Space, Sponsor and Spiel Ltd

I received an email from a friend across the ocean today who has always been a good ally to the artist. I have mentioned him before. He is an extrovert introvert. He is also a great communicator and I marvel at his witty take on the serious side of life, as well as his seriousness on fun. He was in part getting in touch to inform us about an exhibition curated by the man - the ally and friend - whom the artist is seeing tomorrow. I had already seen some reproductions of the work this contact is showing in collaboration with another gallerist. One was in the email, too. They are sometimes large and detailed drawings, as in the artist's work, though the artist of the images uses only pencil. The subject matter is more public and kind of earnestly symbolic. More masculine, in a way, too. More butch. There is no hint of any of the motherhood, say, or out and out acknowledgement of childhood, in the artist's work. But not everyone, I concede, is interested in that, or brave enough to admit its overwhelming importance. Life hangs from it. Tomorrow relies on it. I hope the artist enjoys the experience of seeing someone about her work tomorrow, even though that person is not the person with the actual gallery but the person with the connection to that gallery. I am sure she will be more than fine. Even if nothing comes of it, she is still a great artist. It is absurd in a way that the artist should have to do all this leaping, so precariously, from one rock of hope to another, when in fact her work is really so much bolder than most people's work, and her ideas so much more developed and evolved. I don't wish to come across as arrogant in any way on behalf of the artist but it must for her be rather like being the brightest person in the room, and, one by one, having to wander with your cup and saucer up to every living soul, and listening to their life stories without ever once being asked about your own, which is epic if only they knew, gripping, dashing, industrious, eccentric, passionate, sweet, sweeping, grounded, and ongoing. Who knows, maybe we will just have to end up putting on an exhibition of the work ourselves. With this and the previous 111 daily entries as part of our catalogue. All you seem to need these days is space, sponsor, and spiel.

Standing within the prospect of belief

Yesterday I sent a brief email about the artist to someone I have known for over twenty years. In the email I mentioned a gallery this someone knows, which happens also to be one the artist likes - basically, they have a bright white new space and the normally reticent artist wishes to approach them about the prospect of a show there. As background, the man I was emailing is someone I first met across the ocean when he was in full swing as a kind of dashing physicist-cum-artist, though I had seen him from a distance a few years earlier when as a curator and art dealer he was touring this continent with some rappish and bejewelled graffiti artists. In fact, one summer, memorably for me, I had nowhere to stay in the aforementioned manic city across the ocean and this person gave me keys to their ground-floor apartment in an old industrial building close to the water: a kind of vacant bohemian hot-spot full of stepladders, paintings, Richard Ellmann biographies, and Norwegian rats (Rattus norvegicus). The next time I heard from him, a year or so later, he was in the mountains on an entirely different continent. (Time passes. Two wars.) Then - all of a sudden - he was in this country, dabbling not in paintings but in music. Now - all change again - he is still in this country but helping run a continental wing of the largest contemporary art database in the world. I must confess, I love people who roam the planet with ungovernable relish and individualistic industry, leaping with their chameleon feet from project to project, even field to field. Their sometimes dashing natures are what grant life colour - if colour is your thing - and as a result can make life more inhabitable. A good looking man with elaborate tastes, and pinpointing manners, he is a good ally for the artist to have. This is why I am delighted to report that in his reply to me today he thought the gallerist mentioned made perfect sense for the artist and said he knew him well enough to arrange an introduction. This, with our fingers crossed, he will do when he returns to the capital, after touring the two major cities of the sometimes chilly north.