3-0

I have left it very late writing today's blog. The reason for the tardiness is a game of international football, and all that that can represent. I know the presence of a game of football in a blog about an artist working towards an exhibition may seem like a weak link, but I will attempt to make it. I am immediately reminded of some of the game's great social history. Its importance in local culture. Working men would finish a long and hard and often underpaid week exhausted and dispirited and yet gather together on a Saturday afternoon to watch their team play to win. For ninety minutes, plus injury time, they would stand sometimes in the wind and rain watching as the game unfolded. Perhaps for ten seconds, or, if they were lucky, maybe twenty, they would witness a piece of skill so magical, so deft and subtle, so impossibly beautiful at times, it would somehow forgive or forget some of the hardship endured over the previous week. No, a fan can indeed be a fine thing and should not be confused with the occasional moronic inferno. A fan is someone who admires something other than themselves. In football this really can be a moment of beauty. A real moment of magic. And there is a reward at the end of it. A result. Even if you lose, it is something more finite than most other news. So what is so different from all of that and art? People gather together under the banner of football to support something they love and to appreciate skills they do not consider themselves good enough to achieve. Well, in art, people also gather, sometimes together, under its banner, to support something they love, and to appreciate skills they do not consider themselves good enough to achieve. And they are looking at results. OK, so I have made the link between football and art - he writes swiftly - so that is the first part covered. But how on earth am I going to make the link between football and the artist? To write about the footballer is an artisan would be too obvious, though by no means unjustified. So how else will I achieve this, especially when the artist here - it must be said - is perhaps not football's - or soccer's - greatest supporter. Or could it, in fact, be that she knows very well precisely how much football can mean to me, and because of this knowledge always gives it a kind of companionable respect, and is this not in fact what I am always doing with her art? There. I tried. I know. It was a long shot. (Back of the net.)