The Messenger Is Massage

Today the artist saw the woman and artist she shared a studio with all those years ago. I gather they were both apprehensive, or excited, about seeing each other again, but it must be said the artist came back looking revitalised, enervated, full of ambition, citing the galleries she now wanted to visit and openings she wished to attend. I always compare it to staring down a tunnel of time when you see an old friend again after a long period of time - in a flash, life speeds up, in the artist's case this time by as much as eight years. According to the artist, her old friend, who looked well apparently, knew exactly where the work was coming from, to use that well-worn genealogical sounding phrase so popular with the art world, and its tangential bloggers. Out of four especially close female artists, it transpires that only one has had children - the artist of this blog. Interesting. Anyway, the artist also has a visit on Thursday to a young gallerist in the capital, someone recommended by my friend the art database guru, all of which of course is like art to my eyes, music to my ears. When you work so long and hard in a kind of vacuum, which is to say a place without immediate gratification, as the artist has done, self-doubt always looms large, or lurks behind hope, like a meddler in the soul. That's it: it lurks. It waits until you are at peace with the world and then attacks you. No, as the friend is someone who has known the artist's work for longer than me, I was more than delighted to hear about the success of their meeting. I was also thrilled it was a serious one-to-one - a long, frank, and intellectual discussion about the work itself, in other words. Furthermore it was something done without me gazing irrelevantly into the conversation. I like not being there. If people ever ask what it's like being married to an artist, I sometimes state, perhaps too clumsily, that it's great to know there is a huge part of the artist's life that has nothing to do with me whatsoever, or at least to know there is a place that is the artist's place, the artist's expression, the artist's world. While the very existence of this blog may suggest otherwise, it is hugely important to me that I can keep a kind of melodic distance from the opera itself, especially when it comes to content. (The artist would have it no other way anyway.) I am merely the messenger, remember. But these are front row seats.