The Importance of Being Artist

If a man or woman is creative, and ideas, as well as actions, pour forth the whole time, I know for a fact the world is a better place. We are not here for so very long on this planet - of ours? - and though these words smack of an over-tender idealism, it is none the less good to give a positive account of ourselves, especially if we are lucky enough to do so in a way that can give pleasure long after we are gone. Also, there is the atmosphere created by a person when they are unleashing their best creative juices. This atmosphere is intense, sometimes rigid, occasionally fraught, but also moment-enhancing, light-giving, granting every second a kind of spit-roast glory, and turning each breath into not just a shrewd investment but a pleasurable moment. If this sounds faintly spiritual, let us remember that even some of the hippies who grew out of the west coast of the Sixties were just as spiritual as they were creative. (And where, you wonder, is the peace movement now?) It may seem banal, especially in these greedier times, these protest-free times, to be thinking rosily of all those who preferred to withdraw from the rat race, those who lived on little, who raised families, almost entirely with creativity in mind. But they gave a pretty good account of themselves, too. Some went on to become global leaders. One of them owns most of the software I use. Many of the people leading the movement today towards a healthier planet acknowledge the Sixties as the place where their ideals germinated. In this day and age when you talk about people being creative, it is not unusual for the talk to be met with a cringe or a shrug. (Indeed, you may very well be cringeing now.) But when creativity is in pursuit of something essentially good, something restorative and tonic-like, like a sweet and plaintive moment with a violin, it takes a cruel man to knock it. There is also the self-compassion inherent in expression, which is not to be confused with self-love. I know songs written in pain which produce light, and I am familiar with paintings sourced from darkness which hundreds of years later continue to enlighten. No, the next time you do something creative, ask yourself, go on, how does it make you feel? (See.)

School's Out Forever

Today against a conscientious backdrop of the artist drawing a kind of viral cornucopia of elegant and spidery images on absolutely everything - cards and T-shirts and frames and books - which are then meticulously wrapped in simple brown paper and taken generously as end-of-term gifts to teachers and helpers alike at our local under-funded primary school, I work briefly, possibly indulgently, on a small chapter where shortly after the Soviet withdrawal a former Afghan warlord complains to the British miles away in Jordan - with a kind of clumsy assertiveness - about American training and funding of Saudis in his own back yard, reminding me in the process that even with the ingenuity or inventiveness of art or craft, though in my case inadequately written words, there’s still no real match to reality, especially where issues such as Afghanistan are concerned, where truth really is stranger than fiction. But maybe that’s why I like the artist so much. Her work is locked in a kind of super-reality in which everything is true and yet certain characteristics of the so-called truth are mixed with stridently and beautifully provided alternatives. Let’s not be too unrealistic, she seems to be saying with some of her well worked pieces, but we don’t need to look at the world this way when for example we can look at it like that. In fiction – something I really don’t have much experience of – you can’t just rewrite the facts, can you? Not casually; not when it comes to real deaths, surely. Or maybe I'm just showing my inexperience. Anyway, in a culture where solutions groan, I like to think of the artist here lending a kind of grave optimism to proceedings, though I sometimes fear my own hunger for things like news – though I am not really a journalist either - has been counter-productive to a purer form of imagination on her part, arrogant though it seems for me to think I can impose myself anyway on someone so attractively independent. At least I know the teachers and helpers at the local primary school are taken care of with T-shirts and the like now. Maybe one can concentrate on the Afghan. I hope he survives. I really do. In his defence, he didn’t ask to be invaded by the Soviets. Anyway, the artist is now placing our 7 year-old daughter’s long blonde hair into sixteen plaits. See what I mean? Relentless. Creative. Real to the end.