The only way to have a friend is to be one *

The artist walked to the bookcase, her two latest works screwed into the wall to her immediate right. Anyway, on a black and white patterned shelf with the likes of Martin Amis - wrongly accused of racism by the way - and Carol Shields and Isabel Allende and Laurence Sterne and Gilles Neret's Erotica Universalis staring back, she plucks the Philips phone from its stand and taps in the numbers of a very old friend. She wanted at last to speak to the artist I bumped into on the day I went for my long walk. This is a woman she has known for many years but has not seen for some time. They went to art college together. She threw a party with the artist and a third friend one time and cursed when the artist turned up late in a taxi from the TV studio where she was recording a children's art programme. The taxi was filled with flowers for the party and this was the artist's contribution. They shared a studio together, followed each other's serious progress. I remember cooking some fish for her and remember her boyfriend at the time falling asleep on the sofa with an uneaten trout on a plate on his lap. He was a complex man: I think he was pretending. I can even remember the trout's mirrored cooked face. That said, this old friend, a successful artist in her own right now, in many ways behaved more maturely than the artist's other art school friends. Furthermore there is a residue of experience from their times together which I have always felt the artist should be taking some kind of more calibrated advantage of. Also, when I bumped into this person at the station, she was with a number of other female figures from the art world. I've probably said this before but they struck me as precisely people useful to the artist. I don't know, maybe the men in the art world, the male curators or gallerists, just don't get the work yet. Maybe the artist needs therefore some good old fashioned girl power. The artist certainly seemed energised after the phone call and it transpires they have much in common still and are in fact meeting next week. It seems this friend understood where the new work was coming from immediately. And that was just from the conversation. (The artist also heard about one or two other contemporaries. Interaction. Information. These, too, are all-important.) No, the artist of this blog is held in high regard by her contemporaries. I know this from conversations I have had with some of the most high profile female artists in the world. (Strange, but true: you would know the names.) The artist must not be afraid to tap into this world. Everyone does it. (Though I know the artist is not like everyone else.) The truth is: the artist has an audience-in-waiting. Step on up, I say. Step on up.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)