We Shall Overcome

We have arranged and confirmed the artist's preliminary meeting next week with the old friend who will orchestrate the follow-up encounter with the gallerist with the new white space. It is something to jolt the undoubted labour into a different kind of interaction. And this is good. The artist in the meantime stepped out into the sudden cold this morning and worked for hours in a blustering wind on the mural she is doing as a gift and significant gesture to the school our two children attend. She has been meticulous, practical, seeking advice on paints. Today as a day has turned up its collar. It has been the sort of day to wear only what a polar ice-cap can inform. The heavens have been moody, too, with various warrior seagulls gliding sideways hundreds of feet up in the air and deliberately miles from the sea. Talking of stature, I saw the mural yesterday. It is quite some piece. I think I was taken aback by the scale when I first set eyes upon it. To paraphrase J.D. Salinger again, it raises high the roof-beam, carpenter. In fact, the entire tone of the building's otherwise tawdry architecture is somehow lifted. As I write, the artist is now working on the miniatures, an action matched by our eight-year-old, who is doing an image, also small in scale, of something already done by the artist. Like mother, like daughter. Like art, like art. Our five-year-old is on the floor, checking the various angles he can look at his detailed plastic boar-drawn chariot from. He is like a small film director, a tiny Cecil B. DeMille, doing a kind of surreal bible scene. Come to think of it, what we could enjoy now are one or two sumptuous miracles. Keep the faith.