"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)