Chocolate Melts and Befriended Viewers

Crouched on the wooden floorboards last night like the Little Mermaid statue, the artist laboured until two in the morning preparing her new piece. She was doing this only in order for me to be given sufficient time to put the piece up for her to work on before I disappear on my pre-journey journey first thing tomorrow morning. (I am crossing a short stretch of sea and back.) This of course is typical of her. It was late in the night, very, she was tired, very, but she knew it was something she had to do, and so she did it. In an age where publicly funded artist millionaires complain regularly about the lack of public funding, it is always refreshing to see an artist determined to walk the true road to art alone. It is difficult, however, to remain totally concentrated on the artist and her work at the moment. This is because I am probably without sufficient time to do everything I need to do myself. In a way it may even be fortunate the artist and children will be with their grandparents soon, as that way I will know they are safe and well at the same time as being able to be a little bit more selfish about my own preparations. I still have a host of people to see as well as technological corners to turn. Since writing that last sentence, mind, I have managed to get the board up on the wall. As far as the technology is concerned, the test I did the other day did exceed my expectations. And as a particularly cherishable piece of chocolate melts in my mouth, and the artist snaps herself another on the sofa, I do feel more relaxed than I have all day. Also, I am settled in my mind that the artist is correct in going for another piece rather than concentrating all her efforts on getting galleries to visit. Besides, she will be able to get her teeth into the new piece big time while I am away. Art is companionship as well as expression and what one day may befriend the artist may another day befriend the viewer.

My Own Waiting Game

Well, the artist continues with her diligent and focused mission to find a new gallery and have with her enough art for an exhibition, while I continue to urge her along like a quietly gesticulating and gum-chewing fan in the bleachers. However I am more than aware of my own projects as I monitor the horizon for facts. Reticently I wonder how much longer I can wait on the organisations dangling in front of me the prospect of work. It's frustrating, but I am keeping my cool. I feel sometimes like a deep-sea fisherman refusing to return to port until the net is full. These are projects I have been told are robust probabilities and not just polite possibilities. So why do I feel like I should be doing a great deal more to speed them along? Is this some kind of inadequate male thing? A frustrated hunter's instinct? A tangled work ethic? I have already done enough meetings to stop an entire conflict. There is one role in particular I want. Of course, too much enthusiasm can be mistaken for impatience, and impatience with arrogance, and arrogance ... well, you've no chance with that. Some of my prospects are by-products of the pretty unusual desire these days which is to make some kind of valid contribution to the world by the way. Unfortunately this does not make any of them materialise any faster. I remain on standby. A sentry to luck. I know some of them will deem a blog impossible. Anyway, the artist still has her appointment in the new year to see the woman gallerist she liked so much. This has settled her spirit and should enable a smooth passage through the festive period. The artist's ex-boyfriend meanwhile continues to feature in the newspapers. I wonder if he'll come out of the experience any the wiser. He has already confused one or two of the major issues of the day with his own work, I have also noticed. At least the children have it right. They were taken by their school to a pantomime today. When I asked them what they thought of it, our daughter said she didn't like it much and our son said that he did. 'It wasn't like mummy's work,' said our daughter. 'I liked the scary bits,' said our son. I smiled. 'It's good to be scared,' he added, looking me in the eye.

The Buffer Zone

Today the artist has been looking after our daughter as the last globules of our daughter's cold evaporates into thin air and the excuse to stay at home begins to run out. The artist has also been leaping from piece to piece on the wall like a grasshopper from blade to blade of grass. In fact the flash of light from the nearly completed piece on the right is now beginning to come out on the piece to the left. (Art as an ecosystem surely.) Its glow, like the cold doing the neighbourhood rounds, is infectious. Meanwhile I have been out hunting, as in the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find work, and one of the advantages of today's hunt was in seeing an old friend again. Isn't it gratifying when those you have always liked appear to be doing well and yet still uphold the notions of truth you all clutched so handsomely when young? We discussed children - his are much older - and the 'abyss', which he warned with an experienced smile confronts many a boy aged thirteen. 'And three-quarters,' he added. He kindly bought lunch and listened to my underdeveloped ideas as our waitress ensured we were replete. I was more interested in my companion than I was in myself. It wasn't that we were trying catch up on everything; it was more that we were tackling the present with a kind of renewed vigour. At one point later over coffee as my host stared out at the tiny principality of green in front of his office, we discussed the absence of the buffer-zone between you and death when your parents die and you are still very much a child, which is to say 'pre-abyss'. I was still thinking about this on the underground train later when I saw an elderly woman who immediately reminded me of someone. She looked lost but was putting on a brave face and like the person she was reminding me of, she grinned perseveringly and was well presented. Eventually, readjusting her white-knuckle grip on her handbag, she discovered she was on the wrong train. She licked her lips, nervously. (Her accent was from the north and you could tell she was a long way from home.) When the man she was asking directions from told her to get out at the next station, and left it rather brutally at that, I took my cue and stepped alongside her and ushered her with a smile to the correct train. She reminded me of the aunt who with my grandmother tried to bring me up without the buffer-zone.

Old Flame

I am sitting by a tall white candle. The flame is sure and perfectly still. Not even my typing seems to influence any movement and it is rather like sitting here with a soul. Our daughter walks in. The candle is getting flustered. It leans to the left. It leans to the right. It swirls all around. It lopes like a drunk. Ah. It is still again. You see, the artist is trying to get both children to sleep. They are quiet again. The artist now returns to the sitting room. She leans across me for an empty cup. The candle flickers regularly, steadily, like a pet familiar with the caressing manoeuvres of its master. The artist puts the kettle on in the kitchen and returns to the room again with a large yellow plastic bag, carrying various images collected for her from the centre of the capital. Feel the heat. She is looking at them now on the bright red sofa. As she rustles the crisp and semi-transparent packaging, the candle sways, almost like a waltzing ghost. The artist now leans back on the sofa, sending another gust of air across the room, but this time the candle does not respond. It seems satisfied with the artist's position. It would appear not to wish to grumble. I stare more closely at the naked flame. The burning wick leans to one side like the right-hand side of the letter 'n'. There is a red-hot tip to the top. The actual flame carried by the wick is perhaps two-and-a-half to three times the wick's height. It looks like a Klansman. The artist, though, is as still and as serene as the flame. She will be working tonight. I just know it. In fact she rises presently from the bright red sofa, comes towards me, and moves a variety of working items onto the table. She is also moving the flame. The candle is still but the flame is definitely moving around. It is dancing, strutting, jigging, twisting, two-stepping, tangoing, tapping, hoofing it, doing the rhumba. This candle is going to watch the artist tonight.

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.

The Interim Between The Glances

It is strange how differently something will look if you do not look at it for a while. This is certainly the case with the artist's work when she has been crafting and working on a piece for weeks - if not months - and you have the habit of looking at it every day and then suddenly - boom - it is finished and you kind of deliberately ignore it, put it in your mind to one side, and a few days later - taking a long and deep breath - you look at it again. It is like a preliminary test of time. A gauge of early greatness. A frank appraisal. In the artist's case, you realise immediately the intensity of the work and are reminded of why it was you liked the work in the first place. You gaze at the trawled tension and detailed line - and resultant beauty - and come away from it both informed and - when it's really good - uncannily fulfilled. I had one such reward this afternoon when I switched on the light to help a pregnant friend of ours examine the artist's new piece - which was still on the wall - more closely. (She stepped back from it in a kind of swollen awe.) This deliberate avoidance on my part of not looking at the work for a number of days is indulgent but it is also interesting on another level - it is as if in the interim between the glances a kind of visual fermentation has been taking place. There are one or two other pieces by the artist scattered around the house and they arouse something similar. They are still slowly maturing each day, as the sun comes up and the sun goes down, and include a small portrait of an elderly and gaunt stranger - I may have mentioned him before. This piece the artist recently took out again from behind the dressing table in the bedroom and because it was still poking out afterwards, I was able to take a look at it again. It most definitely had fermented, matured, grown. It had stood the test of time. It deserved its early greatness. It had endured frank appraisal. In a way, some of the pieces now are like flowered genius.

This great solitary ouevre

We spoke at length today about an artist whom we discovered this morning had died just under three weeks ago. I met him across the ocean so a small part of me takes his death personally, which is absurd really as I didn't know him at all well. He burst through the room at a party in tweeds one night, looking like a rock star dressed as Sherlock Holmes, so intense and wanting immediately to discuss the superficiality of the art world. You could feel the ruffled feathers in the room shimmering like fear. He was in such a hurry, too. He was 54 when he died. The cause of his death was given as a ruptured appendix. But he was always in a rush, it seems. I keep seeing his long blond hair parted to one side and the small blond beard clipped like a thick cigar when I close my eyes. He worked as a maintenance engineer in a steelworks before going to art school. When he crossed the ocean in his late twenties, instead of hanging out like everyone else in the warm blaze of an over-bearing art scene he disappeared into a small studio and worked his socks off for a year. A major art critic - a gentle man with white hair and red cheeks - wrote about some of his work in the major broadsheet and the rest - as they don't say - was a pocket of short-lived but intense art history. Soon after, our man defied yet another trend - that of soaking up the praise and preening oneself forever in public - by returning back across the ocean to his native land in the chilly north, claiming he needed some space. What I think really happened was that he could see fashion's tide begin to turn again. The obituary in front of me as I write on the round red table has a large colour reproduction of one of his pieces, and it has to be said that the unfashionably figurative nature of his work shines through. How dare the art world have turned its back on him. He was another victim of other people's idea of fashion, and the art world that thrust him into the spotlight later switched him off at the mains. (Cannot something be both universally and timelessly profound? Does it always have to have some too easily decipherable code saying, 'Now!') They say he never doffed his hat sufficiently to the people who make up the art world. I'm doffing mine to him right now. While it's warming to hear his belief in painting never wavered, I'm still waiting for the critics. In fact, I can hear some of them now. 'Actually, he wasn't that bad,' they'll say. Someone else: 'You know, at the time some of his paintings seemed either dated or juvenile, but when you look at them properly ... they're all rather deep.' As early as the late 1990s his health had begun to fail apparently. They say he lived dangerously. Well, conviction is dangerous.

Riders in the storm

The artist takes a rightful breather, burying her head inside a 600-page novel like a head of corn inside a giant balloon. The mood of the news is not good; it is local and dark, like the weather, and packed like (an) unexploded bomb(s). Soft and relentless rain on the windows creates the right sort of feel in a movie but in real life just makes you restless. The artist's daughter has the right idea - watching TV with the artist's son - though with too many angry voices for something so well meaning. I admit to the idea of the ideal taking a day off. I also admit to the reality that a creative environment is not always a flourishing one and that sticks in the mud cannot always be sidestepped. But there is reward to a creative household. This last piece the artist has been working on can thrill like a walk in the woods. There is a kind of paranormal light across it. It plays yet never deceives. There must be two thousand leaves in the image, one or two hundred broadleaved trees and shrubs. As I write, it remains screwed like a statement to the wall. The density of the medium means its presence has no doubt, but because all the scattered newspapers protecting the floor have been swept up and binned, and all signs of work temporarily removed, the piece sits within the domestic landscape like a cross-armed stalwart, a permanent member. It is a part of our lives - we are having a relationship - but soon it will be gone.

It is st(art)ing to work

I can hear her behind me. First there are the feet. They move across the wooden floorboards. The short heels drag. The soles twist. A different sound is the work itself. First a kind of enforced dabbling, some dabbing, some smoothing, gentle scratches, the odd scrape. Then the feet kick in again as the artist steps back and presumably reviews - I can't bear to look - her work. Relief descends on the room as the artist is not dabbling, dabbing, scratching, or scraping within, but is committing herself, outwardly and with progress. It is st(art)ing to work.

You do not know what you are missing

So this is it: the moment I commit to words my attempt to reveal something I consider special. Please don't get me wrong, it is not my art. It is someone else's. In fact they do not even know I am writing about them or their art. And it will not be easy, this journey. But I know it is important. Because it is important for me and the artist. It is what binds us together. This is what it is like, I am beginning to learn, being the husband or wife or partner of the artist. We watch from the sidelines and feel all the anguish. We feel the blows of perceived failure as if delivered to our very selves. And yet we must remain positive. We of all people. We, the friends of the artist. When lucky enough to find it we must defend the greatness from the insecurity. So, dear reader, there I suppose we have it. Some of the work I will show you one fine day is done, but much of it still being done. On the artist's behalf I am only warming you up. She is sleeping right now, the artist, her head deep into the pillow. As the room grows quiet, I peer through the dim lighting at the wall and see it. There. Her work. Intricate. True. Brave. You do not know what you are missing.