Lighting tomorrow with today

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.

Mission Statement

If you are reading this blog - a feat I cannot of course take for granted - and wondering what on earth it is all about, I suppose the best way to describe it would be to say it is a kind of diaristic homage, a series of sometimes practical dedications, and these to the artist, who happens also to be my wife. I should also state that I never quite expected this whole thing to come so thick and fast, and quite so regularly. (I haven't missed a day since it started.) Nor is it, by any stretch of the imagination, the only thing going on in our lives. In fact, I omit many things which I consider to be either too thorny or indeed sensitive to cover in such a public display of what is essentially affection and respect. What I will say in the blog's favour, however, is that it provides a welcome opportunity for me to drift in and out of various inter-related topics, rather like a tide still trying to find itself, and in-so-doing I get to regularly wash the beach of any distracting flotsam or jetsam. Another thing: it not only charts the very practical progress of an artist working towards, and trying to get, an exhibition, it also gives spine to the idea that it is a good thing for a man to enjoy the creative independence of the woman he is living with. I suppose, in other words, it is essentially feminist, not at all submissive, and, interestingly enough, not that possessive. What else do I choose not to cover in this blog? Well, the artist's husband, like the blogger's wife, remains anonymous. For one reason or another I have not always been so focused on the artist, though I have always been her fan. I don't like to be too literal about the work, enjoying instead the rumour of its greatness. (Ultimately it will be up to you to decide: perhaps the work will not be revealed until such a time as an exhibition is found, dates confirmed, and work perhaps already hung.) I do not find it appropriate to cover our sex life, musical though it is when expressed. I don't see any merit in recording petty squabbles: these may be a common denominator between reader and writer but, come on, who wants it? I don't like to go into any real kind of detail about the artist's relationship with her own family, good though these relationships are. (As for my own: am I saving up on them?) And I never like to be too literal about people or places, by which I mean that where we live for example I always refer to as the capital. Where for instance I spent much of my childhood, I often call the chilly north. The various embattled places on the globe I know fairly well, and to which I may be returning, I call only the war zone. Where our children's maternal grandparents live, I term with affection the foothills. A vast country I knew, loved, and lived in for five years, I describe only as being across the ocean. And the city where I mostly lived there, I will tend to describe as the city of scraped skies. As for where my paternal grandfather came from, I call it the flatland across the sea. And so forth. Anyway, welcome aboard if you have just joined us. Keep coming back. The artist worked on the new piece on the wall today - green, peaty, root-like, profoundly reassuring - and it shows all the signs of greatness. It would be a shame if you missed it.

After Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'

That’s my artist-wife’s drawing by the wall,
Looking so like her work: alive. I call
That person a marvel, now: Her bony hands
Working busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you stare and look at her? I said
‘Marvel’ by necessity, for we never need
Others, like strangers that plant disrespect,
The inability and slight of lesser art,
But to the artist I turn (since none but her
Is the quality raised that must be shared)
And more enjoy as she creates, as she must,
A medium as to look like colour-dust,
And alchemy, to die for. Sir, ‘t was not
Her works’ presence only, called that spot
Of joy in life’s corner: no, perhaps
The artist chanced to say ‘life overlaps
the face of art when art is good’ or ‘Art
Must ever hope to match the heart,
Half-pumped, that lives within:’ such stuff
Was good, methinks now, and has enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She has
A heart … how shall I say? … unsurpassed,
Never matched, and her eye is everywhere.
Sir, ’tis all one! My favourite artist,
The purpose of daylight on the list,
The lift of energy from delicious fruit
Picked in the garden by her, the cute
Children made to love each country stile,
She showed them green lands – both and each
- That cross from fields out of reach,
To others, gated, at home. She taught
Them what she knew from others she aught
The gift of life as one creatively retold
With artistic lift. Who’d want any else
Than this aspiration? Even if of no skill
In art – (such as with me) – we must thrill
Quite sure to such a one, and say, ‘One colour,
Alone, from you, makes all colour duller,
Or some such thing’ – and if you halt
From giving so, without such seeming fault,
There would be lack to this, and much else,
- E’en dearth in breath and laughing, less
Eyes, yes. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The masterpiece, then. I repeat,
The husband your equal’s known pages
Are ample evidence that much respect rages,
And we are, together, unsurrendered;
Though our fair children’s selves, as rendered
In your work, are enough, we have far to run,
And keep going, ma’am. Notice the sun,
Explaining all, like a sage, even through dusk,
And with your craft draw o beauteous musk.

One should never know too precisely whom one has married *

Being the artist’s husband is not the only hat I wear. During the course of a day such as today I am in fact many people. One thing I hadn’t expected to be today however was the recipient of two separate phone calls from two different people, both of whom I know very well, and both of whom I introduced to the other several years ago. I discovered later that they were phoning to inform me that they were about to get married. To each other. On Friday. (Amazing.) I remember when I first introduced them. I can even remember warning the man with a smile to do no wrong. I don’t remember thinking in the course of the introduction of what I should have thought, which is that every such moment is loaded, every such event can lead to something profound, and that no matter what I say to either of them, we are in the deep and rolling laps of the gods. Now, of course, I wonder with another smile: What have I done? Actually, matchmaking is far too grand a title for what I have done, but I have acted as a kind of joy-enabler. Yep. Joy-enabler. That’s the word. I wonder if they knew when they first set eyes on each other that further down the road they would be marrying in arguably the most famous registry office in the capital, where everyone from Judy Garland to Patrick Veira has been tied. And what exactly happens, I still wonder, when two people meet like that and two previous futures become one? Is it – can we make that leap? - like seeing great art? (I remember my first glimpse of Michelangelo's’s Pieta at St Peter’s: that was like falling in love.) Or is it like brushing away a fly, only to discover it was a bee, and that the bee has in fact stung you? (No, I’ll stick to the art analogy.) Kiefer does it for me. Clemente. Rothko. Beuys. It’s funny: it’s always the spiritual ones. Anyway, as I was saying, there were these other hats to wear in the course of the day. I was checking to see if there was news on a wonderful book project I’d really like to do. I was in touch with someone else about the war-zone: some facts I needed confirmed. I was firing off messages on items relating to earlier conversations about film. I was pondering calling the (literary) agent. But each time I went off on one of these largely work-related tangents, I kept coming back to this startling image of my two friends getting hitched. OK, it’s not completely out of the blue. But it is still remarkable. I was telling the artist about it. I was trying to explain how good it was they were getting married. Deep down, I was trying to explain the importance of marriage. I forgot for a moment about us. How funny is that?
*Friedrich Nietzsche

While all about you are losing theirs

There have been times when I have not always been there for the artist, and I would hate for this blog to have me as squeaky-clean, or indeed any marriage as perfect. Sometimes I have arrived home not only long after the birds have begun to sing but also long after they have put their voices away again. (I have been sufficiently AWOL to deserve the sobriquet of Invisible Man.) Throughout, however, and this is my point, the artist has never shirked from her work. This dedication is almost as extraordinary as her patience with me. This is thankfully represented in the kind of work the artist does, too, which is to say long and for all I know painful work that can only be done with unmatchable stamina, because there are no short cuts to be had here and so many high standards. (Sometimes I have seen her bent over her work with her fingers almost claw-like as they graft away late into the night.) Of course, such well crafted work is not always what a quick-fire art world wants but I like to think dedication can have its rewards. It means for example that much of the recent work about to be touted for a show has not been seen before. It is without the disruptive oxygen of a premature audience - like so much work these days - and is literally without peer. And if for a number of years the artist has been building up this fresh body of work without so much as a flash of commercial spotlight, it may very well be her dedication to you, dear viewer, not necessarily to me, which keeps her going.