Aide-mémoires

I have just lost today's blog. I wrote it very carefully. I wrote it perhaps too carefully. Anyway, I didn't save it and something happened and I took my eye off the ball and now it is lost. Perhaps this is a conceptual moment. Something unusual has been written, which no one shall now read. I shall just have to write beyond my means, give some kind of glowing report on what I had written. Well, it began promisingly enough with our walk through a thick white mist across the open space close to where we live, which I wrote reminded me of 'Under Western Eyes' by Joseph Conrad. (The mysteriousness conjured by the mist. And, remotely, the location.) We were actually off to buy materials for the school mural, but managed to see an exhibition as well. (I hate losing text.) This was at a fairly large national institution where the artist once showed. In fact a large blue book from that show seventeen years earlier was still on sale in the gallery shop. As people milled around like children, and two women in their seventies played with and chuckled over a mechanical wooden hand for artists, I studied closely the artist's text from the show. It was impressive. Her words were as honest then as they are now and the medium was the same too. (Few of the other artists in that show can match her for consistency.) That's right: I also wrote that I stood in a queue beforehand, behind a maybe-famous artist, and waved at someone I once knew who waved back. The maybe-famous artist cursed impatiently as the young man selling tickets grappled with the broken computer system: 'Jesus!' he was saying. The person I once knew then came up to me and just as I was about to shake his hand, he shook the hand of the maybe-famous artist. I wrote of the twenty-two artists in the present show, three stood out - Vija Celmins, Liu Xiaodong, Johanna Kandl. It would feel too precious to try to remember it exactly but we liked these three in particular because there was something of themselves in the work - the show was largely images sourced from photographs, each telling us something of modern life. (I'm sure I wrote something else about the artist saying in the book without any kind of pomp that she liked finery and detail.) The blog also contained something about the small and delicate painting we liked painted in oil. It was of an American fifties war plane, in black and white, like its sourced photograph, above a bed of clouds. It was pinned behind glass like a butterfly, eternally, in space. It ended I think with the artist of this blog really positive about her new work as she marched back home to pick up the children from school. The sun had burned through the mist and there was a clarity now matched only by the artist's zeal. I forget the last sentence. It certainly wasn't this.