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.

Aide-mémoires

I have just lost today's blog. I wrote it very carefully. I wrote it perhaps too carefully. Anyway, I didn't save it and something happened and I took my eye off the ball and now it is lost. Perhaps this is a conceptual moment. Something unusual has been written, which no one shall now read. I shall just have to write beyond my means, give some kind of glowing report on what I had written. Well, it began promisingly enough with our walk through a thick white mist across the open space close to where we live, which I wrote reminded me of 'Under Western Eyes' by Joseph Conrad. (The mysteriousness conjured by the mist. And, remotely, the location.) We were actually off to buy materials for the school mural, but managed to see an exhibition as well. (I hate losing text.) This was at a fairly large national institution where the artist once showed. In fact a large blue book from that show seventeen years earlier was still on sale in the gallery shop. As people milled around like children, and two women in their seventies played with and chuckled over a mechanical wooden hand for artists, I studied closely the artist's text from the show. It was impressive. Her words were as honest then as they are now and the medium was the same too. (Few of the other artists in that show can match her for consistency.) That's right: I also wrote that I stood in a queue beforehand, behind a maybe-famous artist, and waved at someone I once knew who waved back. The maybe-famous artist cursed impatiently as the young man selling tickets grappled with the broken computer system: 'Jesus!' he was saying. The person I once knew then came up to me and just as I was about to shake his hand, he shook the hand of the maybe-famous artist. I wrote of the twenty-two artists in the present show, three stood out - Vija Celmins, Liu Xiaodong, Johanna Kandl. It would feel too precious to try to remember it exactly but we liked these three in particular because there was something of themselves in the work - the show was largely images sourced from photographs, each telling us something of modern life. (I'm sure I wrote something else about the artist saying in the book without any kind of pomp that she liked finery and detail.) The blog also contained something about the small and delicate painting we liked painted in oil. It was of an American fifties war plane, in black and white, like its sourced photograph, above a bed of clouds. It was pinned behind glass like a butterfly, eternally, in space. It ended I think with the artist of this blog really positive about her new work as she marched back home to pick up the children from school. The sun had burned through the mist and there was a clarity now matched only by the artist's zeal. I forget the last sentence. It certainly wasn't this.