The Messenger Is Massage

Today the artist saw the woman and artist she shared a studio with all those years ago. I gather they were both apprehensive, or excited, about seeing each other again, but it must be said the artist came back looking revitalised, enervated, full of ambition, citing the galleries she now wanted to visit and openings she wished to attend. I always compare it to staring down a tunnel of time when you see an old friend again after a long period of time - in a flash, life speeds up, in the artist's case this time by as much as eight years. According to the artist, her old friend, who looked well apparently, knew exactly where the work was coming from, to use that well-worn genealogical sounding phrase so popular with the art world, and its tangential bloggers. Out of four especially close female artists, it transpires that only one has had children - the artist of this blog. Interesting. Anyway, the artist also has a visit on Thursday to a young gallerist in the capital, someone recommended by my friend the art database guru, all of which of course is like art to my eyes, music to my ears. When you work so long and hard in a kind of vacuum, which is to say a place without immediate gratification, as the artist has done, self-doubt always looms large, or lurks behind hope, like a meddler in the soul. That's it: it lurks. It waits until you are at peace with the world and then attacks you. No, as the friend is someone who has known the artist's work for longer than me, I was more than delighted to hear about the success of their meeting. I was also thrilled it was a serious one-to-one - a long, frank, and intellectual discussion about the work itself, in other words. Furthermore it was something done without me gazing irrelevantly into the conversation. I like not being there. If people ever ask what it's like being married to an artist, I sometimes state, perhaps too clumsily, that it's great to know there is a huge part of the artist's life that has nothing to do with me whatsoever, or at least to know there is a place that is the artist's place, the artist's expression, the artist's world. While the very existence of this blog may suggest otherwise, it is hugely important to me that I can keep a kind of melodic distance from the opera itself, especially when it comes to content. (The artist would have it no other way anyway.) I am merely the messenger, remember. But these are front row seats.

Lateral Thinking Quiz

Artists do not require lateral thinking. This for me is one of their attractions. As it happens, I was given a list of 22 lateral questions to answer today. Here are some, though heavily tweaked by me for the attempted benefit of the aforementioned artists.

1. Why can’t an artist living in downtown New York, who is a very good painter, technically as well, especially with acrylic on canvas, and who loves his work dearly, to the point of obsession, be buried in London?

2. If a plane carrying a bunch of chattering and over-perfumed artists and art dealers to the Basel Art Fair with a well experienced pilot at the controls and on a beautiful clear day crashed on the Italian/Swiss border, where would you bury the survivors?

3. An artist lives on the tenth floor of a block of flats and every morning she takes the lift down to the ground floor – admiring some of the graffiti on her way - and goes to her studio. In the evening, often covered in paint, she gets into the lift again, and, if there is someone else in the lift she goes back to her floor directly. Otherwise, she goes to the eighth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to her flat. How do you explain this?

4. How many birthdays does a typical female artist have?

5. A collector has 15 Joseph Albers paintings – the man who introduced theory to modern art. Anyway, all but 8 of the paintings owned by the collector are destroyed in a terrible blaze in a warehouse in Europe. How many Joseph Albers paintings does the collector have left?

6. An artist wanted to get away from it all because he claimed he had had enough of his fellow man, and he built a rectangular studio, each side of the studio having a southern view. He spotted a bear one day – though he was not a wildlife artist. What colour was the bear?

7. If you were a really poor Dutch artist who painted oils and you really wanted to do some work and you were alone in a deserted studio at night, and there was an oil lamp, a candle and firewood and you only had a match, which would you light first?

If you get more than 50% of these correct you are obviously strong on your artists and could make a very good artist’s husband or wife. If you know them already, then I apologise. Call it, if you will, collateral damage.

Working Space

The space where we live is small but adequate. It is a flat off a busy road, set back just far enough to create a kind of barrier between you and the traffic. (I can hear it now.) The artist works in the main room, an open-plan affair with one large red sofa, a round table, floorboards, books, a TV with news bleeding in from Iraq, and an atmosphere of industry, irritability, and hope. As I have said before, the artist gave up her studio some years ago in order to spend more time with the children. As a result, there is this extraordinary coexistence in the room between an artist's and child's sensibility, not so much an atelier as playground. As for the hours, they vary but can go on late, however much interspersed with child-caring tasks and general emotional wear and tear. As I am in the room frequently at present, though I am on standby to go abroad, I feel closer to the process than usual. Also, much discussion about the work can be had. We can try things out like http://www.resonancefm.com/. I can read out sections from a book I'm attempting to write. We can glory, no doubt prematurely, in the fact that despite my adventurism and nocturnal past, we are closer than before. All the while, the piece the artist is working on builds and builds. There is much layering, intense detail, and this develops slowly, like a well-honed argument ultimately delivered with warm conviction.

The object of their love

She gave up her studio to be with her children, the artist I married, and to the children it must seem strange when friends say they do not have an artist as a mother, as I imagine nothing is more natural to their seven year-old and four year-old selves than the object of their love, their mother, standing by the wall creating.