Artists: from a long line

The late Dave the Grave, I'll call him, was a great artist, one of those many great artists belonging to my wife's tribe - the tribe of artists - I met before we met. This was across the ocean in the land of plenty on an ancient piece of rock. A new confederacy of artists had gathered on the island and my hugely significant job was to label slides for them. Outside, a collector's noun of limousines splintered the ungentrified streets, dumping short men in real estate and tall women in furs, all of whom smouldered with cheque books: greenbacks in order to buy into this gifted confederacy. As a little fish, my work also entailed sitting in the front of some of these shrines where the deals with the artists were done, in these places called the places where the artists would show, and Dave the Grave was right up there, and not just because he was so tall. I saw more money in cash than I had ever seen in my life one time when he sold a piece of work. Anyway, in this one place where I spent a good year of my life working he would lumber in with his yawning and grimacing and over-rubbed face and his general long-boned and bashed-about uncomfortableness. Sit down, I'd say, chill, and he'd stretch out like a giant accordion in the deep low ledge often painted in turquoise between the floor and window. It would be an absolute miracle once he settled, because so much effort had been applied in getting that long railway-carriage body into position. Then, more often than not, he would be still, very still indeed, as if some kind of mysterious trance had nabbed him. His hands would be wrapped around one knee which he rocked and rocked and rocked. And then he'd say something, usually along the lines of how he couldn't actually remember what it was he was going to say. But he was a great artist, the late great Dave the Grave. Oh yes. I'd usually get through about five or six more pages of slides - each dutifully labelled in tiny black handwriting - before he'd come to life again and then while I was holding to the light a slide of his work - maybe of some amazingly shamanistic comment on the old world and new - he'd say: Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. And then he'd drop his head again, the leg would stop rocking, and he'd be gone. I'm history, he'd say. It's only recently I realised the quote was Kahlil Gibran's.