What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

An itchy, important, frustrating day. Another period away from the artist and a meeting with someone different again: another person who knows his war-zones. It was tea this time, in a tall light room with ornate furnishings. It was like a film-set, a scene from a French period piece, with English undertones. There we were, in the middle of it all, two white cups, two white saucers, a tea-pot and tea-strainer, two uneaten biscuits, and two people talking about conflict, post-conflict, and the issues of aid. His own particular expertise was in picking up the pieces and, though I was frustrated, I felt emboldened by his company. I spoke to the artist before returning and when I got back she was hovering by the piece on the wall. To be frank, she looked intimidated by the amount of work she still has to do. It is not all ardour and loyalty in this household. There can be moments of domestic tension, especially when the subject of the artist's work is raised. (The same place where the artist gets her strength is the same place where she also gets her frustration.) Anyway, the issues she has are now being worked on as I write this blog. I can hear that familiar dabbing and stabbing. There is no rest in this house. We are always striving. It is not helped by the fact the children are still awake and we are all in one room. But, and I must try to remember this, diligence is not explained by success alone. We may not have our rewards, but we most certainly have our creative and functioning aspirations. As I peer over the brow of the day, I can see the next excitement, too. It comes in the shape of three family birthdays in the next six days, including the two children's birthdays. There are always birthdays. Even in the war-zones. But ours are ours.

The Shots Of A Man Who Was Shot

I left the artist and took a thoughtful trip across the capital today to listen to a necessary talk given to 30 or so people by a man who also works in images. Only he is not an artist. And his images are from when he was helicoptered into a lofty war-zone and three months ago helicoptered - seriously wounded - out again. (The bullet ripped through his spleen, lower left abdomen, colon, stomach, and left again in a hurry through two exit points.) I was there for some general info but came away with a great deal more. It was immediately atmospheric, almost fetching. The lights came down and the images were projected between him and an amiable man with a military background. The commentary was lucid and informative and unusually frank. Indeed, he talked with a kind of enlightened intimacy, especially about being shot. (His unit was responding to support another unit that had been ambushed.) You could say that what I find lacking in some contemporary art - humanity, courage, etc - I can see in an abundance in this man's work. It was like going on a journey with him, and you had in the course of this journey become his eyes, excuse, light-meter, conscience. (As I understood it, all but one of the men he was with were shot.) The fact the images were black and white made it all the more surreal. I knew this part of the world and had taken black and white images there myself, though this was during a different conflict. I also appreciated the fact that - just like the man I saw yesterday - he was able to say with conviction that the presence of the soldiers there was not only largely welcomed but clearly justified. Back to the pictures. Image-wise - as I wanted to tell the artist later - I was struck by the following. There was the image of a dog adopted by troops in a mountain look-out surrounded for at least three to four months of the winter by snow. There was a shot of a bare-chested young recruit doing press-ups in the snow. There was the impossibly - strangely familiar - steep paths across which heavily armed men had to patrol. (There was the story of a 19 year-old who slipped and died.) There were simple images of their improvised living quarters - very different to the sickening number of smug lifestyle shots presently peppering the newspaper landscape. There was a picture of some bangles with engraved names of dead friends. There were the dollar-bought piles of surrendered weapons. And then there was the attack: the one that did it for him. They reckon now the sniper was from another country. The only thing the man giving the talk couldn't work out - he said - was where in the landscape was the POO. He waited. 'Point of Origin,' he smiled.

The Homecoming

I awake early. The radio is on. Ever-rolling news. (The chaos of the events unmatched by the neat re-telling.) I roll over, to the east. The artist is not there. Of course. She is in the foothills, though travelling back today, with the little people. I lie on my back and catch up on the news. The stories seem familiar. Some are. I heard them in my sleep. Indeed, in the course of the previous six hours I have probably been around the world five times. I examine the artist’s work on the wall. It will be the first thing she looks at when she arrives. (Mark my words.) Furthermore she will say it needs more work. I shower and shave. I run an errand, and speak on the phone to one of the children, then the artist, who is preparing to leave the foothills. I head into the heart of the capital aware of their imminent journey. Everything in the capital feels relaxed, though I am there to meet a man back briefly from a war-zone. He saunters in to where we are meeting. He bears a relaxed but worldly demeanour. I have seen him each time but one when he has been back. I remember when he first told me he was going out. It is interesting to register the changes, and good to note, in his case, a continued strength and respect for others. Also, you know you are in good company when the brave man plays down the risk, belittles the danger, and talks with humour. We discuss my own possible role in this field - we have had this conversation before - and I am satisfied. I bid goodbye. The sun is on our faces. And I wish him well. He flies back tomorrow. In the morning. My second appointment is with another war-zoner but this one I discover has postponed the meeting for two days. I decide instead, perhaps indulgently, to prepare for the artist and the little people’s arrival by going home and cleaning the flat – we were working hard before the foothills and left it very dirty. Why, I shock myself by buying a mop on the way. Who am I trying to impress? If it is the artist, you would shake your head at some of things I have done in the past in order - you would think – to do the opposite. The first thing I do in the flat is to open all the windows and doors. With basements, the airing of the space is essential. Anyway, when they arrive a few hours later their spirits are high and their appreciation apparent. The artist then looks at her work: ‘It needs more work,’ she says.

Diolch yn fawr iawn

I am on my own in the capital, sitting at the round red table, while the artist remains with our children and her parents in the foothills, drinking a glass of red wine. (I have just spoken to her.) There have been times before when I have been in the capital and the artist has been in the foothills. There have been occasions when I have been working crazily in order to complete a project. There have been periods when I have simply been body-surfing across the up-raised hands of the capital. Or there are times such as now - like this - when I choose to communicate clearly and directly from the red table. (Howdy.) At the end of the day, it remains this blog’s ambition to reach that moment - that premeditated instant - when the artist has her exhibition. In the meantime, it's all about reporting the ride. In this light, let me say the artist has been charging up her batteries well, though there were in the foothills the usual little people to tend with, plus an energetic and effervescent little niece. It makes this blogger happy to think of the artist charging her batteries, as the artist needs to feel fit in order to perform. She is like an athlete, after all, and needs to be, so physical is much of her particular work. Her frame of mind is important too. The brain, as we know, is like a muscle, just as the creative juices are like blood to the body of work. At the risk of over-simplification, though, what I think the artist wants more than anything right now is one more major piece behind her before getting any more people to see the work in the flesh. This is not procrastination. This is artistic choice. That said, a more direct approach by the artist may begin shortly, conceptualising further the actual show. Another idea being discussed by the artist is a public space: she has a place in mind. I must say, it remains one of the frustrating ironies of this blog that the very thing it wishes to publicise must remain anonymous, but that is how it is. That - if you like - is the deal. Besides, art is magical enough to deserve a good-luck parallel, isn't it? Art is not just about the banging of a drum. It is also about leaning your ear to the rich green earth and listening to the plates below. And that - thanks to others - is exactly what we were allowed to do in the foothills.

Onychocryptosis

A not unpleasant ingrown toenail of a day, as a kind of drawbridge comes up, a slipper slips on, and the family all stay in. (The 4-year-old sits at his grandfather's computer finding free online games while the 7-year-old watches an adult drama with her grandmother, aunt and cousin.) Somewhere in this confection is the artist, checking the skyline for change, in order she can gather those upstream images. Yesterday she tried but as the light was failing, it was too late. Tomorrow I must return alone to the capital. I have a view of my own. A kind of ice-rink of grey denotes the sky. Neat pencil lines of three electricity wires run from one bank of trees to another. The trees lining the road wait like spectators for a bike-race. A smoking tractor burns uphill. (One tree moves more than the others.) In the foreground is a spider web, stretched and laddered like a Berliner's stocking. A paperback about bravery and fanaticism lies face-down on the sill, next to an emptied cake wrapper. Ingrown toenails may develop for many reasons. Some cases are congenital - the nail is just too large for the toe. Not this one. These are active feet. These are clipped nails. But we all like a day when there's no chance of putting one's foot in it. Why, the artist may even have found her upstream images by close of play.
Onychocryptosis: ingrown toenail

Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now *

All this feels so charmingly unreal and away from life's slashing. A vehicle of eight people - five adults, three children - swerves lightly and nonchalantly down a dipping valley and along a mussel-spotted and railway-tuned coastline. Several miles later, the vehicle arrives at a gatehouse, through which it continues along a mile of sun-dappledness, at the end of which is the unreal image of a holidaying family with whom the artist shared moments of her childhood. (It is standing there waiting like a very loyal and necessarily dated toy-chest.) Furthermore, each child in this visited island of memory - that is to say, the children of the artist's childhood friends - has been the subject of a portrait by the artist. One by one, in other words, they have all featured as works in progress on our wall. (I have watched their renditions grow.) So when we stand like New England pilgrims on the sun-licked pebbles where the freshwater river meets the sea - we are 20-odd-strong by now - there is something conceptual, something so unreal, taking place. Small portraits have come to life. Two-dimensionalisms have found that third dimension. And on top of it all, perched like that final parcel of unreality, are breathing and speaking and laughing versions of themselves. I watch the artist during all this. She is flashing kind glances, recalling childhood performances, registering time's slow gnawing of skin, and thinking up those images required upstream. I smile at her and step out of this gentle memorialisation. By the house is a large garden and in that garden are apples. The apples are cooking apples. As I hold my son to one of the trees, he holds one of the apples in his hand. Suddenly it comes away. He looks at it, tries to put it back, realises it can't. Now that is real.
*From 'To A Butterfly' by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The Artist As A Muscovy Duck

A car passed on the very last stretch of road between here and a kind of wilderness. Trees crisscrossed above my head and nature oozed like sap from the sides of the hill. I was with the Artist's Parents' dog. Hang on a moment, I thought. What's that movement ahead? Whatever it was, it was parked in the middle of the road like the roadkill that got away. Just then, the car stopped and out stepped a man. He walked towards it. I didn't know if I should start walking backwards or not. It was, in fact, a Muscovy duck, though it looked more like a bald-headed eagle with a wig. In seconds, it took to the air, missing my head by only a few feet. The owner chased after it, mocking it, taunting it, angry with it - understandably frustrated - but most of all ridiculing it. 'It's a bloody pet,' he said. 'I got three of them. It's a Muscovy duck. Yuck. Mad it is. Mad as a brush.' Then he said something incorrect: 'From Russia it is.' (I since learned that Muscovys - note the ease of vernacular - were non-migratory Native Americans and had already been domesticated by various Native American cultures before Columbus arrived. Only after 1550 did the Muscovy Company, also known as the Muscovite Company, begin shipping them to Europe.) Anyway, I saw it again later. Yes, a second time. It was just standing there, alone, unclaimed, among the leaves of a tall bush. 'Do you like ducks then?' it said. As you can imagine, I was genuinely taken aback. It's not every day a duck will speak to you like that. I must say, it looked annoyed, though not with me. It looked angered with its ridiculing owner, who by now had disappeared. 'It's just that you'd like what Daffy Duck said if you like ducks,' it said. I looked at it again, shook my head, in continued disbelief. 'Go on then,' I said: 'What did Daffy Duck say then?' The Muscovy duck stood straight and without a flicker of mockery said: 'Ridicule is the burden of genius.'

Once An Artist

Part of the process in this rare separation of the artist from her art is the accompanying withdrawal on the part of the artist into a kind of silence and reflection and distance. I suppose I am secure within the relationship as I don't take it personally when along with the art I'm in some ways left behind. The broad canvas which is the atmosphere of this valley ensures the big picture, anyway. Furthermore, the rushing water, soft mist, oxygen of trees, spaces us out, obviously in more ways than one. Nature points a green finger and tells us to slow down. The water says, 'Let me do the rushing.' You can't even call it a return to full-time mothering on the part of the artist, as that's something which has never been compromised. No, it is the sleep of the just. At one stage, I offer to make tea and the artist's eyes light up at the prospect of having a warm cup brought to a warm bed, and when she nods off with it a few minutes later reading a novel about jealousy and betrayal, the cup slips from her hand and soaks all the bed sheets. She keeps apologising - for being tired, for this, for that - but has no need to. But I do know what's coming next. Our daughter knows too. And it does. As sure as this blog reaches its end. She wants to get some images upstream.

Stinging criticism

On the artist's behalf I've sometimes likened the art world to a kind of wasps' nest; I'd no idea one of my first tasks in the foothills would be actually to destroy one. A busy nest, you see, established itself under the guttering close to the top of the Artist's Parents' house. It's a building in which a local mine used to keep its explosives - for primary and secondary blasting - so it's suitably robust. This robustness doesn't extend to warding off the wasps, though - yes, those velvet ants again - with their sharp tapered abdomens and black and yellow stripes. 'Conflict resolution,' I'm told, and I'm suddenly sitting there with some extremely flammable nest destroyer foam in my hand, reading about its killing power. (If it destroys karma, I hope not mine: I've had enough stings to last a lifetime.) Anyway, I stand up and shut the upstairs window. A ladder is out of the question. I open the dining room window, the only one with reasonable access. I lean out, look up at maybe 50 wasps. (I'm doing it for the children, I tell myself.) I try my first few yellow-belly squirts, beginning with a 5-second take-that-you-beautiful-strangers-I-don't-really-want-to-be-doing-this ejaculation. They hover and turn. I fire another. This one's a God-I-hate-doing-this-to-you-I-can't-believe-I-am shot, followed by a boy-now-I've-started-I-ain't-gonna-stop kind of shot. One of them has it in for me. (Look who's talking.) Just as they're about to surround me under buzzed instructions from the aforementioned zealot - a waspy kind of word - I dash back in and slam the window shut. Phew. I stare out, still panting. One of the wasps - yep, pretty sure it's him - lands splat on the window - right in front of me: head-height - and begins its slow and long slide down the other side of the glass, leaving a tiny trail of despair. I'm sure he's trying to tell me something. (Now I really do feel bad.) Oh, no. At least 100 are gathering now... A few hours later, I peer up like a colonial officer and check the state of play. All quiet on the western front. (I wasn't trying to make an exhibition of myself, really.) Ruddy art world.

Diamonds in the sky with foothills

The artist came back late with her sister and started working again. I could hear her sighing and squeaking and tweaking after midnight as I tried to sleep: I was smiling, though. Next day, we began the sensation of travelling through a green and pleasant land on a train. A newspaper image in front of the artist of Henry Moore's sculpture 'Large Two Forms' and the artist questioning its veracity. Me, glibly saying it's early evidence of abstract exploration, really looking at the sky. The real sky. Not the sky in the colour newspaper photograph. And thinking of the curious reappearance of Russian TU-95 bombers in another newspaper photograph. Photos. Photos. They pass me by in the end. Then, a few hours later, in 6.1 Surround, a symphony of gushing water. (We've arrived in the foothills.) A butterfly, brown, sits like science in my hands. A boy - my son's cousin - pretends devotedly to make tea. A dog soaks up the years. People, close, unite. The Artist's Parents. The Artist's Children. The Artist's Sister-in-Law. I run my eyes from the sky to the horizon, soaking up the peace. Behind the ridge: a slow moving, wispy white cloud, like a white blood cell against blue sky. I look at the artist, feel good. My only struggle is with the pulp fiction in my hands about shadowy figures catching wind of murder in the skies. A good day with the artist.

An agent of change

I'm hoping the man who could be my agent is reading this. He's very good. We've not actually met in person but we do know someone in common, and he's been kind enough to email. I’m hoping the wit or conceptualism of seeing himself in the title and first sentence might help. (This will be the first page.) What I'm really sending is a copy of the first twelve chapters of my novel. It's strange: I’ve never allowed myself the luxury of imagining I deserve an agent before, which is also strange, because I care about writing, and like to think I'm onto something with the novel. Before I get carried away, I must remember I'm not the only person in this blog. I am, after all, The Artist’s Husband. She's busy, by the way. In between writing and discussions with experts on the war-zone, I've been answering questions for her about the figures in the conceptual intricacy of branches, trunks, and leaves on the wall. She'll ask, for example, if one should be darker. She'll know the answer – she's that good – but I can understand the inherent respect in having a final review. Of course all this finalisation stuff is because we are off to the foothills tomorrow. By the time you're reading this, insh'allah, we'll be by a fast-flowing stream or meandering path, peering into the distance at sheep hugging the sides of mountains. Or we'll be crouched on the carpet, enjoying a kind of ankle-height reunion with the little people. The air: I love the air there. The stature of the landscape, the humility of the people. I've mentioned this before but the little people are with their maternal grandparents there in the foothills right now. They've been there four full days. From tomorrow, we'll be there too. The artist will be arting and I'll be hoping the man who could be my agent is not feeling too bombarded.

Love is a gift

Art is so often commensurate with commerce these days – I know: in this case, it needs to be – that we forget those refined and rare moments when no money is exchanged, or wanted, whatsoever. The work becomes a gift. Though I say it myself, there were many such moments in my childhood. Even without much talent I painted regularly and was always giving paintings away, usually to a relative, a member of my grandmother’s hotel staff, or a friend. The artist does this to this day. Every time she visits her parents in the foothills, the night before returning to the capital she will make something poignant and leave it unannounced – however predictably now - under a pillow or on a bed. This is done with no less commitment than anything in her professional life. Similarly, the t-shirts she’s been doing. They are gifts from the artist. They are not for sale. (One very grateful Belarusian mother asked politely for an extra one the other day for her mother.) There are now so many of these uniquely illustrated t-shirts round these parts – so many mothers bearing the artist’s unmistakeable imprint or hand - that a kind of local forest has sprouted. I see them frequently. At least two a week. I try to photograph them all, though pointing a camera at people’s breasts is not done unselfconsciously. I love the idea of a generous artist. I remember a man in a lushly fertile land one day spending hours painting this beautiful though conventional picture of some olive trees and later simply giving it away. (Well, he handed it to an admiring stranger on the steps of the church from where he’d been working.) A real gift.

Information is not knowledge*

We are all led to believe that there is so little time in the world. Even for us today every spare moment is spent working or absorbing information. The work has been well documented. The information on the other hand comes largely through the radio. I manage to read an article in the bath but it’s through what's basically scoured wire services followed by mechanically reproduced audio sound that we gather most of our information. (Certainly today: on a Sunday.) What precisely is the information today? Well, there’s the thorny dispute over the toll of a country’s injured in a war. (It strikes me that anyone who lays themselves open to attack while protecting the interests of their country should feel the country by them.) The question is, are they protecting their country's interests or someone else’s? (I like to think the former.) Some of the other information is less noxious. There’s the one about young people enjoying themselves too much and it all getting out of hand. There’s the possibility of a snap election. (Snap? Is that a house of cards?) How about the human chains of environmental activists? (Daisy chains?) Or the actor leaving his art to a national body. (ART.) Anti-smoking talking flowerbeds? (No, really.) Toxic children’s bracelets in a country’s largest toy shop. (You’re kidding.) I'm not. A bill giving the security services of one major country the power to intercept all telephone calls, internet traffic and emails made by citizens of another: arguably their closest allies. (Not something like this, surely.) Young tombstoners. There's a phrase. (People for kicks throwing themselves off cliffs.) How about the perpetual rise of the yob? (That’s going to run and run.) Or – BIG - the bleak, ferocious, but still winnable war. (It won't go away.) I like the one about the great man of many parts who for over seventy years worked without a smidge of cynicism. Oh. There’s more on the dead princess. Here’s one I like: six hundred naked volunteers on a shrinking glacier. (ART.) Drugs and alcohol abuse in the stately world of opera. (ART?) There’s so much and it’s all coming at you. It’s like racing through a hail of bullets. Don't you think how much better it would be, sometimes, if it was all made up? (ART.)
*Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The Burrowers

We have filled the day with work. It is like walking for miles down a long dark tunnel. After the first mile or so you begin to think about the men or women who made the tunnel. You admire their persistence and realise you are in fact admiring yourself. You do not think this a good thing and your modesty shuts you down for a while. Then instead of counting the miles you start counting the strides: you go all macro. There is a scent in the air, which you cannot identify, and you hope it is not the stench of failure. This does not matter as your only task now is to keep on walking. You think big again and see the route of the tunnel in your head like a slice-diagram of a train-map done by a brilliant twelve-year-old. It’s only after another twenty miles or so that you begin to realise there is in fact another track, a second one, running alongside you. This is the track belonging to the artist. You nod and feel the same sense of relief the 51st Highland Division must have felt in the North African desert when after days of isolation in a vast and lonely place they suddenly caught sight of their first German soldiers. You continue. There is still much to do. The other track is no longer relevant as you tighten your chest and march purely on willpower. You know you have come far but also you know you must go further. Is this the work ethic? Is this blind faith? You start groping for tunnel quotes. ‘Carve a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.’ That’s one. (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Or how about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s strange line, ‘Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?’ Anyway, before you know it you are emerging cautiously from the tunnel. But where is the artist? Is she still down there?

A mother's children are portraits of herself

This morning before the city awoke fully the artist did not have to pull her son towards her after he crept into her bed a good half an hour before she knew she would be getting up. This morning the artist did not have to get the two cereal bowls filled with the right cereal for the children to eat, or leave them watching TV on the bright red sofa while she quickly tidied their room. This morning she did not have to squeeze the toothpaste onto the toothbrushes, or find the right top, right trousers, right shoes. She did not have to unbolt the back door for them to race into the garden, or push them on the swing, or play a game with them, or quell a minor disturbance. This lunchtime there was no lunch she had to prepare for them and no long walk to share with them to the park later with the bicycles or with the scooters. This afternoon she did not have to feel guilty because she was probably working too hard on her own work at the cost of spending some quality time with the children. She did not have to worry about changing a pair of socks because the other pair had got wet. She did not have to lay out the drawing books on the table and select an image for them to draw. She did not have to worry about her daughter watching episode after episode of her favourite TV series. She did not have to be concerned about her 4 year old spending too long on the computer. This evening she did not have to worry about them not eating enough greens and she was not made anxious by the idea they were probably staying up too late. No, today, as the children were away, the artist simply worked.

White light and black dress

A sharp light has replaced the dark clouds. It is a light as sharp as a freezer-chilled cloudy lemonade sapping the inside-cheeks and supped between sentences. Or like a shard of glass in a glinting sun in a grassy glen. On my way back to the flat today I was struck by the darkness of the clouds and the long-distance jellyfish tendrils of rain coming this way, enough to stop and take a photograph. By the time I had the image framed in the small camera-monitor the wall of rain was like a giant trawled net and I was about to be caught in it. Now, though, sitting at the round table next to the large red sofa, I can see only sun. The children have gone, so a couple of lights have gone out there, but there is light by and large in the capital. That said, I’ve just been reading a recent report on terrorism by a man they call a specialist. I remember meeting this man one Saturday night across the ocean in an over-heated apartment in the middle of the city’s main island. The report was topical and factual. It is a shame so much of what we read about conflict today is opinion. I am no great expert but it seems we are given only these scraps of opinion to run with and as a result get nowhere, or flag before we reach the first camp. Facts, alas, are what we need. This is perhaps why I like art so much. Opinion is allowed substance there and cracks can be smoothed or exposed. The wounds bleed but seldom kill. Talking of conflict, my 4 year old son has left Cyber Archfiend – one of his Konami trading cards - next to my laptop. Cyber Archfiend looks like a warrior louse. Not even the strongest of creams or combs could kill him, you feel. I better place him by the postcard I received this morning from a dear travelling friend in the north coast of the hot continent. The postcard can be Cyber Archfiend’s magic carpet. They can fly off together while the son is away. The artist wore a beautiful black dress this evening by the way.

Since my babies left me

With humour and exactitude the artist prepares the children for their trip tomorrow with their grandmother and cousin. They are taking a supposedly whizzing and skilfully leaning train out of the congested capital. They will snake from the self-inflated constriction and across the bottle green land into what we shall call the fast-flowing foothills. There they will stay by the tall and handsome mountains where the buzzards fly. (I have the honour of feeling like an African chief when I write the above. Or an Iroquois in deerskin breechcloths.) I can remember the times before we had any children and the artist showing the same amount of care and attention to her art whenever the work would go off – usually via the framers - for an exhibition somewhere. Children, though, represent themselves and the artist knows this fact. They are their own titles. They have their own themes, their own movements. Even the way they carry themselves is about them and nobody else. And it is a kind of freedom. Freedom. There's a word. We hear it less and less these days but even with my limited experience I know it to be real. I have crossed from one place with freedom into one without and the difference is uncanny and very real. As the children shunt along the tracks tomorrow to their vacational prosperity in the hills I shall be here with the artist in the fumbling metropolis delighted they have such freedom. And it all comes back to art. Art for example is freedom. I can remember a gentle old man, the father of an old girlfriend, replying to a card I once sent him. The card was Japanese and bore the image of a bird taking flight. We did not know it at the time but my girlfriend’s father was dying. He wrote back. ‘Such freedom,’ he said of the bird. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. No, the children will be enjoying their freedom with their grandparents and it shall be interesting watching the working artist in their huge absence over the next few days.

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.

You can't wake a person who is pretending to sleep

The artist turns the volume down on the TV in the corner of the room and walks deliberately slowly to where the children should be sleeping, only they are not sleeping because they are in our bed and think this all very funny. The artist continues however at a deliberately slow pace, trying as she approaches the bed to induce in their still budding minds a sense of 'sleepfulness'. As she stands by the door – I make it sound more grand than it is - she turns the light down, only slightly, and lies on the bed beside them, because they have asked her to. There are now one or two giggles rising like little eruptions from their mouths as they try to come to terms with the fact they've just won the How To Get Mummy Into The Bedroom With Us While We Pretend To Sleep game. The laughter continues and I take this opportunity to examine the artist's work done today. It is like reading a fresh newspaper. It is full of information. The artist has worked on the contrast. Even in the half-light it pops out at you and readily convinces. The medium assists greatly with this dimensionalisation - if one can use such a phrase. I also like the live and dead nature, as if the dead somehow is still living. Something I remember as a child when puffins would dive into the sea and break their necks when the wrong wave came along, and float on their backs dead but with these beautiful multi-coloured beaks screaming out, ‘I’m alive! I’m alive! Look at the colours of my beak! I’m alive!’ I place an ear towards the room where the children are still pretending. It is very quiet. Either they are deeply convincing or really are asleep. Hang on, I know. It’s happened before. I know what it is. The artist has fallen asleep. (Unfortunately I am wrong: fifteen minutes later, the artist is back drawing at the table and the daughter still awake.) The work on the table is different to the work on the wall. It is tiny. The need to get our dear daughter to sleep however grows vast.

Where it could be worse

I had a dream last night that there was a massive financial crash, which is not impossible, and that the owners of the previous property where we lived, a rented basement flat, were flabbergasted to discover that unlike everywhere else in the crumbling economy their property had enhanced in value by virtue of the fact some nationally recognised important works of art had been done there by the artist. Arrogant, I know, but credit where you can dream it. It got me thinking about art’s ability generally to enhance the value on something other than itself. Such occurrences exist. I saw it across the ocean in the city of scraped skies where an entire area resembling Beirut was flooded with small galleries and these in turn led to a kind of landlord-happy gentrification. I saw glimpses of it this side with a famous art world figure whose life was ransacked by AIDS but whose relationship with art remained as a kind of ennobling lifeline. Elsewhere, you get instances such as what you imagine happened to sculptor and novelist Jimmy Boyle with the personal liberation you assume took place in Scotland’s Barlinnie Prison. Also, there was the reformed old man from Ireland who once said to me, 'I used to piss on trees. Now I paint them.' It is like travelling by moonlight instead of in darkness. Clearly art has an extraordinary array of redemptive powers. The luck is in finding them, or allowing them to find you. It leads us indirectly back again to previous mention here of Hitler not getting into art school and the potential century-saving salvation missed there. And an artist with a lot of money can be a creative force for the good. They tell me. No, thanks to the dream, what I can enjoy today about art's tangential influence on that which surrounds it is the idea that something is being valued here, and not - to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's better line - just priced.

We're all working on a summer holiday

I had wished to make a relaxed trawl of an interview with the artist about the implications of being a mother working at home while the children have their school summer holidays. Well, what better answer than the fact the artist is now too busy working? I don’t know how she does it … well, I do actually. It’s called industriousness. An absence of sloth. Activity. I don’t mean to suck romance from the bite too much but there is not a lot of laughter from the grafter right now - not when there's work to do. Nor is this mania or obsession. It is mission. The children, meanwhile, having just come back with us from an Olympian tour of the park, watch their grandfather’s work instead, a primary coloured sunlit DVD about a previous summer holiday, the two children’s birthdays to be precise, while the artist returns to her well measured working of the paper on board screwed to the living room wall behind me, creating in the process a kind of figurement of sense, while all around the little bones grow and the little brains yield more and more. Another thing: we walk just about everywhere - we don’t have a car - so physical exercise and therefore physical fatigue in this house is commonplace. A good thing, mind, even if it does double the effort required for the artist to continue working. Actually you can tell children who spend too much time in cars and not enough time walking or cycling. They look stiff, their hips in particular, and they do not like anything agile. Or is it our state schools and their lack of large grassy playing areas because they have sold the land to the private schools next door? (Where you can't play anyway in case you fall and break a bone and the parents sue.) Who knows what some of the little people will be like as adults. Mobility and disability frames by their forties? The artist's father has a rapt audience with his film. Maybe that's how you deal with them when their mother is an artist and father writing this down: you have a grandfather who makes films you can watch over and over. (They smile at their on-screen grandmother.) Bed, children. It’s getting late. (Dad.) You should be in bed by now. (Oh yeah.)

Landscape gardening

We are all lone figures in landscape. I am. The artist is. It is a lasting image, too. Our two children feature quite literally as such. The man in our imagination across the frozen ploughed field is chilling. The bereaved woman along the beach makes us friendly. The man on the moon is quite baffling. The hooded dictator is hidden. In real terms you can remain unpainted all your life, but there you are in fact, just like everyone else, bestriding the open space of your time on this earth in this image called life. Alone. (A self-portrait, sometimes.) Lone figures in landscape are everywhere. They are in a way what unite us. Three hours after we met, the artist became a lone figure in a landscape – well, on a dance-floor – while everyone else, except for me perhaps, went through a kind of lyrical self-erasure. Fourteen hours later, the artist had become a lone figure among trees - factually – by walking in front as we searched for a freshly collapsed old oak tree and found it. There was the photo I took of the artist in dappled sunlight where a month later I would propose. There was her large art piece of the daughter staring like a solitary icon with her back turned from a grassy cliff into a vibrant blue sea. There were all the strangers the artist excecuted, or drew, individually, one by one, walking, often in pain, through parkland. There is this image in my head now of the artist walking slowly and with unusual fragility across pebbles by an Alpine lake. There is the artist as a lone figure in a landscape of red sofa watching the dramatisation of an English mother and writer's work. There is the picture she has of me walking for what felt like days up and down a pathway alongside an urban river. There are yet more images out there, too - the world’s most famous terrorist limping down a slate-strewn mountainside. The football hero smiling back from a background of clipped green. Or how about the TV talking head in front of a knocked-focus of dereliction? An angel on a landscape of cloud? A man in a Robert Frost poem? Bart Simpson? A nude in a bed of flowers? When people ask what kind of work the artist does, I see them against their background wondering what I'm talking about. People. Come on. It's universal.

Two arts beating as one

We are not dissimilar. Furthermore - as the first sentence suggests - two negatives can make a positive. Running parallel to the artist’s documented journey towards an exhibition is my own attempt at getting the first part of a book I’ve been trying to write into the hands of an agent. (My central character, I can tell you, is having a bizarre time.) Anyway, like the artist, I also just require some luck. Meanwhile it’s not uncommon to have us wage our separate wars of expression within just a few meters of one another. There is no sectarianism and we are generous neighbours. Occasionally the odd comment is lobbed over but we are much more truth and reconciliation than tar and feathers. Our heads even tilt forward simultaneously when we work, fertile expressions travel each face, and we are interrupted regularly and equally by the little people and their own expressions – a joint exhibition of tirelessness and provocation. No, the only real difference between what I do and what the artist does is physical. The artist for example spends much of her time on her feet while I just sit there like a member of some obscure congregation. It is now just a question of never giving up. Just when I am closing in, though, I must spend two or three days on something else. Still, variety is the life of spice, as we must future our tells.

Curriculum vitae

I've just been looking at a print-out of the artist’s CV. It’s strange reading about a visual artist without any of the visuals. (This of course is one of the deliberate challenges of the blog.) But work when fresh must always try to be seen in the flesh first. I must say: examining the CV is like peering at a beautiful and detailed map. (I am much less modest about the artist than the artist is.) All the rivers are there. Important place names. One or two borders. The occasional former country. Some new ones. Starting from the top, there's the artist’s name typed in Century Schoolbook. She uses her maiden name. A good name. Sharp: nice and curt. Yet: feminine. Then the place of birth. Not too detailed, rural sounding, rural enough to conjure up a pastoral image. The date of birth is absent, though never necessary when exhibition dates feature. (The artist started young.) Education is next. Two colleges. A foundation course, not described as such, and a degree at a well known art school. Next, the solo exhibitions. I count an impressive eleven, starting in the UK and ending to date in Italy. (Belgium, Germany, and Austria come in between.) Then we've the group exhibitions, a sizeable twenty-three. This resembles a list of north European concert venues, though New York, Florida, and the Czech Republic also feature. Then: publications. (I note the absence of 'The Artist's Husband'.) There are seventeen publications in all, including a major political journal, a national newspaper magazine, and a well meaning literary organ. No, the profile is good - a beautiful nose, you could say - and rounded off with eight major collections. Just now, thinking over it all again, my eye returns to the top. Solo exhibitions. I try visualising what comes next. I can see the work. I can see much of the work. (You know what I think about that.) I just can’t picture the venue yet.

Fly low, fly slow

Maybe it was the war parallels I wrote about yesterday but I’ve just received a phone call from someone about a new possible war-zone posting for me. It was like lying on my back on the deck of a cruise ship and suddenly feeling a shot across my chest. I told the artist about it and like to think she understood. It's not entirely out of the blue. But whenever faint possibilities become real possibilities, the heart always misses a beat. The artist went quiet after I told her. She had just returned from picking up the children and I think what she really wanted to do was revisit the large new piece on the wall, the one she's been working so hard on. Instead she entered the small open kitchen and I followed her through. She was already sitting on the stool and staring at the table with her head bowed, which isn't really her style. 'Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear,' Marcus Aurelius said. I wonder if it's true. The money's good and we need it. It would mean working out of an airfield, with twenty-one days on and ten days off, and I'd be in pretty good hands. At least my son is grinning, however preposterously. My daughter doesn't know yet and if I don't go, she won't. The artist is no longer in the kitchen and is back working, by the way. She knows well her husband's contradictions. (Artists have a way of understanding these things.) I wonder how I would view her journey towards an exhibition should I go? She wouldn't be too alone. The artist’s sister is here again and sleeping on the large red sofa. (Her brother and family came at the weekend.) No, the artist's family are close and it's a source of some comfort, though never an excuse, to know this strength. 'Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you,' Aldous Huxley said. Maybe it's just a wake-up call.

Shopping for the Artist

Self-evidently I am a fan of the artist. But I am also a fan of life. This life thing is often tested, though: as perhaps it should be. In the heart of the capital for example I see two military Chinook helicopters cross the sky, following the course of the river. They splutter with perhaps necessary gusto. I see eagle-eyed police with MP5s (machine guns) slung over their shoulders, waiting by a main railway station. I step past a building where I know major suspects are questioned and a pub once destroyed by a different type of terrorist. After passing a newspaper vendor selling images of a bio-security breach, I make it to the art shop. Therein, tools to all manner of expressed conflict are available, and the counter where I buy them is made of stainless steel. It is where I imagine T.S. Eliot’s 'patient' - the evening - 'etherised upon a table’. Anyway, opposite as I exit the shop is a club owned by people who also bought the house of a famous poet who drank himself to death and turned it into a drinking establishment. I wait for the speeding police van to pass and cross by some roadside flowers. A mother berates a boy with a small toy gun. I still have some reference images when they are ready to collect for the artist. An old man with a philosopher's face next to the developers leafs through a bin. While waiting for the images I drink coffee opposite an old Victorian workhouse. A young woman in the queue, I notice, quickly pops in her mouth a famous antidepressant – I see the packet - and downs it with designer water. Just then, my mobile phone rings. It is the artist. I am asked how I am. Not bad, I say. Not bad.

The sights and sounds of the ups and downs

I have been in the garden brushing away the flies, ladybirds, and wasps, while the artist works on a kind of dream rendition indoors. Trying to write with the children playing is not difficult when compared to some people's distractions in the world, and in truth I can hear the traffic more than the children, motorbikes mostly, and await with well-honed foreboding the sound of a high-speed crash. This is not unfamiliar territory. It is perhaps the same with the Middle East, Persian Gulf, North Africa and Central Asia. We all hear something. We know the situation is bad. And some of us fear it will get much worse. Also, with a kind of well-honed foreboding we await the sound of a high-speed crash. (Nuclear? No, we dismiss.) Which is why as well as writing I have also been reading a book today by a man I met on a number of occasions and with whom I once gave uncredited advice. His latest volume covers one of the countries in the present fragmentation, the strongest perhaps, and though I have only just begun it I can see already the problem I have with my own ignorance. I can never for example seem to grasp fully why things have to fall apart. Over two thousand years ago these people were the most sophisticated on the planet. Renowned for their rectitude and wisdom, they were hunters, poets, and musicians. Indeed for a while they would use art rather than weaponry as their principal means of persuasion. So what went wrong? Did the flies, ladybirds, and wasps get too much for them in the end? Were they obliged to withdraw indoors? Today once again we have some of the so-called most sophisticated people on the planet, on both sides some might argue, people famously keen - again, on both sides - on rectitude, thinking they have the answer, and maybe some of them do. But what can you really do when you hear a motorbike drive too fast? What can you do when you see a wasp on someone’s nose? Warn them? Strike out and risk being bitten yourself? Or, like a woman I met on a two-masted brigantine once, keep calm until it passes? I have a friend who would know. He is cleverer than me and writes about insects well. Hang on. Wait. Another motorbike. (A beat.) Phew. No. It’s OK. (Actually I thought there was a wasp, too.) Wait a moment, shall I just go inside and listen to the news instead?

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.

The Artist as a Mama

I have been thinking about respect in the context of the artist today. The artist is definitely one of those people with a refined and at times delighted respect for others, as long as you do not take advantage of her time, which is precious to her. I have also been thinking that the artist has probably spent much of hers listening to others rather than holding court, probably even knowing in advance the ends of some people's sentences, though out of respect never finishing them. I have also been feeling sure this respect has something to do with her upbringing. Her parents have a very strong respect for others. No, the artist does well unto others, which is why I find myself so protective of her today. (I have not always been this protective.) What I am saying is that being an artist and working at home today - self-employed basically - seems to go by unnoticed as a vocation by some, as if art when it really comes down to it is just some kind of hobby. Some of the other mothers are precisely the opposite and pick up on this problem of perception, going so far as to offer kindly to take the children off the artist's hands, so that she can get on with work. But it riles me that the artist as a mother is treated by others with what I consider insufficient respect. I can remember being with the artist at a so-called power dinner with some people who clearly considered themselves very important. At one stage during the conversation, as we all self-consciously dipped into a vast plate of one chopped radish, the artist explained what she did and how she worked at home and how her children were often her subject matter. After a silence - it was like the silence of the damned - one of the women guests said, dismissively, 'Oh lots of my friends do crafty things like that.' This person was an artist too. But she was not a mother. (You cannot be both, she was probably thinking. You have to be one or the other.) It also riles me that these are often so-called feminists saying or feeling such things. I am increasingly thinking that when I introduce the artist's work to people, I should not only tell them immediately that the artist works at home, and that she is a mother, but also that they might like to consider leaving their irony at the door, certainly as far as content is concerned, as this work will not be an experience like any other. Here in the artist's work for example she shows this thing some call, we call, respect. It is an old concept but one I suspect the artist believes has legs. We should maybe all try it. I know I should. I am told it works wonders on the soul.

Live with intention. Walk to the edge.

It is night and I have just walked up a large hill. The sky was a kind of muddy purple and the trees lining the road gave off a whiff of summer. I was with a friend and we were admiring both the buildings and the people in them. A couple we passed in one house were sitting on their large sofa as if gleefully awaiting anyone who passed. They each had I think a glass in their hand. Furthermore he was bare chested and she was wearing what looked at a glance like a fluorescent pink tutu, though again we were walking pretty fast, even if the windows were studiously uncurtained and tailored for people like us. I suppose they were making an exhibition of themselves. Anyway, we passed a larger building which once had been a gallery and I remembered being there with the artist one Saturday or Sunday before we had children. Now it stood like an effigy of its former self, closed but lit. We continued and the scent in the air was evocative of so many things. Rome. Lahore. Sekondi-Takoradi. Savannah. I think it was the sense of people already in their beds which encouraged this voyeuristic respect, and I remember thinking as we crossed the road that I should look upon this walk later as reportable. As we reached a fork in the road I bade goodbye to my friend and we wished our families well and I continued my way up to the artist. On the last stretch I walked down a long and half-lit path for pedestrians only and saw at the far end a brief burst of flame which flickered and eventually disappeared. As I walked on I began to realise what it was and passed the person halfway. The person in question had obviously been lighting a huge joint as I was now walking straight through a thick cloud of smoke and I think I was still coughing when I arrived home and greeted the artist. She, bless, had just finished working.

A grace of sense

A better day for the artist. The large piece is beginning to shine and take shape. The artist as a result is more cheerful and a sense of relief as well as progress has seized the day. Indeed, the artist’s son is replicating this new work on a large piece of white paper taken from his drawing book, and the artist’s daughter is staring at it with a kind of settled admiration. Also, the sun has been shining most of the day and this of course makes a huge difference, especially after so much sobbing rain. It has burned a hole, you could say, through our negativity. It is something of a cliché that when people look at where an artist works they ask about or mention the light, as if artists are the only true custodians of such a phenomena, but the same applies to us all when it comes to natural sunlight. It is our emotional photosynthesis. 'It shouldn't actually be pale,' interjects the artist's son to the artist's daughter. Hang on, the artist's daughter is now replicating the artist’s latest work, too. Fresh from her bath she has returned to the grime of artistic endeavour. The artist’s son already has a large dark mark across his face and now the daughter has dirty hands again. ‘I’m not going to finish mine,’ the artist’s son says. ‘Ever.’ In fact there are three people now all around me doing exactly the same piece, and I suppose by writing down this, I am too. We are the four quartets.

A round of claws for the artist please

A natural frustration has descended on the house and I can only assume it is something to do with the absence of any gallery progress. Not that they have been blitzed by either the artist or the artist’s husband with examples of the work – and maybe that is the problem. That said, gallerists even at the best of times don’t exactly endear themselves. I have mentioned previously their disappearing trick when it comes to incoming artists. Some are fantastic, I have said, but others are indeed like trickster absentees. For example the gallerist whom the artist emailed, as promised, recently - well, a month ago - about coming to see her work in person hasn’t even had the courtesy to reply. And they were the ones who in the first place on the back of some colour reproductions invited the artist to be in a group show. So what is going on here? Apart from anything else, though I do not wish to be misconstrued as threatening, an artist is a sensitive being. An artist is often an artist because it is impossible for them to be anything else. They require kid gloves. Yes, they are fragile. Yes, they can break. No, it does matter. And if they are talented they can deserve this unusual degree of protection, though without it they can also perish on the vine. I remember one person when I was twenty-two jumping to their death in a fast-flowing river because of rejection. Not that their circumstances were comparable with the artist's. But manners - and their importances - do run deep. I should know: I have failed before myself. Or is it nothing to do with art or artists? Is it simply a fact that grace and sensitivity has been sucked from the fabric of our culture? Are manners no longer seen as the management of emotion but the bane of commercial progress? Certainly people today seem to care only about moolah, lolly, greenbacks, doe, spondoolies. Mind you, that’s probably why they are rich and we are not. Still - bringing the blog back home again - the artist will reach her mountain top. I can promise you that. (We can't afford to disbelieve this fact.) But we will not apply the normal rules of engagement here. Oh no. The artist might just show you up.

"When the past no longer illustrates the future, the spirit walks in darkness" *

It is a curious thing seeing people again for the very first time in years. Crudely speaking, it is like peering down a tunnel of time, taking a moment of history, so-to-speak, and smash-cutting with it to the present. I did it twice today and on both occasions it must be said I was energised. (Maybe I was just lucky with the people.) It gets you thinking, though. It is almost as if the excitement comes from the fact that everything that has happened - to both parties - since you last saw a person is somehow crammed into that split second when you do see them again. You register - in an instant - each developed or developing line on the face, every subliminal piece of code in the other person’s make-up, a kind of glimmer of unexplored facts in the eyes, and a tantalising hint of wisdom. Perhaps, I have since been thinking, this is what it will be like with some of the artist's work. Hers is after all work about carefully selecting and freezing a moment, aesthetically compartmentalising it, giving it a kind of immortality, and positioning it in order to transcend time with it. At some point or another with the work the present will bump into its past again. In a sense it illustrates the difference between the idea and the reality and explains art's triumph over mere thought. My comment about the tunnel of time for example may be interesting to me but it is still only a thought. The artist’s work on the other hand makes an actual statement, a time-honoured commitment, a kind of conquest, even if years later looking at it again may be like peering down that tunnel of time. *Alexis de Tocqueville

Phone An Artist

I remember - in the foothills of our relationship - being in a medieval town surrounded from the land and sea by formerly friendly neighbours who were now enemy forces, and though this town was not your traditional frontline there was an armoury of dispiritedness – bloody hatreds, wretched breakdowns, twisted animosity, and the like. I’d spent the day touring a tortuous sequence of large and deserted buildings, hotels mostly, shells, which smelt of human excrement, anger, and in the corners of some rooms urine-doused fires. The people who let me speak to them would look fearfully over their shoulders the whole time and chain-smoke non-filtered cigarettes from nervously crumpled packs. Fear was everywhere and was contagious. The faintest of unfamiliar sounds were met with frozen looks and mass-migratory thoughts. It was hot, too, and I remember tugging my shirt between my thumb and index finger from my sweating chest. In the distance was a bombed-out radio tower, broken like a toy, and on the floor were spent cartridges, and on the broken tables were lavish and unused dinner menus printed in several languages. By one desultory wall close to where I was staying, I remember a hospital doctor waiting in the sun to hand a list of desperately needed medical supplies, and when I walked the cobbled streets, sinister figures appeared from nowhere, offering to take me back to their flats where the flickering darkness had me convinced I would be murdered. And the dogs, the dogs. I had never seen so many strays before, some of them pedigrees, whose wealthy owners had fled across the sea with cash and gold on high-powered speed boats. Conscripted soldiers were everywhere, too, bruised and back from the real frontline, and I will always remember, always, one young man in a large trench coat despite the heat with this look in his eyes – the look – which said he was a good man but had done some butchery and could not live with himself anymore. I could not take it, either, and went to a public phone exchange where I waited in a queue to phone out. Eventually I made my call. It was to the artist. I burst into tears.

Fly low, fly slow, know nothing and know you don't know

The artist worked on a larger piece today attached to the sitting room wall while the children prepared to join me for a walk. Hey, it's the weekend and we needed adventure – a user-friendly version - so we wished the artist well, gave a kind of wide but affectionate berth, and made our chatty way past the one-person double-locked travelling cars, the camera-pocked smile-shy buses, the impossibly hi-tech bicycles, and the slightly lopsided police van. We were headed for that mass of green in the middle of our urban romp. Anyway, the girl had a smile and the boy an old pair of binoculars, a rare leftover from my childhood. (I used to sit with the binoculars by the sea and watch the coasters running the feeder route and struggling through the water.) My son clearly enjoyed their maritime presence around his little shoulders as he stared from the bridge of his four small years. ‘Did you take them with you when you were little?’ asked our daughter. ‘When I was allowed,’ I smiled. We were surrounded by starlings, pigeons, sparrows, warblers, song thrushes, and woodpeckers, but I think the boy with the binoculars looked better suited for the gannets, guillemots, cormorants, and kittiwakes of his father's childhood. ‘Have you ever seen a plane crash?’ he asked, taking this flight thing a step further, or higher. ‘No,’ I said. (I had to think about it.) 'Not in person.' Anyway, we continued through the lines of sweet (Spanish) chestnut trees and time-honoured oaks and reached a secluded and vibrantly coloured flower garden and I was thinking that whenever I see bright colours it reminds me of the artist. ‘No!’ said my son. There was panic in his eyes. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ he said. (Was that man, the so-called psychic, correct when he said our son had a talent for atmospheres?) I tried calming him and remembered somewhere in the ether hearing that the flower garden was used for anti-aircraft guns when years ago the city was bombed regularly from the air, and that some of the trees – for all I know those two over there - were cut back to ensure a good field of fire. Do you think that people had been blown out of the sky from here, or was he just a creature of habit who didn't like going a different route? Back home again, the artist was continuing her assault on the new large piece and we spread the financial and holiday sections of the newspaper across the plastic table outside and set about doing our own art. My son began with a landscape, while my daughter painted an imaginary person. Half an hour later, we were still at it. When we met up with the artist she said she was excited about the piece, and for one brief and beautiful moment we didn't know which piece she was talking about. Hers? Mine? His? Hers? There were so many.

When even the crickets hesitate

I am tired tonight. I do not feel like words. This is perhaps why we have images. Only I do not want images either. Not tonight. No, I will watch the artist instead. She is at the same table with some of her work, which she moves like weather symbols on a small map. I love watching her work. There is nothing self-conscious about it. She is sharpening a pencil for example into a tin and I hear the shavings fall. Her head is bowed and I cannot see her face. Her nose is running. She has hay-fever. The TV is talking to itself about drunken astronauts. I smile at this lunacy. I met two astronauts. They stood in the corner of the room drinking mineral water. They had shaved heads and I thought they were Buddhist monks. Shush. Right now the artist is putting pencil to paper. There is something satisfying about watching a sharpened pencil give meaning to paper. The artist sneezes, careful not to spray her work, and resumes what she is doing. I can hear the pencil this time. Listen. How would you describe that sound? It’s like the tiniest paw of the tiniest animal making a little path. No, the artist definitely has hay-fever. Perhaps she is allergic to art. That would be something. An artist allergic to art. Perhaps, tonight, I was allergic to writing. Bless you. Excuse me.

Interview with the Art(1st)

Can you name a moment when a contemporary artist has really inspired you?
Yes, it was when I had our first child and I went to a gallery and was trying to find something I could relate to, and I saw this piece by Mary Kelly about her little boy starting nursery. It was her recording of his words and daily life. She was quite obsessively documenting his first days, and I just thought ... it's so brave, so radical, so heart-felt. It made me think this kind of art really is important. It's part of life and I'd rarely seen it so succinctly put. By contrast I remember some really unbeautiful photographs of women having just given birth strapped up with sanitary towels and blood dribbling everywhere and it was like they were trying to make it look like a bloody battle. The Mary Kelly work ... it was just so much more profound than that.
What is the principal theme of your work?
I suppose nurturing. Yes, nurturing. A kind of motherhood. I see my work as inherently feminist, though.
Are these themes under-represented today?
Well ... (laugh) ... I think my version is.
Would you like your children to be artists?
I wouldn’t be able to stop them.
Do you think artists need to go to art school?
Yes. I think they do. Definitely. It’s a way of questioning things. A way of learning to deal with things like criticism. You do have to be answerable to your work sometimes, and to your influences. But if it’s a great time, it can also be a very difficult time. I was pretty much left in a studio and just told to get on with it, which is better than it sounds because you then did something you really believed in. Quite a few people were having nervous breakdowns around the place, though, and there wasn’t much back-up for things like that, not much of a safety-net.
What is your favourite work of art?
Oh, I know exactly what it is ... it's this. (swiftly producing postcard bearing image of The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly by Thomas Gainsborough.) It symbolises to me a kind of complete innocence, a wonderful spontaneity. The older girl is slightly protective of the younger one and ... it's just the peachiness of the skin, the translucence, and the way the older one is holding back and more informed. I really love the way the dresses are painted and the linking of hands and the light travelling across. Oh and the fact we know now one of them had such a problematic life later on. And of course the whole thing's quite manufactured, very staged. The butterfly. He painted a dead one. No, the whole thing, it's ... really joyous to me.

The wind blows out the candles and kindles fire

Two bright red candles burn in the fireplace. They burn like a need to reflect. Traffic smokes past, computer systems jam, glass breaks, and people promised love are killed by the hour. The candle holders were a gift. They were a gift from a friend who obviously knew a thing or two about reflection. They are tall and gallant like friendship and made of pewter. From where I sit the two flames pierce the gloaming like cat’s eyes, and in the corner of the room to the right is the artist with a glass of wine in her hand. (For some reason her shadow is moving more than her body.) On the sofa meanwhile is our son and he is watching his sister stand too close to the candles with her long hair in her mouth and a plaster on her knee. I watch as my daughter, unprompted, moves out of harm’s way. It is late and I enjoy these moments of reflection. I am also thinking we have pretty much forgotten as a culture how to reflect well. Sadly, I think we imagine we no longer have time. A central premise for art I always thought was reflection. Maybe the solution lies there. Anyway, the artist’s sister has come to stay for the night again and I am watching the scene like a movie, or piece of art, as she sits with us and talks. Above the fireplace is a small ink drawing of a mother and child, and tiny rose petals form the illusion of a frame. I like it when the light is low like this in this room. It reminds me of being young again and pretending to understand. (No change there.) On the crammed bookcase are nine tea-lights. They, too, are burning and flickering like golden white ghosts. I place a mint in my mouth and continue writing. Not that I've been burning the candle at both ends this time, but I've miles to go before I sleep.

They paint things differently there

I am thinking of another country, a vast and bleak landscape, while the artist works until midnight. I was in this country to meet a powerful man. Listening presently to the artist’s breathing, I remember the low-lying mist and tall pine trees, the whiff of decadence and smell of gas. The man I was there to meet loved Hegel. He also ran one of the largest banks in the world. (‘I've got so much to do,’ says the artist.) He believed in cancelling Third World debt and reorganising the world’s financial system. I was small fry and happened to know a young woman who knew him well. I wanted to make a film, something inexpensive, unusually intimate, using a hand-held camera and natural sound. I knew getting him to agree to be the subject matter was a long shot but I was a determined young man. Anyway, word soon came from his honour-bound secretary that we could meet. I was to travel one morning to his home 25 kilometers outside the city and drive with him back to the bank. I phoned my young friend to register my delight. Each subsequent confirmation however was swiftly cancelled. The man must have visited four countries while I waited in a hotel close to his headquarters, where floors of financial acumen sported swathes of art. (The artist is still working behind me and I hear her industry.) The philosopher-banker even bought a bank while I waited and eventually I was informed we could meet in precisely two days – same plan, same route. I put my feet up and ordered a drink but the following morning I was woken by a young banker imploring me to wake up. ‘He’s dead!’ he kept shouting down the phone. ‘Dead, dead, dead!’ I leaped out of bed and raced to the bank’s headquarters and I remember still dressing while I ran. The young banker was right. The very same three-car convoy I was to travel in was hit by a roadside bomb hidden in the saddle bag on a children’s bicycle. The philospher-banker's legs were blown off and the poor man bled to death. (‘I’m done,’ says the artist, life-affirmingly, as I revel once more in the present tense.)

Sneak Preview, the 100 Extras

The artist is walking with our two children in the rain. They are off to visit a recently separated mother and her three beautiful children. I rise from the round table and take a look at the four small black ink drawings on thick white squares of paper blue-tacked to the sitting room wall. These weren’t meant for the planned exhibition but are rapidly earning a place. With typical understatement the artist wants to do 100, a great deal of work when each is so detailed yet never larger than the palm of your hand. I’m listening to the rain spraying the traffic while thinking each image politically charged and refreshingly non-ironic. They have respect. Inching my way along visually, I feel I’ve never really looked at them before. One is of a mother pulling by the hand her eight year old son with a schoolbag across one shoulder like a bandolier. Both have the bottoms of their jeans folded in a certain way and are rushing somewhere mysterious. The next is an equally small but intimate ensemble piece with two mothers, five children, and one pram - the heads of everyone never larger than a pinkie nail and one face like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, only shrunken to a smile. The third is a mother crouched by a child’s shoe, very tensely tying a lace while a second child looks on knottedly. The last piece, possibly my favourite, is a miniature sweep of a young people’s comely comradeship as one mother and six children this time – each about six or seven years old - walk away like they're playing the leads in The Usual Suspects. I sit back down at the table both impressed and frustrated and write this down. Am I doing enough to get the work out there? When I think of the artist now with our two children in the rain they are in black and white and blue-tacked to the wall and magnificent in all their subtle detail, but how I want to see them framed now and in a line of one hundred accompanying the much larger pieces still waiting undiscovered in the hall.

Sound Bites, Yellowjackets, and Velvet Ants

The artist was stung by a wasp today and I had this vague memory of the father I never knew sucking venom out of a sting like a snake-bite once, but that was impossible to verify so I verbally soothed and sat the artist down on the bright red sofa, checking for no bad reactions, low blood pressure, or welling to such a degree it blocked the air from getting into the lungs. I should probably have removed any remaining ‘stingers’ in the skin with soap and water. Stingers? A long way from the 10kg ‘Stingers’ with a distance range of 8km provided unwittingly to certain members of what became the Taliban*, but risky enough I suppose. (Some medical opinion even recommends scraping out the stingers with a credit card so there may be some connection, though I'm told this kind of stinger - the so-called velvet ant or yellowjacket variety - is only present in females and derives from a sex organ.) Anyway, I tried ice cubes in a plastic bag wrapped in a red and white cotton tea towel, but that wasn't enough, though I think the artist admired the inventiveness. (Even with a spear in her heart she’d find a way to be polite about the carving.) I used cream in the end and gave the artist some space to read a novel about an early-twentieth-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. And to think her sister only a few days ago asked if we knew what was good for wasp stings. (‘Vinegar,’ she beamed.) I even meant to get some today. A WASP. I had to cross an ocean and read about people like James Ellroy to discover it meant a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as well. Anyway, throughout the afternoon I kept checking – no rash, no breathing problems, nothing to worry about there. Then I remembered I was stung by a wasp on the eye-lid once and even shared a different kind of sting with the artist one hot summer when a large and gelatinous jellyfish wrapped its long tentacles round us in the water. I actually felt good afterwards. (It was some hit.) The artist felt bad. We weren’t married at the time and I think I saw it as some kind of pagan symbol of our unity. I'm stung if I know what the wasp means. *now unusable due to the deterioration of the battery and electronics and systems

"Every child is an artist ... the problem is how to remain one"*

The artist’s son is 4. He is a political artist because he challenges perceptions. He is already drawing cunning shapes first thing in the morning and adjudging them worthy of his wall and would consider any attempt at preventing such expression dictatorial and narrow-minded. His most recent major piece is vaguely reminscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat from the period before the famous New York Times Magazine cover in 1985. He shares the same nervous line, the fashioned letters, that melodic hint of something tribal, almost voodoo. The 4 year-old is also informed by a kind of patrician sensitivity and upon rising - in what he by now of course sees as his studio - he squints through the window at the day's light as if guaging which of his moods to use. This morning for example the artist’s dear sister was in residence - well, sleeping on the sofa - so he waited until she was fully awake before exploring - with a kind of artistic irreverence - the edges of what he could or could not do. The serious work began later, I seem to remember, with an installation. This consisted of a plastic brown treasure chest transformed into a kind of budding lagoon with a convincing palm tree erected in the middle. A man wearing something similar to armour was introduced and given a feminine stance. Still dissatisfied - not uncommon among artists - a toy Daimler Chrysler made in China and used by the artist under licence was pitched on a large pile of plastic bodies - in homage I suspect to the Chapman brothers and their own tipped hats in Hell. (There was another sculpture with cleverly shaped perfect skulls from the bogeys in his nose but they ... gone.) This was followed by collecting some bric-à-brac and in particular a so-called Hot Wheels motorbike valued at less than one unit of the national currency. Upon re-entering the flat - not quite Christ's re-entry into Jerusalem, but you get the picture - the young visualist was then observed shaking his head at a picture on TV of a man in shorts carrying a woman through at least two feet of water with a swan in the background. Which left us still with the day’s masterpiece, a Chemi-Sealed Beral Mirado 3B pencil drawing of the aforementioned Hot Wheels motorbike in the end - ‘See this,’ he said, absorbed, ‘the car goes down here … see that line … and shoots through the fire circle!’ Indeed, all that is now left is for the artist's son to inspire the artist’s husband to write it all down, but that he would probably find too political. *Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

School's Out Forever

Today against a conscientious backdrop of the artist drawing a kind of viral cornucopia of elegant and spidery images on absolutely everything - cards and T-shirts and frames and books - which are then meticulously wrapped in simple brown paper and taken generously as end-of-term gifts to teachers and helpers alike at our local under-funded primary school, I work briefly, possibly indulgently, on a small chapter where shortly after the Soviet withdrawal a former Afghan warlord complains to the British miles away in Jordan - with a kind of clumsy assertiveness - about American training and funding of Saudis in his own back yard, reminding me in the process that even with the ingenuity or inventiveness of art or craft, though in my case inadequately written words, there’s still no real match to reality, especially where issues such as Afghanistan are concerned, where truth really is stranger than fiction. But maybe that’s why I like the artist so much. Her work is locked in a kind of super-reality in which everything is true and yet certain characteristics of the so-called truth are mixed with stridently and beautifully provided alternatives. Let’s not be too unrealistic, she seems to be saying with some of her well worked pieces, but we don’t need to look at the world this way when for example we can look at it like that. In fiction – something I really don’t have much experience of – you can’t just rewrite the facts, can you? Not casually; not when it comes to real deaths, surely. Or maybe I'm just showing my inexperience. Anyway, in a culture where solutions groan, I like to think of the artist here lending a kind of grave optimism to proceedings, though I sometimes fear my own hunger for things like news – though I am not really a journalist either - has been counter-productive to a purer form of imagination on her part, arrogant though it seems for me to think I can impose myself anyway on someone so attractively independent. At least I know the teachers and helpers at the local primary school are taken care of with T-shirts and the like now. Maybe one can concentrate on the Afghan. I hope he survives. I really do. In his defence, he didn’t ask to be invaded by the Soviets. Anyway, the artist is now placing our 7 year-old daughter’s long blonde hair into sixteen plaits. See what I mean? Relentless. Creative. Real to the end.

My kind of town

Obviously I'm no real authority on art and do remember a lighter side, in particular sitting at the front desk of one of the galleries I worked in across the ocean having been told by my flavour-of-the-wall gallery boss that a group of academics were coming in shortly and would I do the cause of great art a service by giving a brief talk. ‘A talk?' I said. 'On what?’ (I’d just been in a war and was confused as hell.) ‘Oh, the history of the place, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But it’s only about six months old this gallery,’ I said. She smiled knowingly. Anyway, half an hour of obviously important history later, the door squeaked open and this erudite long face looked round and said Pee-wee Herman-style: ‘We’re here!’ I brushed aside my wheeled executive chair like a small pet and immediately shepherded everyone in. Oh there must have been at least twelve of them and I stood in the middle of the gallery nodding like a priest as they looked round before launching into a long and winding road of freshly bottled information about the gallery, gentrification, new collectors, visual rather than literary culture. Sometimes in mid-sentence I’d hang there like a fish in the middle of a fish-tank with its mouth wide open taking in the bubbles. On occasion the odd pair of eyes would prop me up as I randomly sparked my campfire thoughts about this movement and that movement, and when it came to the artists themselves I did my best to raise high the roof-beam, carpenters. Anyway, each person came up to me afterwards and firmly shook my hand. ‘Much more than we imagined,’ said one. ‘Exceeded our highest expectations,’ said another. I must admit I was chuffed. I sat down satisfied and alone at the front desk and had just placed my hands behind my head when the door opened. ‘Excuse me,’ said this person. 'Can I help you?' I said. ‘We’re here for the talk,’ he replied. God knows who those first people were.

Art on a sleeve

Lying in bed together with the foxes, maybe even rats, rustling ungovernably through the last of the weeds on the other side of the window, the artist has a panic attack about her work. Anguish rises from the propped-up pillow like a burning cactus and all reason in the room is suddenly smoked out. The artist’s lot, I am thinking, can be an unhappy one, and being an artist is not just about getting a show, though this counts high enough on my list to hang a regime of hope upon it. No, it’s about maintaining the right environment to work in, too, and I don't know how good I am at that. The children in the other room meanwhile snore on like little seraphs in their bunk beds, their growing-pain drawings blue-tacked joyously to the wall. As I remember it now, the boy actually falls out of the bottom bunk, rendering the artist momentarily obsolete as she rushes out of bed and sweeps him up like a mother. (Not that the idea of an artist and mother is an incompatible one in this household: not with this one's art.) Moments later, the whole flat is creaking, as if sharing in the family’s general aches and pains. This entry wouldn't be complete without mention also of the additional financial pressures tapping at the window like a character out of a zipped up Dickens novel. Don't get me wrong: we are trying as nobly as possible to find a creative way out and proudly and foolishly are nailing our futures – and for all I know our children’s futures too - to a creative mast, yes, in a world full of shark-like submarines. Later in the long night, I hear sirens speed past and think sleeplessly of the word liberation. I turn quietly to the artist. She is asleep now and her anguish settled. Tiny snores from the next room are my only accompaniment as I brush her cheeks and place one palm briefly on her shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. As she sleeps on, I can just about make out a smile. Don’t stop, I'm thinking. Dream on, dear artist. Please don’t stop. I find myself beside you.

Pimping iron

I popped into two good galleries today with detailed matte photocopies of the artist’s work in my rucksack. On my way to the first one, I bumped into the best man of the only art collector in my family, a mathematician banker making a killing in Moscow. (I feel like the poor relation.) Rather creepily I’d actually thought about his best man the night before, and, no, the relative does not collect the artist, preferring a kind of ice-age modernism instead. Anyway, the first gallery was showing an unusual homage to the gallerist’s late mother with a heady trawl through at least sixty years of abstract art. Not the artist’s thing really but laced nonetheless with a kind of irrefutable pedigree. The mother’s death was also commemorated in an insightful essay at the front desk, which I surprised myself by reading in its entirety. But the place to me was infused with more than one death as I knew both mother and son through a close friend of mine who died on his kitchen floor aged 46 from a brain aneurysm and who was found the following morning by his 11 year-old son. (I've been trickled back to a number of deceased friends lately.) In fact, I'd taken the lift to the two floors of the gallery thinking only of this friend when what I should have been thinking about was obtaining for the artist an exhibition. As it transpired, the artist would not have minded – she would not have minded anyway – as the gallerist was away and we know the need for a kind of continued respect for the dead, just like we know the hopelessness of leaving photocopies. As for the next carefully selected space, which was pinned like a white dress behind an orange cordon of road-works, not only was the madam of the venue absent but the aesthetic immediately grated. Besides, as she wasn't there, it seemed inappropriate to bang the drum too loudly. (It is not easy retaining a kind of tasteful allure about the artist's work at the same time as wanting people to notice it.) One of the tensions of this blog is its inherent frustration at knowing something few others at this stage know, namely the artist's work. Best to keep the powder dry with some of these gallery people, though, until the right moment. If the person you want to speak to is not there, come back when they are. Keep it personal.

Oh What A Lovely Art

The artist had a tooth taken out today. Her mouth exhibited a bloody rout. Years ago I introduced the artist to a legendary figure who once exhibited a group of bloody war artists in a large townhouse across the ocean and with me the day before draped massive green camouflage netting all the way down from the fourth floor to the ground. It was the forerunner to a later and more grand show - which I never saw - before his very sad and premature death one Christmas day in Paris. I had a Scottish-Nigerian friend make a cassette of second world war speeches and songs for him which played throughout the wild opening party of this first exhibition. Surreal Eighties cocktails were drunk to the sound of Churchill denouncing 'Corporal Hitler' and Eisenhower talking about the bazooka, jeep, and atomic bomb. Vera Lynn came into it, too. Meanwhile throughout the townhouse tiny watercolours peppered the slightly camp walls with glimpses of hell as painted by people painfully unsuited to the slitting of throats. The artist here in fact once briefly contemplated being an official war artist but felt that journalism and photography covered the subject amply, which I believe to be true. There was a time though when artists were the only visual war reporters, just like when the painters of the American frontier were the only means for the settlers to see what lay ahead. (How the artist and her husband could do with their equivalent now.) Talking of art and war, it was the aforementioned townhouse curator who told me of a possibly true and certainly artistic incident in the second world war when the British built a fake bomb factory close to a real one and how the Luftwaffe one night dropped a rubber bomb on it. (And if true, what a wonderful jewel in an otherwise ghastly crown of thorns.) Why, even 21 SAS in the UK are to a select few known also as the Artists Rifles. But, it must be said again, the TV screen today with all its compressed news from Iraq and Afghanistan burns in the corner of the room with a kind of endless artlessness and all creative thought goes out the window. What will we have next in this light? The Basel War Fair? We've already had the suicide artist. Don't you just hate it? It's like pulling teeth.