Born To Be

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.

Love is a gift

Art is so often commensurate with commerce these days – I know: in this case, it needs to be – that we forget those refined and rare moments when no money is exchanged, or wanted, whatsoever. The work becomes a gift. Though I say it myself, there were many such moments in my childhood. Even without much talent I painted regularly and was always giving paintings away, usually to a relative, a member of my grandmother’s hotel staff, or a friend. The artist does this to this day. Every time she visits her parents in the foothills, the night before returning to the capital she will make something poignant and leave it unannounced – however predictably now - under a pillow or on a bed. This is done with no less commitment than anything in her professional life. Similarly, the t-shirts she’s been doing. They are gifts from the artist. They are not for sale. (One very grateful Belarusian mother asked politely for an extra one the other day for her mother.) There are now so many of these uniquely illustrated t-shirts round these parts – so many mothers bearing the artist’s unmistakeable imprint or hand - that a kind of local forest has sprouted. I see them frequently. At least two a week. I try to photograph them all, though pointing a camera at people’s breasts is not done unselfconsciously. I love the idea of a generous artist. I remember a man in a lushly fertile land one day spending hours painting this beautiful though conventional picture of some olive trees and later simply giving it away. (Well, he handed it to an admiring stranger on the steps of the church from where he’d been working.) A real gift.