Praise For Elation

I have just come in from listening to 145 schools and well over 5000 children, possibly 7000, singing a medley of songs in one arena, as part of an attempt to raise money for a children's charity, at the same time as encouraging young children to sing, and enjoy singing. I was there with the artist, our 5-year-old boy, and the artist's affectionately astute parents. One of the participants was our daughter. It took a while to spot her among the thousands of white-topped singers, but eventually our binoculars were trained on her 8-year-old frame, dancing with her peers on the far side of the vast space, her voice running like a thin stream into a wide river of voices, the chasm between like a giant gulp of breath between each line of a song. It had been a day of childhoods, in that we began pushing through sunlit mist across slippery grass for an indoor tour through paintings of naval adventure, painting as reportage, beauty discovered, high seas instead of high teas, salt in wounds, shivering timbers, young boys aged twelve travelling the world for the very first time. One oil painting depicted exotic women with tattoos on their buttocks: ample inspiration perhaps for sea-legged pubescence. Later, a nourishing few miles later, the artist's father played a DVD of freshly compiled and edited photographs from the artist's childhood: the family's travelsome holidays together. A lone camper van cuts through Lovat green hills. Ivory white beaches and turquoise seas. Unphotographed midgies. The skirl of pipes as soundtrack. Adventure. Nature. No schlock. The holiday as a concept. And there in the middle of it all, as if the only people on the planet, was the artist with her mother and father and younger sister and brother and beloved dog. Everybody there. Also, you could feel the strain of hormones forcing their way through untapped veins. You could sense the thoughts running like colour on film. And the eyes. The artist's eyes. You could see something there. They were beginning to scrutinise. They were glimmering. These were finding shape, form, contour, contrast, meaning. In a way, the innocence has proved abiding, but not inhibiting, and by no means unflowering, and is now passing on, successfully, from mother to daughter, from artist to artist perhaps. An unpompous choir of talents. Pencil lines meet songlines. That kind of sing.

We're all working on a summer holiday

I had wished to make a relaxed trawl of an interview with the artist about the implications of being a mother working at home while the children have their school summer holidays. Well, what better answer than the fact the artist is now too busy working? I don’t know how she does it … well, I do actually. It’s called industriousness. An absence of sloth. Activity. I don’t mean to suck romance from the bite too much but there is not a lot of laughter from the grafter right now - not when there's work to do. Nor is this mania or obsession. It is mission. The children, meanwhile, having just come back with us from an Olympian tour of the park, watch their grandfather’s work instead, a primary coloured sunlit DVD about a previous summer holiday, the two children’s birthdays to be precise, while the artist returns to her well measured working of the paper on board screwed to the living room wall behind me, creating in the process a kind of figurement of sense, while all around the little bones grow and the little brains yield more and more. Another thing: we walk just about everywhere - we don’t have a car - so physical exercise and therefore physical fatigue in this house is commonplace. A good thing, mind, even if it does double the effort required for the artist to continue working. Actually you can tell children who spend too much time in cars and not enough time walking or cycling. They look stiff, their hips in particular, and they do not like anything agile. Or is it our state schools and their lack of large grassy playing areas because they have sold the land to the private schools next door? (Where you can't play anyway in case you fall and break a bone and the parents sue.) Who knows what some of the little people will be like as adults. Mobility and disability frames by their forties? The artist's father has a rapt audience with his film. Maybe that's how you deal with them when their mother is an artist and father writing this down: you have a grandfather who makes films you can watch over and over. (They smile at their on-screen grandmother.) Bed, children. It’s getting late. (Dad.) You should be in bed by now. (Oh yeah.)