when her colleague eventually arrived back - from the bank apparently - there wasn't a great deal of love lost, I noticed, and even less sympathy. I did what I could to patch up the enmity, as well as the wound, and proceeded to have my hair, as well as my faith, 'repaired'. An auspicious start to the day, I thought. It didn't end there, either. I caught a train into the centre. As it drawled into its final destination, I saw a woman at the end of the platform. She was standing there perfectly still with a large hand-painted sign emblazoned in red with the word 'FORGIVE' . I disembarked, baffled and bemused, and walked silently through the crowds. I was almost ready for anything now. As it happened, there was a film premier being set up and large banners with the faces of the stars staring down. Now, it just so happened that I knew one of the people in the film before they were famous and I think I half-expected to bump into them, given the sort of strange day I was having. Added to which was the fact the film was set many years ago in the war zone when indeed I was briefly there, too. Just as I was looking up at this person's giant reproduced face, I slammed into someone by mistake. It was like a thump. It couldn't be, could it? No. Instead of it being one of the biggest movie stars of recent times, it was in fact a friendly-faced tramp in a worn and patched tweed jacket with an ancient rucksack on his back. 'I do apologise,' he said, most courteously. 'No,' I said. 'I apologise.' And with that we bowed and bade each other good day. Now, I doubt they'll have had courtesy like that at the premier. Not when the paps are out and the scrums are ripe and the glitz is big and vulgar. Anyway, the artist was still working when I returned. 'How was it?' she asked, trying to get used to the haircut. 'Fine,' I said. 'I got your materials.'