Get Well Soon

It is not often that the artist is ill. It's the first time in 118 daily blogs she has been sick, under the weather, beneath the clouds, below the early autumn wind. For most of the day she has been camped in bed and, to be perfectly honest, pretty miserable. She has what we call these days 'some kind of virus'. Rather attractively, she doesn't really know how to be ill. I believe this to be fairly common among very active people, though not necessarily among artists. A number of today's artists - if you think about it - have taken to their beds long enough to have made entire wards of iconic works of art about them. Beds in one form or another litter the contemporary art world's subconscious like sweetie wrappers across an unruly playground, or condoms across a bordello floor. You could even say some of these artists are greater authorities on their own beds than on any other area in today's tumultuous designer showroom of an art world. Turner? No. Beds? Yes. Doig? (Who?) No. Sheets. Why, sure. I have read or heard of many such artists calling off sick and staying in bed all day because they are unwell, which can admittedly be some kind of euphemism for genuine depression, a hangover, a drugs problem, or all three - not perhaps unique to the art world, but true all the same, when all they are doing is researching their next bed piece. But many of these people are what on a sick day you might call professional fakers by calling off sick the whole time, and you have to wonder what that says about their art. No, in my small book, or blog, you have to admire more the artist who tries to shrug off his or her illness. Even if illness, faked or otherwise, can be like a protective blanket, especially to an artist thrust into a limelight which through no fault of their own they do not know how to deal with. Even if no one in their right mind would ever condone the ripping away of this blanket. And nor is illness - oh no - peculiar to today's artists. The history of art is littered with it. Caspar David Friedrich, Jackson Pollock, Adolf Wolfii, Edward Dayes, Edvard Munch, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Mark Rothko. And that's just mental illness. (Nor do I mean to belittle that, either.) One thing I can add, though, is that long before the artist of this blog is fully recovered, she will be supervising the attachment of two new and large boards to the wall, stepping back with a kind of professional detachment, and mentally whacking her virus like a fly. In fact, she's stirring now.