Rest: the sweet sauce of labour

The artist was tired yesterday and took a deserved break, watching among other things a three-part documentary on ("Pablo Ruiz") Picasso. She sat there on the bright red sofa with a duvet across her lap looking like a clothed little mermaid. As the life of the prolific legend unrolled before her like an endless carpet. (The person on the sofa also never stops working, never prefers the easy option.) She had worked until two in the morning the night before, having spent the earlier part of the day catering for a friend's two children who were enjoying a sleepover with our two children. But the fruits of her labour were at least in evidence on the wall behind her as she fixed her eyes on the inexhaustible Picasso and his work. I looked at her new piece closely. The depth-of-field in particular. I looked at the piece next to it. The two figures vulnerable. Picasso also enjoyed a long and fascinating biographical thread, we were learning: his images were nowhere near as random as my ignorance had told me. I moved back to the table, dealing with the edges of my own next steps - made small by the great man's work - and my thoughts rolled like a silver ball-bearing from memories of the weekend and my sisters to thoughts about the continued need to find a gallery. (I convinced her to write to an old and well connected friend and artist yesterday and she received a positive reply today.) There is comfort in the fact there is no insincerity. Indeed, today, in the heart of the capital, talking with a friend off to the war zone, I found myself extolling the virtues of the artist. I didn't go into any real detail. But I didn't have to. He was at her last exhibition in the capital. In fact, if he gets back from the war zone in one piece, perhaps he will be at her next.

Or better still be my winding wheel

I love the lyric. I love the ballad. As a form of expression there are few things more pleasing to me in the rich firmament which is art than a fine narrative in a good song. It is my equivalent of a good cellar. It was a pleasure therefore to light eleven candles last night and sit with the artist on our bright red sofa and watch in the flickering light as a young American balladeer sitting in a line of five musicians went through his repertoire of love songs mostly. The televised concert was in an old church and the atmosphere there was attentive though faintly self-conscious. We on the other hand felt like we had travelled the entire way on the sofa, speeding across the river in it, taking sharp lefts and sharp rights, holding on to the arms in the process, until driving at speed down the aisle and parking in the middle at the front. Outside the church, we noticed, as the musicians tuned up, a tall tree, an ash perhaps, was sensitively lit, and through the ornate church window from the inside we could see the foliage blowing in the wind. Marred only by the occasional cut to some songless celebrity, we watched in communal awe as that rare sight these days - a romantic – took centre-stage. A romantic. Someone in other words who chooses what sometimes turns out to be the broken road of dashed hopes rather than becomes jaded. And yet there was a thankful lightness of touch to some of the songs, a fluffiness within the darker moments. There was one song about unrequited love. But he laughed at himself. One song had his life as a blue hotel. Another saw the singer marrying the wrong member of a family. Another, my favourite perhaps, had the singer with a broken arm just wanting to come home, wherever that was. I particularly remember the singer's pianist looking up like a shy and gifted pupil at a prize-giving ceremony. No, it was good to hear good words in song. Songs are inherently different to the visual arts and yet a good one will always paint its setting well and chart its journey with an expressionistic flourish. I don’t know if it is just me but I find a lot of the music today which masquerades itself as sensitive and poetic in fact fairly humdrum, as if the singer cannot have felt the depths of experience littered in the lyric. (There have been in the past other exceptions to the sofa singer: the man from Hibbing springs to mind.) And yet there we were, parked on our bright red sofa like we’re at some drive-in movie, listening to a young balladeer and believing every word.