Disembodied Voices

The artist is attending the opening party at an exhibition this evening and the two children are half-asleep on the bright red sofa. It is good for everyone that the artist is out. It took some persuading, a few moments in which she seriously considered cancelling, but she looked positive when she left and is now - I hope - enjoying herself. She knows many players in the art game and owes it to herself to explore these connections again. No matter how much it may feel like several steps removed from the art itself. In truth, there are no steps back to be had. It is all forwards. I can imagine the sounds. The disembodied voices. I made a film once about an artist. The scenes I hated most were the ones at opening parties. This was to do with the sound as much as anything else. The camera would pan with pretentious seriousness across what it hoped were interested or interesting faces, but underneath it all, on top of it all and through it all, was this inaudible and complacent din. It was the din of voices, laughter, clinking. Nothing of any sense was being espoused. But there were moments of delighted innocence. Art-loving at its purest. Only when the main subject spoke - the son of a tuba manufacturer, bizarrely - did we hear anything we understood, and this only because of the wireless microphone pinned to his shirt. (As it happens, I am in the process of purchasing a set right now, which reminds me - I must look into frequencies.) Anyway, just as I was about to check up on the children a few moments ago, the artist has just phoned. ('They are asleep,' I told her.) She said she was on her way home having enjoyed herself greatly. I was annoyed with myself. I had meant to text earlier, having wanted to say the most recent piece on the wall worked well. She wasn't so sure when she left. I hadn't wanted this to debilitate. Don't tell me I was underestimating the thickness of the artist's skin.

I couldn't even remember the punchline

As I said to the artist on the phone as I was walking past the garlic, cannellini beans, pinoli, focaccia, biscotti, and pancetta for sale in the innards of the mainline station, my sister wants so badly to stay alive but knows she is dying and the two facts simply are not compatible. My sister looked like she'd done fifteen rounds too many with the cancer. The mind looked like it wanted to ditch the body. The lights looked like they were going out, though a kind of obstinacy remained, a glimpse of something sturdier than it should be. This is not me being morbid - I have never felt so life-affirmative - but this is how it is for my sister. She shook her head one time when I was with her and stared at the floor. It was as if it was the unfeeling doctor saying to her she had only weeks to live that had done it in the end. With the cancer she was almost fine, or at least she knew it and somehow managed it, certainly keeping it down with the regular doses of chemotherapy she hated so much. But the stark and unsentimental timeframe she was so suddenly presented with, the fact it was put so bluntly, I think surprised her to a degree that it was as if she'd always given doctors the benefit of some kind of mortal doubt when it came to manners, but now, as she sat dazed in the corner of her living room, punch-drunk and against the ropes, I don't think she was sure about anything, except that manners perhaps were more important than death. With great effort she raised her head again and looked at me. Was I the referee come to call the whole thing off? A long-lost component of a divided self? Or an irritant, a fly on the windscreen, as she struggled to enjoy the view? The daffodils bobbed in the wind as we spoke. The carved wooden elephants and sailing ships all looked so terribly familiar. The mantelpiece was crammed almost boastfully with cards. But they were both hurting, my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law said to me later that he wouldn't see much point in surviving my sister. I reminded him he had a son. Just before I left - my sister was tired - I stared deep into her indigo blue eyes. I lost her briefly but then she returned again as if slowly getting some joke I had told but had long since forgotten. (I couldn't even remember the punchline.) Anyway, the artist listened sympathetically as I told her briefly what I could on the phone about my sister and then I elected not to buy any of the prosciutto and caught the train home.

Oh Sister

I am visiting my ailing sister tomorrow. I have mentioned her before. I may also have mentioned I have five sisters. Anyway, this sister was the reason for the reunion a number of months ago and I now gather from my eldest sister - a former doctor who worked for many years on the world's poorest continent - that this particular sister's health has taken a sudden downturn. She isn't well at all now and it seems death is trying hard to stalk us again as a family. Just as it did when our parents died prematurely, in my case before puberty. Sometimes when I am relaxing on a train, or staring out the window of a plane, I wish I knew more about my parents. I wish for example that they had left some kind of articulation of their being, especially my mother who for many months knew she was dying. This regret is perhaps one of the reasons I am glad of the opportunity in this blog to express feelings not only for the artist and her art but for family life too, and indeed for life - and in this instance death - itself. My ailing sister is probably too discreet to say much at all of any personal note about her predicament except with those closest to her. I can say a few things. For all of her working life she looked after others. Now she is a recipient. No one can quite stamp out the merciless march of cancer when it gets going I gather. I was going to say it is like the largest army in the world marching into a tiny country. But there is a fairly recent precedent of the tiny country winning. (Only to have another illness?) Can this really be a good omen? All I know is that with any luck I shall catch my train tomorrow and stare out the window and think not only of my parents but of my ailing sister's unailing dignity. Because of the fragmentation, the shattering almost, of family unity when our parents died, I never got to know my sisters - all older - well at all. But our love is indivisible, in sickness and in health. I am proud of this fact.

It's A Girl *

Shortly after having our daughter, giving birth to her, releasing her into the big broad world, the artist set about working on a piece, a large work of art. This she sold in the end. She sold it through her art dealer at the time to a collector across the ocean. The piece was manifold. It contained about as many as twenty-seven or twenty-eight individually framed and small re-rendered items. These were each taken from in and around our daughter's early life, or first few months, and reproduced like loaded joy. I sometimes wonder where on earth this piece now is exactly: on which wall, in which house, by which people. (The artist's gallerist at the time discovered the artist by sneaking into her studio when she was out and offering her a show when she was in. Now he is a selfconscious supporter of esoterica.) Anyway, right now slides of the piece lie on the table in front of me. They feel loaded and are vividly coloured, though minimalised. If I hold them to the light, these perfectly executed objects from our daughter's early consciousness stare back at you like cerebral trophies on some memory shelf. From the top left, as if reading them like a book, I see the following. A perfect pair of grandmother-knitted small red and white and blue socks. The inside figure from a Russian doll already featured in one of the entries in this blog as having been also a page in a literary journal. A saggy toy lamb. A Champagne cork from the bottle opened at the hospital on the day our daughter was born. A sepia-tinted drawing of a photographic portrait of my mother as a baby sitting on an old carved chair. A nipple with a bead of milk, the artist's nipple, also featured in the aforementioned journal. A tall giraffe-like toy which used to play a tune I hear now looking at it. An unidentified greetings card with a Madonna and child. A baby fist, also featured in the journal. A kind of ball of socks. A bare, unwalked foot. An ear. A sleep-suit. A toy duck. A grandmother-knitted white cardigan. A squeaky elongated toy from a couple met on the continental mainland. Another sleep- or dream-suit. Two pairs of baby tights. A giant ladybird, which used to droop over our daughter like a bent flower. A nappy, or diaper, with evidence of success. Two mittens. The handwritten ID tag from the maternity ward. A crib. A giant butterfly. A hooded cardigan. A small teddy bear. As ever, the detail is incredible. I don't know what to say about it now, other than wanting to laud it. Maybe I am impressed most by the lack of sentimentality. You would think that with a list like this we would be entering into saccharin mistrust. But this remains and is art. It goes back to this business about the artist being a mother and artist simultaneously. It's not just art; it's life.
* Title of the piece

A Work of Family

Conceptual art runs deep. While the artist knows she must examine her strategy again next week, a kind of ingrown creativity continues to yearn and promise like a kernel among her offspring. Our son coughs. The desert lamp shines its lamp across the polished bare floorboards in front of the fireplace and unlit candles. In this space come the two large and white cardboard boxes. With one now perpendicular to the fireplace on the floor our son crawls inside it, slowly lifting the other box on top and disappearing. Over and over he does this - it is an open and shut case - hoping someone will notice him, and continuing quietly until they do so. It is like a work of art, a cardboard womb, a fictitious nest, a comic kind of cavity. Eventually I acknowledge to the 5-year-old artist that I see him and soon he is leaning against the back of the bright red sofa like an amateur golfer admiring another person's swing. Then he starts asking questions. Why for example can you not fill the cardboard box with water? He has been skateboarding with his sister today and his cheeks are red as blushing fruit. This afternoon I could see the artist watching him grapple with the gravity and physics of it all and saw her smile when he slipped and fell and immediately screamed out: 'I'm all right!' In some ways our whole lives could be transmuted into a single work of art. Conceptualism may run deep but it also runs through this family like a blog running through a major artist's journey towards fresh recognition. I would say watch this space. But this isn't space. Space suggests something unfilled. This place is jammed to the rafters. And we love it.

Friday's list

My phone wakes me. The artist is warm beside me. First our daughter then our son make their presences felt. The artist's sister is asleep on the bright red sofa. Later I hear her voice as she speaks to her nephew and niece. I am on my back. The artist flicks the switch on the kettle. I see heavy rain through the blinds and briefly listen to the news and a song. A sock falls to the floor. A magazine glistens. After some tea I unlock the door and bid goodbye to the sister. The children meanwhile dress for school. Daffodils shine in a vase. Scraped cereal dishes sit in silence. Taps continue to gush and then are switched off. Silence. I am alone again. I re-check the news, this time online. The war zone has dropped in profile but not in reality. I switch all the lights out. I vow to make a list of my day. I deal online with processors, memory, hard drive - with speeds of up to 7200 rpm. I have also been reading a book written by the man I bumped into the other day. I enjoy his pages and feel comfortable there. It is my kind of place. I check a borrowed camera for quality again. The images I am examining are the ones taken in the park. I am reminded when looking at them that I unwittingly filmed where the other person I met that day actually lives. This I filmed before knowing he was in the neighbourhood. It is strange when something so emotionally prosperous as an image is reduced to purely technical analysis. Illegal colours. That phrase again. I first heard that getting a film approved by an old quality controller for the most famous public broadcasting company in the world. The artist comes and goes without talking of Michelangelo. I buy fish. I watch the funerals of massacred victims on TV massacred because of massacres because of massacres because of massacres. ('Without any solution there's only action and reaction,' said one figure.) I look at some new ideas by the artist. The sun is out. The rain has gone. A siren passes the window and disappears again.

Radar Love

The artist was with our daughter's class at a national gallery today. I felt aware of them as I passed the area they were inhabiting for the day. It was like picking up on something held like a fly or flies on your radar. Or a small cluster of lights. You knew exactly what the radar was picking up on, but it still held your interest, as if you had never seen their like before. I was on my way to an old colleague whose advice I was seeking. (I have been doing this a lot lately.) Actually it is a liberating feeling knowing the enormous gaps in one's knowledge can to some degree be filled by other people's expertise. You simply need to know how and where and who to utilise, find and ask. This is perhaps the truer expertise - knowing who to ask. Because most of my questions are tied up in what I am told should be called global conflict prevention - some kind of attempted rollerball of solutions - I suppose I shouldn't feel too self-centred as I hunt for answers. My own personal needs these days are certainly smaller than those living in the war zone. It gets you thinking, though. Wouldn't it be strange if everything was maps, beeps, blips, zones and radars? Maybe there is a grid of all the capital's galleries to be created, for example, in which certain flashing lights denote availability, aesthetics, manners and the like. Perhaps lovers can find an equivalent. Phones detecting interest. (Actually people and phones can do this already.) Anyway, when all my errands were done and it was time for me to return home, the artist and our daughter and her class had already left the station. But my train was right behind them. I could feel our two separate groups moving in a kind of familial tandem. It was frustrating, though. No matter how fast my train travelled, they were always a few stops ahead. My radar didn't like it. That got me thinking too. It was like being an artist in search of the right exhibition.

Scene from a marriage

INT. LIVING ROOM/STUDIO. DAY.

SUNLIGHT pours through two half-opened window blinds, casting shadows across two works of art - detailed, worldly, expansive - on a long white wall. A female ARTIST, attractive, dark hair, sits anxiously on a bright red sofa. The ARTIST'S HUSBAND sits typing by a laptop on a nearby round red table. The phone rings.
ARTIST(answering): Hello? Oh hello. Hi. I missed your call. How was your holiday?

A MONTAGE of small talk, the words REVERBERATE and ECHO, the images begin to BLUR and WHITE-OUT, the ARTIST taps her fingers impatiently.

ARTIST(cont.): Good. Great. (a laugh) Oh. (a long pause) Right. I see. (a sigh) No, I know. Yes. Pardon? No. I see. Never mind. That's just the way it is. I completely understand.

The ARTIST stares defiantly, admiringly, without vanity, at her work on the wall, and shakes her head.

CUT TO:

INT. LIVING ROOM/STUDIO. DAY.

The ARTIST'S HUSBAND opens the blinds completely and leans back on his chair. It SQUEAKS.

ARTIST'S HUSBAND: She was the first private gallerist to see the work. She loved it. She said so. She wanted to show the work. It's not her gallery. It's her father's.

The ARTIST smiles bravely and picks up the phone and dials a number.

ARTIST(into phone): Yes, hello. I'd like to order another board. (another smile) Yes. It's me. Oh, one hundred and twenty-two centimetres by eighty-five? No. No, it's for a new piece...

The ARTIST looks at her husband. The CAMERA crosses their faces, passes slowly over the work, encircles the room, moves into the light and out the window. We travel through the window and through the foliage of a line of trees, and across the road, across open land, above a park, where we meet a balloon and float, float HIGH above the city skyline and river.

Take what you can gather from coincidence

A curious but ultimately hopeful day with a fat cold sun. For example I bump into two people I have not seen in years. The first is a writer whose work now features with fetching regularity on many a bookshelf. (I knew him when he was a supportive but distant figure generous enough about something or another I wrote about my first experiences of the war zone.) The second is an artist, a painter, who painted the tall sets in my attempt at a play set on a fictitious and freshly invaded Polynesian island in the city of the scraped skies across the ocean. (He was also a boon companion.) It was strange, because I wasn't thinking about myself. On both occasions, I was actually gunning in my mind for the artist, who was still perplexed, like unrewarded talent, by the lack of communication on the part of the gallerist, the only gallerist to have been allowed to see - and who enjoyed - the new body of work. I was in the centre of the capital when I bumped into the writer. He approached from the left, a tall silhouette, and exuded the calm authority of someone who knows he is read. We talked about the war zone and I gave my opinion. His eyes had the sparkle I remembered and his wit was warm and melodic. It was a bit like having your brain coated with words. We talked about someone we knew in common, a good friend of his and someone I admire. This person works in film and TV. The writer at this point said he could never work in film or TV because there were simply too many people whose permission or blessing was required in order to get anything done. No, he said he much preferred being a writer and could for example go home now and write a novel about the war zone if he so wished. There was an element of mischief in his words and I enjoyed them all. I spoke about the artist and said with a tight gesture of my hand and fingers her work was extremely detailed. Again playfully he asked if that meant she drew everything on a grain of rice. Anyway, a few hours later, after a meeting with an animator and director whose measured opinion I sought on some technical matter, I am walking out of my local overland railway station and about to climb the slow steep hill home when slamming into me at speed comes the second blast from the past, the artist, the painter, like a missile. Amazingly it turns out he is now my neighbour and when we walk across the open land between the station and our flat together it is as if I am having a dream in which my old friend from across the ocean is walking with me across the open land between the station and our flat. I talk about the artist and he tells me about his partner. (They share the same name.) When I get home I tell the artist about all this but she is still at a loss about the gallerist. I suggest she texts her.

'So sorry i haven't got back to you yet,' the gallerist texts back: 'if it's okay ill call you first thing tomorrow. Hope alls well with you and the family, all the best.'

And then she leaves her name.

The while we keep a man waiting, he reflects on our shortcomings *

Last night's vegetables were burnt in the end and it has not been a good day today for the artist either. She has left several messages as requested with the gallerist but has to date received no reply. I suggested to the artist this may be because it is the woman's first day back, but the artist is now being hard on herself for not having checked her emails and picking up on the fact the gallerist before her holiday was trying hard to get in touch. This may be in part my fault. In my own frustration I may have laid it on a bit too thick that the instructions I had left before going to the war zone were not taken up and should have been. I am sorry for this. Now, to make it worse, the artist has lost track of whether it is a positive or negative that the gallerist wanted to get in touch in the first place. As a result, it was impossible for her to work today and she watched the brilliant and heartfelt German film 'Das Leben der Anderen' instead. ('The Lives of Others' in English.) It is not that the artist is frail. It is not that she cannot handle all this. Early success as an artist and a former successful career in TV prove this. It's just that she holds this woman in high esteem and is still - albeit painfully - clinging to the ideal of working together. At least she seems more relaxed now sitting on the bright red sofa with her sister, staying with us again, leafing through a catalogue of a favourite French clothes designer. Also, tomorrow is not a cliché, it really is another day, and we must remain positive. Just as I try to be today when I learn I am to return to the war zone on the artist's birthday.
* French proverb

Food for thought

Butternut squash, sweet potatoes, green and red and yellow peppers, mushrooms, carrots: all are roasting in the oven. Wild rocket, spinach and watercress leaves sit in a salad bowl. Our son laughs with his mother in the bathroom. Our daughter watches a cooking programme on TV. The kettle boils, ready to accompany the rice on its eventual journey to our familial stomach. It is like a self-generating Grand Central Station in the kitchen. We went swimming today. On our way to the pool on the other side of the park - one of the lungs of the city as someone once put it - we stopped to watch the beginning of the race in which I thought my acquaintance from the war zone may be participating. If he was, I did not see him. In the pool, I noticed, we were pretty much the only people speaking our native tongue. There was many a consonant cluster used. At one point I lay on my customary back and stared up at the rusting beams as I floated like a leaf across the surface. In one arm our son was grinning away, safe therefore, and our daughter was tearing through the water in front doing the crawl. Unusually for her, the artist wasn't feeling up to a swim and I turned to watch her through the tall glass windows separating her from the pool. She was reading. Her head looked deep in thought and was part-obscured by the reflection of the people in the pool. It was like a bad collage made by a painfully bad artist. Most unbefitting. Anyway, I pulled our children across the pool again and listened to their laughter as I narrowly missed the other parents and children still caught up in their gushing waves of consonant clusters. These are precious moments, I was thinking. This is the peace zone. Here we make people welcome. And the gallerist returns tomorrow.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing *

I really just feel like wishing everyone a peaceful Mothering Sunday. (I never knew mine but that's another story, a lifelong blog in itself.) It's just that the more you look at the state of the world today, if in fact you look at all, the more you can despair at the breakdown of communication, and the more you want just to concentrate on what you at least perceive to be the good in most things. Keep talking. Keep mixing. Keep it open. And don't let the bad bugs bite. That's about the sum of it. I spent much of the day with the artist and the children in the park. I had a camera with me. I filmed them all, I filmed them a great deal, plus dogs, lots of dogs, planes, tree bark, flowers, a broken mirror, a collapsed wall, a boarded-up building, more dogs, a skateboarder, a jogger, a magpie, a keep-fit team, different clusters of trees, domes, a wedding. Everywhere you looked it was as if nature, or just life, was trying to tell you something profound, and it was simply a question of whether you had the patience to understand what exactly it was it was trying to tell you or not. I filmed another plane. At some point we passed a sign for a race from the park tomorrow and it then crossed my mind that this may well be what the man at the airport of the other capital with the helicopters and mountains in the background had been talking about. The one who surprised me by the candid explanation of what he did. It would be funny to see him. A small part of me obviously is not really here at all. It is still there in the other capital. Another part is simply waiting for the gallerist to return from holiday and cast her judgement. But my Mothering Sunday wishes are here. Respect. Which may, the more I think about it, be presence enough.
*Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Faith, A Leap of

Wait a minute, hang on a moment. You're actually telling me a solar year is almost six hours longer than three hundred and sixty-five days? That can't be right. Isn't that typical? Just when you're beginning to think that it's all perfect, that the world and all its cosmology if not its inhabitants is rhyming, some fact, some pick-axe of a piece of scientific detail comes along and shows you the fallibility of it all. But that's of course why we have to go and add this extra day, this leap day, this today, to the calendar every four years. The Gregorian calendar, that is. In the Islamic calendar, leap months are not used at all. (How does that work?) It actually gets worse. Exceptions even to the leap year rule are required since the actual duration of a solar year is slightly less than three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days. (Christ, it takes a leap of faith to conjure with all this.) Rather charmingly, mind you, in some cultures it's a tradition that women can propose to men during a leap year. For example, in the flatlands across the choppy sea - in the country of my paternal ancestors, in other words - tradition has is it that women may propose on leap day February 24th and that refusal from a man must be compensated with twelve pairs of gloves. The French-Polish painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) was a Leap Day baby. He is considered one of the last century's greatest realist painters. I'm not a fan. I just feel uncomfortable with the work. It may be that his depictions of young girls were not pornographic at all and simply acknowledged the discomforts of early sexuality. But it leaves me cold and uncomfortable. It is as if a selfish adult statement is being made at a child's expense. Very different to the artist of this blog. She for example uses childhood as one of her themes in her art, her major theme to some degree, but always you get the impression the point is one of universality and respect - for both subject and viewer.

Chop-chopping choppers and cargo hooks of art

As I crossed the busy road and walked the narrow pathway to pick up our son* from school, the light in the sky and in everything else reminded me most evocatively and to some degree sadly of the other capital. In fact, all that was missing were mountains in the distance and several million battle-scarred inhabitants. There was even a chopper crossing the sky. A green military helicopter: one of those famous twin-engine tandem rotor heavy-lift helicopters popular, to continue the vernacular, with troop movement, artillery emplacement and battlefield resupply. In this instance, I suspect it may only have been transporting politicians. They have such a distinctive sound, don't they? Part-spluttering. Part-droning. The helicopters, I mean. (Not the politicians.) Actually it is an alarmingly reassuring and heart-stirring sound in a conflict zone when you hear what is in effect your own defence system traversing the sky. Everyone from a squaddie to a royal will tell you that. Somewhere in that feeling, I suspect, is the sometimes necessary intoxication of war. I say 'necessary' aware of the controversy of such a comment, but some wars simply have to be won and if the sound of a helicopter puts you in a winning mood then so be it. Nor, bringing it all back home, is it such an improbable leap to say I still also see the all-important task of the artist getting an exhibition as a kind of battle, though only recently have I developed the appetite for the kind of singlemindedness required in order to win such battles. Though I have the artist mostly to thank for that, I can probably give myself some credit too. I still drag a tied and tired sequence of empty tin cans of weaknesses a mile or so behind but there is a small part still evolving, still growing, and determined for example to honour the artist's steadfastness with the pleasurable witnessing of an exhibition. The work, as I have said countless times before and will enjoy saying countless times more, most certainly deserves it. In an age of conflict, a corridor of dry concern, hers is one of the peace treaties and a small part, believe it or not, of a big solution in global conflict prevention. Win it on the walls.
* Our delightfully social daughter went to a friend's house.

Ever fresh and fresh

Let me describe to you the living room. I have mentioned it in many ways many times before but I have usually been physically accompanied in the room when writing about it. This time there is no one around: nobody. It is a million miles from the war zone and all I can hear is the washing machine. The artist has disappeared to pick up the children from school and take them to a friend's house. I have just returned from our closest supermarket with some food. (As the artist is going out with her sister tonight, I thought it a good idea to cook something special for the children, something they like, as they will inevitably miss their mother and need consolation.) Anyway, the living room. A dozen or so newspaper pages are spread out across the silent floor by one of what are now three art pieces screwed to the wall, two of which are works-in-progress and one not quite sure if it is finished or not. It is very much a working scene. An open-cast mine. The artist's materials sit like spices in the boxes on a table to my right. The small turquoise blue plastic stool, upon which she stands in her clogs to reach the higher parts of whatever the piece she is working on, stands alone in the middle of the room. It is like some curious item from a model of a TV studio. Next to the stool stands our son's intricate and treasured pirate ship and next to that is the bright red sofa. It is all so still - everything - it is as if Mary Celeste was an artist and not a ship. Also, there are no electric lights switched on in the room, the window blinds are open, and the afternoon light pouring in gives the faintly smudged white walls an air of omniscient credibility. Furthermore, at the far end of the wall is a smaller work of art and this is covered entirely in newspaper, with the paper taped to the wall. This is in fact a portrait of the daughter of the sister the artist is going out with tonight and who will be staying with us later. No, there is something fascinating and slightly loaded about an image covered and hanging on the wall. While I have the advantage of seeing its progress daily, I am sure it is even more exciting having seen nothing of it at all. Memories of unopened presents as a child spring to mind, adolescent unbuttonings, the breaking of the spine of an exciting new book. That's it, isn't it? Art is at its best when served fresh and if it is great it will always be fresh. Meanwhile the cars and heavy vehicles muffled only slightly by the line of trees between here and the busy road continue past the window. Bills and books and bluetack sit on the table beside me. Life goes on like traffic and one by one our destinations are reached. Here in this room is no roadblock.

Song for today

I left the artist hard at work and firmly pulled the door behind me and climbed the cold steps into the light and made my way across the open expanse of common land between me and the station; I was listening to some music on my phone and the words were fighting with the wind for my attention. I braced myself: the woman twenty or so meters in front looked like a mountaineer, so strong was the wind gusting towards us. Just then, a song by the name of 'Villanelle For Our Time' came on, sung by Leonard Cohen, a man who, like Bergman, is wittier than people credit, though on this occasion deadly serious.
From bitter searching of the heart,

Quickened with passion and with pain

We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start...

The clouds were moving fast and when I wasn't thinking about the words I was thinking about the time between now and when the gallerist gets back. It is all so ambiguous. Really there is no way of knowing what she has to say. Hope flatters. Still, I noticed the gap in the clouds and the sun slanting through, stroking and clearing the shadows from the grass where during one former conflict there were allotments.

Men shall know commonwealth again

From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,

But now, with keener hand and brain...

There is something unusually reflective about song, I was musing, and something entirely non-reflective about the way people go about their business in the capital. Ah, the sun was now reflected on the small pond, blindingly so, and I waited for a car to pass before safely crossing the road.
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart,

And neither race nor creed remain

From bitter searching of the heart...

I was invited with the artist to an exhibition this evening. We couldn't go. I don't think we wished to, either. It was at a gallery who kept the artist waiting for months to make a visit that they promised to make and the artist never asked for. They never did make it in the end.
Not steering by the venal chart

That tricked the mass for private gain,

We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art

Whose symbols are the millions slain,

From bitter searching of the heart

We rise to play a greater part...

But first I must get to the station and ride into the centre of the capital, crossing my fingers for the artist and us all. Not heavy of heart but gleaming, like the sun now encompassing all of the city.

The Other Capital

This capital here is different to the other. Here the problems lie in the execution. There it is in the executions. Today I passed the public galleries and worked my way through time-honoured streets and rich biography. This punishment of luxury of sorts is important and not deemed unworthy by its present relative peace. Just because one part of the world is in turmoil does not mean the rest of the world should suffer too. The body global is like the body politic and is connected enough. Besides, we from this more stable capital are also represented in the other. Many people far more accomplished than me work very hard indeed to eradicate the poverty over there, to unshackle the women, stimulate the growth, becalm the fundamentals, and unpoison the crime chalice. When I look at the city here and admire its engineered elegance I do not feel any guilt; I feel only a kind of non-jingoistic pride. There you go, I sometimes think. This is how it can be done. Yes, it is full of flaws. Full of them. No, it is not perfect. By any means. But it does meet and greet and it does accommodate. Debate thrives here and is spectacular. I wandered into a famous map shop in the centre of the capital this afternoon. There on the shelves was the bristling of a kind of nomadic erudition. Silent wanderers had done their research of ancient lands and the testimony stood before me pret-à-lire and sheathed in evocative covers. I had met up with a friend earlier, the friend who travelled alone across the desert. Friendship is not the preserve of this capital alone, I was thinking as I looked at the spine of one book exhibiting sepia-tinted palm trees and sand. Indeed, where there is poverty and where there is hardship, as indeed there is in and around the other capital, there will always be friendship. It may not be to the visitors. It may not be to everyone. But it will exist. This - friendship that is - is life at its best. With friendship life does not discriminate. Only with war. I also wonder how the gallerist is getting on with her holiday.

Landscape

It is sometimes as if I have never been away, so brief was my going and so far the location. And then I get a flash of something. A thought. Deep in my psyche, like a smouldering pike, there is movement. Small bubbles on the surface denote its place. Though today traditionally is a day of rest, I am already looking into the plans required in order to raise my game. More importantly, however, I have been slipping into life again with the artist. We are family. Our daughter returned tired from her sleepover and our son enjoyed single status last night. The artist is rested, I was thinking as I sewed more grass seeds into the bright green but occasionally threadbare raked and poked lawn in the back garden this afternoon. The restfulness is obvious not only in her face, I was thinking as I stamped the seeds down again in order to help them germinate, but in the way she moves like some kind of lucky spectre from one room to another - slowly, easily, calmly, and smart. It is as if the pores of her skin have been cleansed with a kind of organic joy by the air in the foothills. It is strange how I think in terms only of beauty when thinking about the foothills and the mountains thereof. The mountains in the war zone are just as epic, in fact more so, and yet something far graver parks in the mind when considering its warrior skyline. Like butterfly mines, deliberately shaped to look like toys, human beings made small by the landscape move in lines of hatred towards their prey. Giant green ants land on rocks. Plants poison and addict. Rustles, in bushes, in sand, in caves, in war, predict death. But now that the toys on the floor by the bright red sofa are being gathered up and taken into the children's bedroom by the artist, I marvel at the grandeur of the landscape at home - its civility, romance, and charm. What is so easy for us is a deathly leap for others.

The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work

I have done nothing much but sleep over the past two days. But our son is now here and our daughter is enjoying the self-imposed mystery of a sleepover over at a friend's house. As I write, I can hear the artist gently urge our son to sleep. When not sleeping I have been loosely reassembling my thoughts - old and stiff playing cards drifting down a fast-moving mountain stream come to mind - while leafing through my notes and cards in my hardback notebook. It frustrates me that the artist had not been in touch with the gallery when they were making their various attempts to contact her, only because I had made provisions for that. But this is also her unique strength. She is so seeped in art itself she has no time to fathom its curricular business. However, we must now wait for the woman who came round to return from her holiday and this will not happen for over a week. When I sleep I am like a runway, across and upon which are landed planes of every hue. I have been back to the war zone. There is the plane of reason, the one of visuals, the jet of fury, the hot air balloon of comic self-indulgence. I will be returning to the war zone - the first trip was just a taster - and already I feel in touch with a different world. War, I hate to say it, can also bring out the best in people. The artist looked well when I collected her and the children from the station. She looked rested - from all the hard work and successful but tiring mothering. I sat facing them in the back of the taxi as the city became our backdrop and the road our good route back home. Strange without a close protection team. In our children's eyes are many corridors and I love each one. Now, as three candles burn without grief in the fireplace, and my fingers pound the keyboard, I am aware of the work I must now do in order to make good things happen. I am aware of the broken hearts and minds. The artist is best at making good things happen through hard work. She just doesn't like reading emails from prospective galleries. It is an intrinsic and undeserved and very beautiful fear of failure.

Only the dead have seen the end of war

What I can say is that the light was improving when I left. The gods were playing with the dials and turning it up just a notch. The mountains in the background had a frankness about them and sat well among the helicopters and multi-armed agents of peace and state preparing like me to get the hell out of there. But I was thinking about the depressed faces I saw by the side of the road as we were driving there. I wasn't just thinking about myself. People who have known only war, I mean. The tormented. The angry. The fragmented. It was easy enough for me. I was at the end of my first phase and about to return home. But for those whose country I was leaving, it was misery as usual, just as it's ever been - life as a lingering, blistered lack. That said, I also found myself discussing the artist to a man with incredible eyes and elite skills also waiting to board the plane, the tail-fin of which was reflected in the large round window set like a clock among the cracking white paint of the small airport terminal building. Towards my right, a man sat alone in a ramshackle garden with a satellite-pointed laptop on his knee. Young soldiers squeezed their chins with fingers and thumbs and one old man tried to light an old heater but gave up in the end. Battle-hardened vehicles sat like warriors a few meters away, but I wouldn't be needing them for another while. It was cold - where I was standing was exposed to the winds from the mountains - and I was thinking about childhood. On the bus to the plane we were asked to disembark in groups of five and were rigorously searched. 'New threat,' said the fixer. I watched as the man I had been speaking to got through and safely boarded. Soon we were flying like a kite across snow-set mountains. Next we were skimming clouds through which mountains like lizards could be seen dominating the sand. When we reached the oil terminals it was like looking down on blotches of power. I changed planes. I was restless to get home. This I did hours later. Yes, I was back. The artist and the children were away. But I was back in the flat with the large red sofa. Later, as my amazement settled, I checked the artist's unopened emails - she had asked me to do this when I phoned from the airport. Remarkably, she had one from the gallery who had come to see her work. They were desperate to get in touch.

Art Lives

The day we cease our art is the day we stop stop breathing.

What can I say?

Sturdy.

Happy Valentine

I don’t know what the artist would make of it. It is like an oasis at the side of a desert, a gulf between us, a wet fruit in a dry skin, a chapter in your own book that you did not write. Tall thin buildings stab the hot smoggy air like bent knitting needles striking out from a half-baked pancake. Serious faith mingles with sun-reflected aspirations. I have not reached my destination. (I shall not cease from exploration.) A mixture of fog and snow where I am heading means a delay of at least another day. Such is the nature of the beast. But I am not alone. I have carved the initials of some kind of camaraderie with someone also working for the same people, and our tribal elders so-to-speak have found a way of taking care of everything. As a result, I am sitting alone in a hotel room on Valentine’s Day having managed to catch - like amnesia - a few hours sleep. Desert images from the plane journey to this moment flash back. Oil fields pocking Planet Sand. Night flashes like night sweats. But I do remember the artist, oh yes, and the children. As I write, the sound of air-conditioning hums like a progressive, slightly dulled choir. Just then, as I finished that last sentence, there was a knock on the door and a polite man in a black suit entered with a beautiful bowl of fruit. There is no round red table, no bright red sofa. But there is fruit. I am due to fly out of this fictitious oasis early tomorrow. I am sure this world and the world belonging to my destination could not be further apart, and yet both my destination and the other war zone are really no distance from here at all. Is there some kind of moral there, a clue perhaps to the mechanics of peace rather than the splinters of war? What is it for example about one place and another that makes one prickle so with violence and the other chill like a perfectly cooked pepper plucked from the fridge? It can’t just be natural resources, for obvious reasons - one of the war zones is on fire because of oil, this one not. Was it because it was attacked? (Sometimes, obvious is illuminating, instructive.) Anyway, I am watching the news. I am thinking of the artist. I am eating fruit. I am poking through the plastic seaweed of this culture clash in order to get my bearings. I may slip out of contact again.

Salut

I salute and love the artist and my family as I slip from view.

Never Give Up

The art can be ripe. The notes can be neat. The scene can be set. The pens can be counted. The gadgets and chargers can be placed in some kind of order. Printed tickets, electronic or otherwise, can be neatly folded and placed into crisp white envelopes. Clothes can be laundered and gutted from polythene. Unfamiliar transit reservations can be checked. The currency exchange can be examined in some kind of non-commercial preparation. Foreign newspapers, the editorials imagined as pertinent, can be finished off. Lists can be culled with the stroke of a pen. Forms of goodbye can be softly spoken. Boots can be polished. Fear can be sublimated. Contingencies can be revealed. An artist's cheek can be kissed. A deep breath made. A pocket patted. A key felt. But nothing can prepare for that moment when something happens out of the blue and causes everything to go pear-shaped, which happens to be exactly what happened to me today. But, and I must repeat this to myself as well, it is precisely how we deal with these unexpected incomings that defines the crisp edges of our abilities and survivalist flexibilities and instinct. My poor artist, though. She, like me, was tuned like an instrument for the 'concert' tonight, but it isn't going to happen. It will. Give it a few more hours, day, or days. We, I, it, will get there. Like life itself, like the artist's search for a show, like the child's pursuit of a dream, like the shuttle racing through the sky, nothing comes easy for those who cannot see where they are heading but know that the not-seeing is part of the deal. But it comes. It does come. It has to come. If you never give up, if you keep the faith, if you hang onto the ledge with your fingernails, you will be rewarded, you will be believed, you will climb back in again. Never, let's say it again, give up.

Avail

I met my friend who has lived for long stretches of time in the desert for some lunch today. A bowl of wide thick Japanese udon noodles with seaweed and two slices of salmon sashimi on a side dish were served. Green tea was the beverage and a few topical articles were exchanged before some long distance thoughts about the war zones were aired. I don't know what the desert equivalent of a fish out of water is but my friend is probably more at home by an oasis than a metropolis. His spine and perception makes for good rumination in any context, however. The artist meanwhile has been waiting to hear from the gallerist who came round the other day and it was impossible for me not to be also thinking about her as the centre of the capital bubbled and our conversation flitted from reportage to my trip to my friend to the artist and back again. Mind you, all this waiting for news from the gallerist occupies an even larger space in the mind of the artist, I am sure. Let us hope there is no tilt, no crash. I suppose it would be asking too much for her to receive confirmation of a show just as I am obliged to either tone down, or stop completely, the blog. I suspect my imminent departure features in her psyche like an irritant as well as good news. I am trying not to make too much of it. Especially to the children. Our 5-year-old son will occasionally glimpse conflict on the news and ask a searching question. ('Do guns not work sometimes?') Our 8-year-old daughter's rather charming way of dealing with it is to tease her father when talking about where I am going. It does tally with previous experiences and adventures, so I'm not strictly a scorpion out of the desert. (Is that the one?) A goat down from the mountains.

Ceremony of the Horsemen

Action! I have been watching a film awards show with the artist. With some amusement we have witnessed like bad critics various movie stars moving silkily down the scrubbed carpets before levitating like digitally enhanced ornaments onto the thinly constructed stage to receive their peace prizes. (Not.) Actually one or two faces in the audience were half-familiar to me. One of them was a well known thespian whose diary I had to arrange over and over again a number of years ago, in what feels like another lifetime, in order to get them to do some ADR - additional dialogue recording - on an otherwise bearable film. (This person cancelled me 21 times, usually only a few minutes beforehand, and still put in a crackling performance.) It is a pompous business. A majority of schlock films aside, however, at least one or two poetic souls appear to have made that rare transition from penniless auteur to mainstream minstrel in one piece. Abstractions in some films are even acceptable. In fact, to be fair, some of the film makers and much of the public have never really been the problem. No, it has always been the money men - and they are usually men. They have this utter conviction for some reason that all members of the public are dumb, while they sit among their sunlit clouds unaware of the precise nature of what it is they are dumping on us all. Maybe I am old fashioned. I still flirt with the notion that there is an essential intelligence to every living soul. It is just a question of believing that and finding a way to absorb, enjoy, or accentuate it. Isn't it? Not so long ago - the artist was working - I took the children to the cinema. It was a good enough film, but our experience of the cinema itself was loud, garish, and cold - air-conditioning in winter is like people cleaning their houses before the maid comes round. Meanwhile on the TV screen a woman with somebody else's body reaches the stage. She struggles with the autocue. I look at the artist on the bright red sofa and I stare at my notes on the round red table. A number of people from where I am going have ripped up their contracts in the past few weeks and left. We stop watching the awards ceremony and miss the winner of Best Male Actor mentioning our children's school in his acceptance speech. Serves me right. Cut!

Saturday Night Fever

I actually began this blog with a slightly rudderless tirade against all the pressures in life that people face these days, especially to conform, but I deleted it in the end as its inclusion felt rather unsporting. Perhaps it was the calm that has befallen the flat ever since the children and the artist cleared some space in the living room, turning down the lights and dancing solidly for eight songs as I played some music through the laptop. There was fancy dress. Clowning. Pastiche. Much disco. I even filmed some of it on my phone as practice, if you can believe it, for my trip. Now, as the artist lights a candle securely set back in the fireplace, and our son holds the artist's cup of decaffeinated tea in his hands, and our daughter tells me how many pages of her book she has read, any kind of complaint seems ill-placed. No, the rest of the world, family and friends excepted, can back off just now. We have our invisible wall and we just so happen to be using it. Invisible, because manners are important. A wall, because people penetrate. Also, as the candlelight illuminates the blood-red rose petals above the fireplace, I keep thinking of things I will need shortly and jot them down in my large hardback notebook. Once the list imagines itself complete, I will deduct from it what I think I can get away with not having. Research. Planning. Contingency plans. What equipment will I need? These are the sorts of questions. I have also been told not to overpack. I seldom do. After five years of living across the ocean, I returned with just the one suitcase, and that was pretty empty. Admittedly I disappeared to the desert fairly soon afterwards, via the odd broken bone and car crash, but I have never been particularly materialistic.

A Pair of Art

Today I think is the first time since the artist was sick over a month ago that I've actually seen her sit back a moment from her work, move aside from the industry, the gifted labouring, and all that diligence. I am sure that the meeting yesterday will have had something to do with that. (The result of which remains, unusually, in the lap of the gods.) However, it is still interesting to me how some people will always find a way of staying creative even when they are trying not to be creative. Today for example the artist bought some rail tickets and booked some seats for a northbound train next week with the children to their grandparents in the melodic foothills. On her way back from the station she saw in a charity shop a pair of bright red Spanish high heels. Quietly, she slipped them on in the shop and decided to buy them. When she returned home she walked into the kitchen and took out a tube of acrylic Mars Black paint from the sink and proceeded to completely redesign them. Afterwards the two heels bore the unmistakeable imprint of the artist's detailed doodling. Now we had a pair of art. The creative impulse had been satisfied. The height was fetching. She didn't wear them out - she is with friends at the moment - but the children were amused. (The artist may have taken a night off but she had just taken our daughter to gym.) Now they - the children, not the heels - sit on the bright red sofa under a duvet; I am at the red round table, working on my trip. And no one's got the Tombstone Blues.

The Visitor

With the kind of confidence that perhaps only a certain kind of truth can exude, I watched this morning as the artist prepared the living room for the visit from the gallerist. The bright red sofa was pulled to one side. The African mat was rolled up and moved. The round red table was squeezed into the corner. Dust was wiped. Blinds were hoisted. (OK, I helped.) Then, one by one, the artist carefully slid the heavy completed pieces from their precarious resting place by the front door - space, like art, is a premium round here - and we posted them in various positions around the room. I then worked on the bathroom, cleaning the sink and bath and mirrors. I had already opened the front and back doors and a cool air blew through the flat. Then I blew up a yellow balloon. This was to leave outside the house for the visitors' taxi. Anyway, all done, I kissed the artist and wished her well. Her visitor was imminent. She had phoned, even left a courteous and friendly email confirming the visit. As for me, I was on my way to see a friend and former Marine for lunch. I was almost there when the artist phoned. Apparently the woman was as I remembered in her gallery a week ago - informed, gentle, confident - and the artist told me that she thought the work was fantastic. The artist sounded the kind of positive you want. A meeting without the artist will take place next Monday at the gallery during which the artist's work, with the benefit of some printed images, will be discussed. The gallerist will then get back to her. I am pleased it went well. The artist is trying to be philosophical but I knew there is real trust there. I also noticed a real strength in the artist's voice when she told me her news. It was as if the currency of their exchange was high art indeed.

Artist's Essentials For Survival, Part 2

PERSISTENCE
If an idea feels right but doesn't seem to yield anything at first, keep working on it, keep shaping. If it is really good, it will declare itself.

WET ART
Avoid placing wet or porous works of art near fires, especially papier-mâché type work that has been accidentally submerged in water - it may explode when heated, producing dangerous flying fragments which could take out an eye if you are close to the fire.

COLD STUDIOS
If heat is lost rapidly - rewarm rapidly
If heat is lost slowly - rewarm slowly

STUDIO LAYOUT
Latrines must be downhill of studio and away from the water supply to avoid risk of seepage.

GALLERIES
Be suspicious of any gallery with no goodwill, or avaricious dealers present. It is likely to be regretted. Check eyes for soul which might indicate true prosperity. Always show art in intelligent rooms. In foolish circles, art without stewardship becomes dross: its company must be respected.

HOW TO RETAIN FUNDS
Avoid giving away too high a commission. Keep cool. Never lie. Be as much an admirer of them as they are of you.

FEAR NOTHING
You are an artist. As such, you must aim high.

Congratulations to the man with the show

There is a present exhibition featuring an artist who now regularly sells his paintings for millions of dollars yet never do you feel money is the point. This is rare today and makes me happy, because unlike so many of his peers his work is actually about something. Something bigger than himself, too. I have a second reason for being happy about his progress. Years ago, not so long after I had witnessed my first ever firefight and shortly before I moved across the ocean to the city of the scraped skies for five years, this very artist came to me for some advice. (As I remember it, we were in a former timber warehouse the first time we met.) Anyway, though I haven't seenm him in years, he was a shy person then and is no more than a year younger than me, and though he was tall he gave the impression of not wanting to take up too much space. I of course immediately suggested I had no advice to give, in fact felt embarrassed he thought me capable of any. (If he had asked about war, then OK ... I might have had something to say.) Anyway, he picked my brain about his work all the same and I liked him immediately. We even discovered that his father before travelling the ocean and starting a family there had gone to the same school as me in the far chilly north, though naturally before my time. As for the work then, it was perhaps more about wit than wonder but still had glimmers of the respect for nature and humanity so attractively prevelant in the work today. In time, I would recommend his work to people I knew across the ocean myself, but no one responded. I remember one time wanting a fairly senior gallerist over there to show him but I was instantly mocked, though not unkindly, and it was suggested the work was uncommercial.

Universal Privacy

The centre of the capital bristles with power like a massive building bristling with antennae. And yet the people with the power are just as vulnerable as the rest of us. I was thinking this only this afternoon as I popped in to do some paperwork in a large and busy building. I was actually thinking about it in the context of the artist's work, too. This is what is so strong about the art. It manages to show us both strength and vulnerability. A kind of lifeforce is acknowledged, and yet no rank is thrown. The fact nature is deployed so broadly in each piece is another asset - it places the human condition, the lives within the figures, into some kind of universal context, or perspective. Everyone is rushing about, especially down the corridors of power, in the world today. Sometimes we have to move in what in any sensible situation might be called too fast and yet important issues can be at stake and people have no choice sometimes but to move fast. What the artist gives us - in my humble yet provenly abiding opinion - is a rare opportunity to slow everything down, not to a halt but to a calm, without sucking out any of the work's strength or energy. It is rather like having life slowed down to what is probably its preferred speed. I know these are vague terms, but there is a genuine unsnatchability about the work. And when there is great purpose and limited time down these aforementioned corridors of power, in other words when public service meets limited time, and duty grasps idleness, sometimes flinging it aside, these people doing all this will often mean well but simply not have it within their gift to contemplate fully what it is they hope exists and therefore justifies their duty to keep some kind of peace. Well, the artist is proof that that peace, that very peace, in real terms, and without fake ribbons or bows, exists.

A seahorse, a tomb, an antelope, and a four-eyed fish

Our children's voices travel like light and music through the cleanish flat. A bath is running - not a river, but like a river - and the children's voices travel above the additional sound of hot and gushing water. Then the artist wanders into the living room. She is nude, naked. She disappears into the bathroom again, shutting the door behind her. I hear the water being clawed and the hot or cold mixed with cold or hot as she paddles her way towards attempted bliss. She has worked very hard today. In fact I will check to see if she is having a bubble bath. She is. Rosemary. The flat is now scented. This small urban habitat is faking nature superbly. The children by the way called me as I checked on what I hoped was a bubble bath. They were sitting on the top bunk chatting away and drawing. Our daughter was with a friend today and with her friend's mother they all went to a museum. While there they did some art and I have our daughter's in front of me. The pièce de résistance is a pencil drawing of a snowy owl. The owl looks like it is concentrating, more alert than wise perhaps, and has a kind of awkward beauty which make the entire piece feel very sophisticated. She also drew a rabbit. This poor creature looks frozen by the young artist's glare: it is endearing and intimidating, though. (She also rendered, though smaller, a seahorse, a tomb, an antelope, and a four-eyed fish.) The artist is out of the bath by the time I finish this - I have just been checking the news and reading an irritating and gloating opinion piece on the war zone - and looks washed if not entirely refreshed. I hear laughter and feel bad about wanting to quell it but the children really should be getting ready for sleep now. As for the artist's new piece, for me it is more interesting by the day. Today I am especially impressed by the manner in which it explains all the other pieces rather like a tent-pole holding up a tent.

Artist's Essentials For Survival

Survival is the art of staying alive and true as an artist. Mental attitide is as important as skill and knowledge. You must know how to take everything possible from your talent and use it to the full, how to attract attention to yourself so that the right kind of gallerist comes along, how to make your way through the social minefield that surrounds a show and make it back to your work not too impaired by either success or failure, still navigating successfully without facts or figures. You must know how to keep healthy, or if unhealthy how to make yourself better.

CRITIC ATTACK
Slashing your way through the thickets of unsung industry to get a show does not mean that once you get one you will not be disturbed by venomous critics. Any bare emotion is vulnerable to attack. Say nothing! Don't get angry - you won't want to ridicule yourself having just watched them ridicule themselves. Calm will protect the nerves. Contemporary critics, sometimes desperate for something they know they cannot do themselves but wish they could, will make for and mock the honesty of the artist. Protect all parts of your talent from their painful stings.

You must be able to maintain your morale as an artist and that of others who share your situation. Any studio space you have must be considered a bonus. Lack of studio space should not mean you cannot work, for you are an artist always and those skills and talents must not get rusty and you must extend your knowledge at all times.

WHITE PAINT
Too much white paint can cause blindness. Protect the eyes with goggles or a strip of cloth or bark with narrow slits cut for eyes. Blacken underneath the eye with charcoal, or Daler Rowney black soft pastel, to reduce glare further.

Knowing where you're going

I feel I don't want to go into my imminent trip too much but I want to present it as a continuing background while still honouring the artist in her unhesitatingly impressive journey of her own towards exhibition. Today for example I walked with her into perhaps the largest and best art supply store in the capital and watched as she strolled the upper floor sniffing approvingly at the various materials, admiring without reproach the beautiful wooden boxes filled with small tubes of paint, and reminiscing before paying at the till about the crayons she would be given each year as a child. I must admit, she looked attractively accomplished as she dealt with the transaction. The surfaces were largely stainless steel and at one point I could see this warped reflection of the artist staring straight back at me. To her left meanwhile was a large table of art magazines. I had leafed through some of them earlier and there was not much within their glossy and advertising-led pages to catch my eye, which is not to say an absence of the artist's images within such pages is a cause for bitterness. How could it be? Only now is the artist feeling ready to step forward. But that image of the artist, that shiny warp, reinterpreted by the stainless steel, is clear in my head now. More than any of the pages of the magazines. It is the delightful image of someone going somewhere.

No Pressure

The gallerist is coming to see the artist next week, not this week as it happens. I met the gallerist myself today. I met her in her gallery. A broad, refined space which literally gave me shelter from the storm. (My light brown cordoruoy coat looked like a cammy leather afterthought.) Immediately, I thought the gallerist charming, bright, unaffected, and the gallery measured, respectful, epic. Her thoughts stroked the work on the wall, which were largely contemplative and contemporary landscapes. I enjoyed talking to her - we even discussed the seventieth birthday celebrations last weekend - and I hope the meeting next week is a success, because as people alone the artist and the gallerist seem a cut above the rest, and they could be good for each other. A good service. This in fact is one of the things with the artist's work. It requires an unlazy mind to appreciate it properly and the artist's journey to date is not one in which the participants are particularly required to party, talk 'dosh', or deliberately lack cohesion. Its society should bubble, yes; the talk should prosper, certainly; but it also needs the right space and the right person, and this one person I met today was impressive. Meanwhile my trip grows closer and my running in the morning marginally less cumbersome.

On Natural Selection (Music)

I start this with http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cn7ZW8ts3Y playing on my headphones. Click on it if you like. Minimize the image and listen to it while you're reading, if you can. Otherwise welcome back, over 10 minutes later. The artist has been listening to it. She has been quite literally attacking the rockface of her new piece more than just a little motivated by the piece. I have had it on my headphones a number of times as I've surfed the topics and regions I'm most interested in at the moment. This piece of music - 'a tapestry of voices,' someone has called it - was written over 500 years ago. Can you imagine such a thing? It sounds to me so contemporary. Turn up the volume. Go on. As I write, the artist is sitting on the bright red sofa with her sister, who has come to stay, and they are both giggling as they try to find a film to watch. I can see the backs of their two heads and they are like characters in a cartoon to me. I suppose the caption could be something along the lines of ... Sister 1: "How about the Sound of Music?' Sister 2: 'No, I want to watch a film.' Actually the music has stopped because I paused to drink some tea and briefly joined in the conversation. What shall I play now? I know. Wait a moment. There. Now I am listening to http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1oitSlHi3MY. You will probably have gathered but it is by the late great Nick Drake, and it really should be played loud. A few times. Play it again. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1oitSlHi3MY.

Our Daughter's Friend's Artist Father

Our 8-year-old daughter played at a friend's house after school today. Her father rather kindly brought her back and accepted an invitation to stay for some tea. Also helpfully, he is an artist with a studio in a creekside warehouse not so very far from here and responded immediately to the artist's new piece on the wall as he stepped over the shoes into the living room. I took one or two steps back myself, knowing how much it means to the artist to have an in-shop discussion about her work with a fellow artist, no matter how different each artist may be, either in exploit or ambition. Actually I have mentioned this person before - the mother, whom we like very much too, is also an artist, and a teacher - and it was good to see him relax and enter fully into a rich vein of thoughts about all manner of works. What really took off in the conversation was the topic of the artist the artist of this blog had recently seen - and spoke about - with our daughter. A woman in her nineties, no less, still making work often fuelled by memories from her childhood, and not all of them good. While the artist of this blog would be the first to admit to a happy childhood herself, it is fair to say she is quick to acknowledge the potency of childhood, whatever the shade, as a source of inspiration. No, our daughter's friend's father is a gentle and thoughtful man. His kindness reminds me of the opposite, namely that so many people one encounters these days can come across, intentionally or otherwise, as selfish in comparison to someone like him, and, though I feel pompous saying it, generally unengaged by a social conscience. I don't quite know where this comes from, this disengagement, but there are so few people taking an interest in where our culture is going, or indeed what kind of a world we now live in. No, the conversation was good and went some way towards reminding me once again of why it is I like certain artists. Yes, it is their singular need to create something beautiful. But it is also their keen awareness.

"When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country: I make up for lost time when I come home."*

We are back now from our successful long birthday weekend in the countryside. The children have just had their hair washed and are supposed to be in bed. But I can hear them whispering from their bunks, like softly mutinous bedfellows. The artist is in the kitchen making hot milk and wiping surfaces. I am at the round red table and have been going through numerous details relating to the fresh confirmation I have just received for my imminent trip to the war zone. It is strange being back in the city after the beautiful segue we undertook to the countryside. The traffic outside our little flat sounds louder than I remember and the footsteps from the flat above seem almost intrusive. But footsteps are the least of my issues. I have a lot of sorting out to do. Meanwhile the artist now puts on the kettle, having given the hot milk to the children. It is funny how something as seemingly inane as the particular sound of a kettle signifies more than anything that feeling of being home. (A few minutes later, I take a sip of hot peppermint tea.) I must go running tomorrow morning, I am thinking. The artist will no doubt return to her new piece in the morning with a kind of unharsh vengeance. She will be remembering again that she has a visit - we hope - from the elusive but important gallerist in a few days time. I must admit, the greatest rush I felt when we stumbled in after our journey was seeing the artist's work on the wall again. For example I was impressed by how much of the colour violet she has managed to incorporate into what is a dramatic piece. In fact, the pet name she has given this piece is the name of the country I am bound for.
*Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

The Street Lights of Eternity

I gazed at the stars with the artist tonight. No light pollution. No urban mesh. One constellation that was particularly outstanding was Orion the hunter and his famous 'belt' and the great cloud of dust and gas known, I have read, as the sword of Orion nebula. It made our viewing playful as well as instructive. (Anything beyond the earth's atmosphere is an impossible distance; but at least it teaches you scale.) Earlier I had worked out without much pleasure that we were located close in the valley to where a woman who once commissioned the artist to do a portrait of a wealthy poet's wife committed suicide not so long ago. She died from drinking weedkiller. It was a terribly sad story. As I held the artist and we continued to stare at the sky, I saw what I think must have been Mercury to the east. I was also remembering the history of suicide not only in the woman's family but in her husband's too. I remembered climbing the side of a mountain in the land to the chilly north once with three people after a hearty lunch, one of whom was the daughter of one of the most renowned novelists of the last century who famously committed suicide. Later, years later, alas, so did she. 'Self-murder,' it used to be called. That would just about sum it up were it not for the other people such as her it can kill too. I don't know of any suicide in my own family - I champion, however clumsily at times, life - but ghastly it must be when it comes. A man from the small valley where we have been staying responsible many years ago for weaver's jobs eventually committed suicide after failing to preserve many such jobs after the introduction of the mechanical loom. Furthermore, not so far away, in a neighbouring principality, there has been a spate of over a dozen suicides among a group of teenagers. (I even spent time once writing an article about a group of people working for a well known charity created to stop people from killing themselves - http://www.samaritans.org/) That was a lesson. Anyway, I returned indoors with the artist from looking at the sky, both of us lit up, alive, glad to be alive, wary, strong, aware. Life. Sweet life.

The Lights Above And The Valley B'low

The artist awoke for no particular reason. Perhaps it was a jolt in a dream, the imaginary thud of huge and heavy hand shears, or the sound of ancient spindle and bullrushes. I was already awake, thinking a thousand thoughts. (Many of them good.) I recommended the artist get out of bed, just as I had done, and walk to the French windows. As the artist crept across the room, our son continued sleeping in the sofabed beside me and our daughter in the large double-bed. The artist paused and parted the thin linen curtains. It must have been about three in the morning. I watched as she stared gently out at the moonlight illuminating an entire valley. A single electric light shone like solitude from about a mile away. Other than that, it was as if we were the only people in the world. With a silhouetted nod of the head, she agreed about the beauty and returned quietly to bed. There used to be so many clothiers and millers and shearmen and weavers round these parts, some of them the best in the world. Streams ran with scarlet dye where the military uniforms were made - it was also the colour of royalty - and someone somewhere must surely have seen the colour as some kind of prophecy of blood. I saw no such menace when I looked out, nor I believe did the artist. I can admit to a feeling of brief sadness but felt a presence of greater authority too. Round these parts, weavers regularly worked sixteen or seventeen hour days and mothers and children often lived in bare, cold and empty cottages. A famous soldier sent to quell the increasingly angered workforce wrote uncomfortably of their hardship. Last night, though, the light was magical, transcendental, and I saw the artist in a new - moonlight they call it - light.

Three Score Years and Ten

I have the unusual pleasure of writing this entry on my laptop from the lap of what I can only see as dark countryside. My son is on the bed beside me playing with a toy diver in a frogsuit while voices drift like bubbles through the old and commodious farmhouse. We have begun celebrating the artist's father's seventieth birthday and it is already a fine and handsome occasion. I am still feeling for the artist, though, as the gallerist, I am afraid to say, cancelled again at the very last moment. I had already blown up the balloon the artist promised would be flying as humorous indication of where on the busy road we lived. In fact I had just tied it to the tree outside and was about to disappear when I saw the artist on the phone looking dejected. Twice the gallerist has done this. She has rescheduled for next Thursday but still it gnaws. Again, I suppose, the party-line must be to be patient, to make allowances, but deep within I know the artist is disgruntled as well as disappointed. At least she knows it is no reflection of the work, I hope. Meanwhile my son tells me that where we are staying is no one's house because no one lives here, an absence not dissimilar to the one experienced by the artist today. Still, her father's seventy years are being celebrated and this is why we are here. A special person. Very. The type who would be embarrassed by such accolade. The artist's mother read out an accurately sprightly and endearingly unpretentious poem by the fire. Our daughter read one too, full of the cadences of the right kind of hope. The artist for her part has made a beautiful book, each of the drawings depicting various moments of the father's impressive and intelligently constructed life so far. (I watched her draw them with bowed head as if in a kind of melodic trance.) Now, I can smell the firewood on my hands from the fire I made and will return upstairs to the firelit party. (We are sleeping downstairs.)

Lighting tomorrow with today

The artist is expecting a visit from the gallerist tomorrow after which we go to the countryside to celebrate the artist's father's seventieth birthday. (The children have been virtual tourists this evening, exploring the rooms in 360 degrees on the computer.) This may also mean being separated from the blog as I do not think the farmhouse where we will be staying, generously rented for three days by the artist's parents, has internet access. I feel mildly uncomfortable about this. It is as if underneath the neo-literary and pseudo-diaristic pleasure of writing it, some kind of useful if not too metronomic irrigation also takes place. Still, I will have to get used to being without it anyway as I doubt I will be writing one in the war zone. It might be interesting advertising creativity as a life force where many lives are threatened but I am convinced neither of its practicality nor of its tact. In the meantime, the artist is being incredibly relaxed about the gallerist's visit tomorrow. This is not arrogance on the artist's part and for me is reassuring. I think it has finally begun to sink in that this work really is as special as I drone on about. It is a wonderful thing self-belief and I understand any natural inclination towards modesty. I have touched upon this about the artist before and admire greatly hre absence of loud and garish pride. In the end, it is a fine line between modesty and invisibility and we shall just have to see what tomorrow may bring. ('Yesterday is but today's memory,' as Kahlil Gibran said, 'and tomorrow is today's dream.') Two weeks ago we had a dress rehearsal for the visit, a kind of useful false alarm, so it may be a winning performance.

Working towards a wholeness

As I sat on the bright red sofa an hour ago and turned my head, instead of it being my tireless son's eye I caught - he had ducked behind the sofa - it was the artist's new piece on the wall. Like our son, it is still in its infancy, no longer teething but still early-glowing, and the ambition of detail is not only apparent but arresting. This is a good thing from the point of view of the piece, but also in the way it informs all the other pieces. With each piece, in other words, the artist gets closer and closer to a kind of collective detail. Where before the chief characteristic was content, it is now also detail. I have suggested this before but never have I seen it so clearly. Detail as a form of visual respect. Industry as a representation of character. Time as proof of commitment. I wish I could go say more but I don't want to give any kind of game away; not at this early stage. Nor has the artist been lending her hand simply to that: she has been busy on another project and is now the deserved recipient of some early sleep on the aforementioned sofa. Indeed, her head is pressed against a cushion made by her mother and all is still in the house. At least I thought it was until I turned my head a few moments ago and saw our son pop daringly around the bedroom door. He was in his pyjamas and cannot sleep. I hand-signaled with a finger across my lips for him to be quiet. It seems to have worked, leaving me now to rest my eyes on the new piece again. I am entranced, pleasantly puzzled, avid. Physically, I am thinking, while there is nothing strictly speaking of the mandala* about the work itself, it does establish a kind of sacred space and is an aid to meditation.
*Any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.

The Artist's Swan

Sometimes, like one of those Bewick's swans that breed in the Arctic in the area surrounding the Kara Sea and now reside on the small gentle pond I pass most days, you just want to build enough momentum to get those big old wings flapping again and take off. It's not that you don't like the pond. In fact you care about the pond more than anything else in the world - it's where your family stay. It's just that you need the big picture and you need to hunt. Now, hunting isn't exactly what you might call particularly swan-like behaviour, but when there's not much in or on your pond and you know where to look, you must go there. Especially when you've an important artist and mother by the pond, who needs time to make one day what may be a priceless picture of that pond, let alone two beautiful cygnets. Thankfully, I know it's important to look around, to check the temperature, to be informed. This old swan likes to do that anyway. Take that talk I attended the other day, the one given by the principal spokesman to the largest military alliance in the world. One hell of a smart swan. But what wasn't mentioned then and maybe should be mentioned more now are some pretty salient facts, namely what have just been deemed the four key threats to the security of this planet.

1. Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

2. The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

3. Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

4. The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.

Now, few of the other creatures I meet flying around this small airspace here seem to care much about these points, though they do have beautiful nests. Especially the politicians. I don't know, even in a powerless kind of way as I peer from high above the pond at the horizon, I'm sure I'm a better swan for being informed and this will make me a better hunter.

The Artist and her Daughter

You seem to like wearing clogs when you work.
They have such a history behind them ... (stepping up to work) ... good working shoes too.
Tell me about your day out yesterday, just you and our daughter.
It was lovely, lovely to spend time with her ... just the two of us. She's only eight but she's so receptive to things. (stepping back from work) We went to see a show.
Did she enjoy it?
Well, yes ... (working again) ... In the first room were all these paintings with female bodies trapped by houses. Also, a huge cage-like box or cell with a replica of the artist's childhood home in it ... (light chuckle) ... I was laughing with her. Explaining how it's not good to feel trapped at home with no way out. That it's good to find something you really want to do in life. Something you care about. And not spend all day cleaning ... (a smile) ... unless it gives you a huge amount of satisfaction ... (stepping through mess) ... No, home, I said, is a good place but that for some people it can be a trap.
How are you getting on with the new piece?
Very good. I've just removed something from it which helps it greatly ... (angling head; working away at surface) ... but I want to talk more about the show we saw.
Go on.
The rooms were like dreams, bad dreams, and memories ... (stifled sneeze) ... I talked to her about how memories aren't always truthful. One room had all these chairs ... a torture chair, little chairs. And it was all about the artist's background, her father's job, and something that had happened in her childhood, which she was very angry about. Which I think is extraordinary, because she's in her nineties, this artist. And to be still making work about it? It's incredible.
What effect does a show like this have on an 8-year old, do you think?
A good effect, it's good ... (sitting down) ... She was fascinated by the fact the artist used so many different materials. (standing up) And that you could literally walk into these imaginary worlds. I think it was also very significant that it was a woman artist we were seeing. No, she was very sweet. (a beat) Inquisitive. Just really enjoying it. We had a really good time. (looking intently at work) And because she's been exposed to art from such an early age, she never wonders what it's for. (working hard) The other thing I loved ... is the fact it was also about motherhood.

The Quote of the Day

'I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for,' said Georgia O'Keeffe. 'Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in,' said Amy Lowell. 'We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies,' said Picasso. 'All art requires courage,' said Anne Tucker. 'Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail,' said Theodore Dreiser. 'Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do,' said Edgar Degas. 'Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art,' said Wynetka Ann Reynolds. 'It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work,' said Henry Moore. 'Pictures must not be too picturesque,' said Ralph Waldo Emerson. 'Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better,' said André Gide. 'Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass,' said Fran Lebowitz. 'Great art picks up where nature ends,' said Marc Chagall. 'When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?",' said Howard Ikemoto. 'What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit,' said John Updike. 'The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life,' said Henry Miller. 'Erm,' said the artist of this blog, interrupted by her 5-year-old son who was refusing to go to sleep, 'art is something you need so badly but don't realise until you see it.'