Every kind of artist has a line of defence

It's unusual - for me, as well as the artist - when the artist has no work-in-progress on the wall. I suppose there is a mural-in-progress adorning the school wall, so it is not as if art has been sucked from the body artist completely, and we are left only with some kind of memory husk and a whiff of former glory. But there remains an interesting and subliminal connection between the artist's work and my web logging. It goes beyond the obvious, too, which is to say that of a wife who is an artist looking for an exhibition and a husband who is tangentially writing about it all. And it is like the parting of a kind of twinned intuition when the art - quite literally - is off the wall. It's good, though, to veer in separate directions like this: it's beneficial for the relationship. I disappeared into town today for example for a visit to an embassy, while the artist ran errands and made plans. The embassy I visited was the embassy of my father's father as it happens. It was in a building I have looked at and admired for some time - its strangely modern presence only tolerated on a street lined largely with older and more stuffy buildings. Interestingly, they have erected a new line of defence outside the embassy, in my opinion as much in keeping with the generally peaceful manner of the embassy's citizens as with any need, however real, for a new line of defence. Instead of adopting the concrete-ugly approach of one or two others, they had filled a dozen or so giant plant tubs with soil and concealed concrete - and indeed plants - and these now formed an extra line of defence. One only had to glide through these tall long baths of nature and might in order to climb the few steps and enter the building, but on foot. How civilized, I was thinking. How subtle and how strong. I felt at peace. There was one other visitor, also a man, sitting alone in the waiting area, quietly reading a newspaper in English. He looked Middle Eastern. I must confess, the man who came down to see me was initially bullish, vaguely hostile, and it was not how I expected to be greeted. But, in fact, this turned out to be an excellent way for us both to break the ice - our different strengths exposed from the outset, you could say - and within a minute or so we were enjoying each other's company greatly. It is interesting the different ways people greet aggression. I definitely prefer the plant-tub approach to the concrete-ugly. It is like preferring art to artifice. Mind you, some artists I've met in the past have been incredibly aggressive, too.