Shuffle on this mural wall

I am going back to the war zone in a host of weeks. I have just received confirmation. But I will leave it at that. It can sit there in the background like a new character in a play who doesn't really say anything but has, you feel, a great deal of thought. In the meantime life as a man married to an artist looking for a show continues and this is what I am here to concentrate on. Indeed I breathe what lungs of support I can every day into the body artistic. With admiration comes I hope encouragement. (With this artist I do watch.) I watched her disappear into the cold grey day today in order to work further on her volunteered mural at our children's under-funded but cheerful primary school for example. I shook my head at the window and really wanted a gallery of people to witness this. I saw the mural for myself later when I went to the school to pick up the children and the artist passed me, shivering on her way back home, happy enough, relieved a gallerist is coming to see her work in the new year. It looked magnificent. It is a signifant and generous gesture. It is like Julian Opie meets Michael Craig Martin meets the artist. Instead of just being the generous gesture it is, it also now holds it own very much as a genuine work of art. It is like the acceptable face of socialism. It is like the good side to conservatism. It is all things to all children and yet entirely original. Just the parade of them all, the long and the short and the tall, all the different children, in different poses, stretching along the great white wall as you enter the playground, is like watching angels play. Nor is at all self-conscious. I was there to take the children to the dentist. Bombarded by dental questions on our way down the hill, I marvelled at both child's tenacity and fact-finding skills. Once inside the actual surgery for example my five-year-old son pointed to the fire extinguishers and asked what they were. When I told him what they were, he then pointed to the running man figure in the fire exit sign and asked me what happened to the people having their teeth fixed when there's a fire. Later I sat with them as they were lowered one by one into the high-tech dental chair where their little mouths were lit and picked and toiled away at. They were very brave and I think admired the specifics of dental work. Just like they admire their mother when she comes up with her amazingly intricate details. The artist is in the detail.

He who limps is still walking

The artist with effort pulled out three of her large pieces from their neat but ever-expanding parking space by the door, and I must admit I was stunned. I think I have said this before but when you don't see the work for a while you are immediately struck by the intensity of detail. There was an element of defiance in this gesture, too, after yesterday's failed meeting, which is being rescheduled by the way, but there is also a kind of regrouping taking place as the artist contemplates a new image she wants to do, which both corresponds with the others and yet takes them all forward. No, the artist left in high spirits when she went off to work on her mural; I had business in the centre of the capital and left similarly propelled. After doing what I had to do I went to see a film made by a friend and former colleague. (I seem to be surrounded by images these days.) It is set on the fringes of the war zone and is based on a true story - frankly speaking, the beheading of a journalist. It was an unfussy film and - through the eyes of the journalist's surviving pregnant wife - just got on with it, if you can imagine such a thing. For me, the message of the film was clear: terrorism only succeeds if you let the terrorist terrorise you. I came away from watching it, still depressed generally about the situation, maybe even more so, but also reminded of the danger of blanket cultural dismissal. On another front, a more selfish one but all the same important, I had a huge amount of communications taking place in between the events of my day, and my world feels like a busy place at present. A dear friend, a musician, got in touch. He is building a small studio. Two big players in the work department also got in touch. Also a newspaper. And a TV news channel. But perhaps the nicest message of all, certainly as far as the artist is concerned, came with the offer from another friend of a list from him of all the galleries he knows well as an art critic, so that the artist can let him know which ones she wants him to get in touch with on her behalf. Champion.

We Shall Overcome

We have arranged and confirmed the artist's preliminary meeting next week with the old friend who will orchestrate the follow-up encounter with the gallerist with the new white space. It is something to jolt the undoubted labour into a different kind of interaction. And this is good. The artist in the meantime stepped out into the sudden cold this morning and worked for hours in a blustering wind on the mural she is doing as a gift and significant gesture to the school our two children attend. She has been meticulous, practical, seeking advice on paints. Today as a day has turned up its collar. It has been the sort of day to wear only what a polar ice-cap can inform. The heavens have been moody, too, with various warrior seagulls gliding sideways hundreds of feet up in the air and deliberately miles from the sea. Talking of stature, I saw the mural yesterday. It is quite some piece. I think I was taken aback by the scale when I first set eyes upon it. To paraphrase J.D. Salinger again, it raises high the roof-beam, carpenter. In fact, the entire tone of the building's otherwise tawdry architecture is somehow lifted. As I write, the artist is now working on the miniatures, an action matched by our eight-year-old, who is doing an image, also small in scale, of something already done by the artist. Like mother, like daughter. Like art, like art. Our five-year-old is on the floor, checking the various angles he can look at his detailed plastic boar-drawn chariot from. He is like a small film director, a tiny Cecil B. DeMille, doing a kind of surreal bible scene. Come to think of it, what we could enjoy now are one or two sumptuous miracles. Keep the faith.