Skateboards and Art Boards and Overlords

Our son really wants a skateboard. I left the artist with an old friend and went off to the station alone. A skateboard? He's only five. Anyway, much of the city was coming one way and I was going another. I forgot about the skateboard, though I could have done with one. I thought about salmon instead, bouncing their bloody bellies upon tooth-like jagged rocks. They, too, go one way while everything else goes another. Staring out the train window, the sun was out and the sky was blue but there was an almost nostalgic sight of the faintest of condensation rising from people's mouths at the platforms. I was also thinking about the artist. She also exudes - energy, in her case. She was receiving some new boards for her work later on, she had been working on her miniatures earlier, and she was still doing her mural. The stuff of industry, she is. Anyway, I am going on a long hike tomorrow and needed to get some new boots, my previous pair having come away at the heel. I used to know a great deal about boots. I still know, for example, that it is bad news to go for a long hike with a brand new pair but it's either that or wear some brogues which will not protect my ankles if I go over on them. What has this got to do with art? Well, I was also on my way to see an exhibition in an old brewery. The exhibition is by a man in his seventies whom I first met as long ago as 25 years. We have a pleasantly sporadic history together. Across the ocean, when I was with him on his fiftieth birthday, I developed appendicitis. It was with him I once ate lambs' tongues from a giant pan of boiled water when I went to see him one snowy January in his reconstructed castle in the land of the northern chills. Anyway, his work has taken a significant turning again. After years of impressing traditionalists with his early swing from Pop Art to formal sculpture - largely figurative, bronze sculptures - he has gone all Pop Art again, but with a savagely delivered anti-war message and a sweeping back-up of images of torture, Masonic undertones, consequences, and death. The space, it must be said, was gigantic, but the work somehow justified it. Art still talks after all, I was thinking. It was also fantastic to see him again, and to be reminded of this incredible engine he has. I spoke to one of his sons, who was there as one of his father's biggest fans, about this very point. (And to think: he once drank tea with his brother in my little flat across the ocean when he was only thirteen.) He agreed wholeheartedly: his father had one hell of an engine. I think we were all impressed, even if the work is so convinced of its anti-war stance it has to forget the true complexity of the paths still running today to and from the war zone. (Indeed, if only it was a simple case of right and wrong.) Anyway, when I came home and finally sat down on the bright red sofa, I saw our son had made a card. It was of a skateboard. A beautifully rendered diagonal of skate and board. I tell you, art really does still talk.