Sneak Preview, the 100 Extras

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