Another one smites the rust

The most recent piece of art is nearly finished: I know this because there are increasing moments now when I am in the room and the artist is stepped back. Arms are folded in greater confidence, too, and the head tilted with increasing patience as completion nears and fear subsides. Of course, a blemish or imperfection in the work is spotted regularly and the piece is swiftly attacked with a kind of last-minute benign intolerance, but I have witnessed it before and know it always to be good. I first saw it in a former studio belonging to the artist in an old school building, now an achingly trendy block of flats. It was so cold the artist had a hot water bottle strapped to her waist like some kind of physical manifestation of a phantom pregnancy. I saw it again as she worked all the hours in a day towards an efficient corner in the Cologne Art Fair. I saw it another time while she prepared for a solo exhibition by Lake Constance in Austria, and then for another show in a woman's gallery across the Alps in Milan. I saw it on the top floor of an empty old hotel building in Northumberland overlooking an inky blue sea as she finished 'doing' a Danish family. I saw it in the foothills of Snowdonia one cold and crisp winter when it was indeed ourselves that were being done. (Have I got your lips right? How about your smile?) Outside of this home-spun realm, I have seen it with exhausted feature film directors when they finish films, too. (Let's see that one more time, they say with a kind of prepared finality.) I've seen it in the field among soldiers, alas, when they've reached that moment of obliged withdrawal. Why, I have even seen it in the act of love. It is the moment. It is the idea becoming reality. It is art having moved from the academic to the anthropological, to paraphrase and abuse what Seamus Heaney said about Ted Hughes. And I have been lucky to have witnessed this time after time, that is to say this key moment, this point of no return. If you love your child send him on his travels, they say in the east. Well, it is the same, this week, with the artist's art.