Disembodied Voices

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.

The Artist and her Daughter

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.

Foreword

After several years of mothering, working, experimenting, thinking, positioning, surviving, tolerating, imagining, comparing, grooming, conceptualising, sighing, building, caring, bruising, bristling, drawing and driving forward, the artist is now ready to show a visually arresting build-up of a body of work, still gathering pace and substance, and sure of what it is. For years the artist has been working away like this - not so much in the background as away from the instant gratification of constant public feedback - and now it seems she is more than ready for the next step. A greater confidence in the work is apparent. Not just in terms of its execution but also in terms of the idea behind the execution. The work is as finely tuned now as anything done by the artist ever before, and it is more than refreshing to see an artist spend time developing a body of work, and not just intoxicated by the world of one-liner ideas executed by others which is so prevalent in the art world today. As mentioned, the artist is preparing for the visit of a gallery. She is feeling calm and unfussy. The concept is as sound as the need for a show is profound. Forward she goes.

Win some, not winsome

The artist's last boyfriend before me won what a leading white-bearded actor tonight from across the ocean described rather grandly as the world's greatest art prize by ripping open the purple envelope with Zeus-like non-grace and announcing the artist's ex-boyfriend by name. The artist was sitting next to me during all this and I registered and indeed admired her response: she was genuinely pleased for him. The last time he was nominated - and did not win - the artist sat back as a guest at his table. I was watching it all on a small black and white TV alone at our flat. The TV has changed and we are still together. No prizes for that, but we feel like winners all the same. No one really makes art to win prizes but this one is rated highly - it was rated highly then and is rated highly now - though some of it has been glazed with a kind of sugar-coated slebbiness (as in celebrity). The prize itself - named after a painter of all things - used to be for artists under 40 but is now for artists under 50. Quite generously, tonight's winner said it should simply be for artists with a pulse. As a man, it must be said, the prize-winner has always been uncomfortable around me. As an artist, however, he has often impressed, though much of his work inhabits the world of ideas only, and can as a result be like watching someone trying very hard not to dirty their hands. I think the awkwardness is genuine, however, and may in fact be part of its appeal. I also believe the man to be a true outsider, uncomfortable in his skin, and one who sets himself apart, unusually so, from the clannish principles behind the art world. This does not mean I do not think some of the work is either too obscure or yet more one-line ideas executed by others at times. But they did spend a lot of time together, the artist and the prize-winner, and when you are both visual artists in a relationship it must be very difficult. I bumped into him the other day by the railway station I use most frequently in the centre of the capital. I wrote about it that day. He even came to our wedding, which was good of him, though he was as uncomfortable with me then as he was at the station. Still, social graces alone do not a good artist make. And I warmly congratulate him, albeit anonymously, on his award.

Standing within the prospect of belief

Yesterday I sent a brief email about the artist to someone I have known for over twenty years. In the email I mentioned a gallery this someone knows, which happens also to be one the artist likes - basically, they have a bright white new space and the normally reticent artist wishes to approach them about the prospect of a show there. As background, the man I was emailing is someone I first met across the ocean when he was in full swing as a kind of dashing physicist-cum-artist, though I had seen him from a distance a few years earlier when as a curator and art dealer he was touring this continent with some rappish and bejewelled graffiti artists. In fact, one summer, memorably for me, I had nowhere to stay in the aforementioned manic city across the ocean and this person gave me keys to their ground-floor apartment in an old industrial building close to the water: a kind of vacant bohemian hot-spot full of stepladders, paintings, Richard Ellmann biographies, and Norwegian rats (Rattus norvegicus). The next time I heard from him, a year or so later, he was in the mountains on an entirely different continent. (Time passes. Two wars.) Then - all of a sudden - he was in this country, dabbling not in paintings but in music. Now - all change again - he is still in this country but helping run a continental wing of the largest contemporary art database in the world. I must confess, I love people who roam the planet with ungovernable relish and individualistic industry, leaping with their chameleon feet from project to project, even field to field. Their sometimes dashing natures are what grant life colour - if colour is your thing - and as a result can make life more inhabitable. A good looking man with elaborate tastes, and pinpointing manners, he is a good ally for the artist to have. This is why I am delighted to report that in his reply to me today he thought the gallerist mentioned made perfect sense for the artist and said he knew him well enough to arrange an introduction. This, with our fingers crossed, he will do when he returns to the capital, after touring the two major cities of the sometimes chilly north.

Diolch yn fawr iawn

I am on my own in the capital, sitting at the round red table, while the artist remains with our children and her parents in the foothills, drinking a glass of red wine. (I have just spoken to her.) There have been times before when I have been in the capital and the artist has been in the foothills. There have been occasions when I have been working crazily in order to complete a project. There have been periods when I have simply been body-surfing across the up-raised hands of the capital. Or there are times such as now - like this - when I choose to communicate clearly and directly from the red table. (Howdy.) At the end of the day, it remains this blog’s ambition to reach that moment - that premeditated instant - when the artist has her exhibition. In the meantime, it's all about reporting the ride. In this light, let me say the artist has been charging up her batteries well, though there were in the foothills the usual little people to tend with, plus an energetic and effervescent little niece. It makes this blogger happy to think of the artist charging her batteries, as the artist needs to feel fit in order to perform. She is like an athlete, after all, and needs to be, so physical is much of her particular work. Her frame of mind is important too. The brain, as we know, is like a muscle, just as the creative juices are like blood to the body of work. At the risk of over-simplification, though, what I think the artist wants more than anything right now is one more major piece behind her before getting any more people to see the work in the flesh. This is not procrastination. This is artistic choice. That said, a more direct approach by the artist may begin shortly, conceptualising further the actual show. Another idea being discussed by the artist is a public space: she has a place in mind. I must say, it remains one of the frustrating ironies of this blog that the very thing it wishes to publicise must remain anonymous, but that is how it is. That - if you like - is the deal. Besides, art is magical enough to deserve a good-luck parallel, isn't it? Art is not just about the banging of a drum. It is also about leaning your ear to the rich green earth and listening to the plates below. And that - thanks to others - is exactly what we were allowed to do in the foothills.

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit

Today I have just helped the artist email a gallerist at a gallery where the artist has been invited to exhibit in a group show, though no dates have been confirmed and the art world is as fickle as a tampered barometer. The artist's plan is to explore the idea of a solo exhibition there too. The gallerist, a pleasant man with serious manners, has been shown a number of reproductions of the new work - plus slides and transparencies from previous exhibitions - and in an eccentric kind of way is impressed. But most of the artists he represents are abstract and this would be a departure for him. Anyway, the idea is to persuade him to visit where the artist works, her home basically, and this is never easy. Gallerists are like self-styled agoraphobics, even the nice ones. They never like to leave their galleries. Not unless there is a sale involved. Here it will be different, very. Beforehand, the artist will clear away all domestic and myth-sucking items such as the children's laundry, some toys, felt pens, their impressively competing sketchbooks, my jackets, and take the aforementioned gallerist on a kind of whirling tour around a room emptied of people, as the debris and energy of the artist's mothering manages to chime with the courage of her art and all the while the work leans against the walls in a large circle. The side of the room with the fireplace for example can be the east wing and the area behind leading into the kitchen the west. I will be hiding, a million miles away. I am not asked to hide but hate with confidence the idea of being the overbearing figure at the shoulder of a prospective ally. (More exciting I hide in the wardrobe, no?) No, it wouldn't work and I actively discourage it. Better not get too big for my blog, either.

The quiet exhibitionist

The necessary process for an artist, any artist, of showing work to someone in order to get an exhibition is a difficult one, especially when the artist is coming out of a self-chosen period of hands-on mothering and wrestling with work at the same time. The world has changed, though the work is timeless. So many of the better galleries - places where a good artist might want to show - imagine themselves as already sorted, count their money with a kind of inelegant relish, while having a well tuned, slightly over-orchestrated, line of defence, presumably in order to rebuff with an ostentatious flourish any incoming artists. I feel for them. It's a painful process watching them drop like flies, especially up close, and one I've seen on both sides of the ocean. Besides, social confidence is not always an artist's strength. And today's habit of crushing something if it is insufficiently robust in presentation is - in my opinion - a mistake. But at least the few people allowed to see the work have responded impressively. One major art world figure shown examples responded brilliantly. As one of the world's foremost collectors, they had their office email two galleries - chosen as ideal venues by the artist - and recommended the galleries view the work immediately. But what did the artist get after making contact with the galleries following the collector's emails? Not so much as an acknowledgement - and that without them even seeing the work. (One suggested the collector never got in touch with galleries about artists, insinuating it a lie.) Still, their loss. Their mistake. Onwards.