Two arts beating as one

We are not dissimilar. Furthermore - as the first sentence suggests - two negatives can make a positive. Running parallel to the artist’s documented journey towards an exhibition is my own attempt at getting the first part of a book I’ve been trying to write into the hands of an agent. (My central character, I can tell you, is having a bizarre time.) Anyway, like the artist, I also just require some luck. Meanwhile it’s not uncommon to have us wage our separate wars of expression within just a few meters of one another. There is no sectarianism and we are generous neighbours. Occasionally the odd comment is lobbed over but we are much more truth and reconciliation than tar and feathers. Our heads even tilt forward simultaneously when we work, fertile expressions travel each face, and we are interrupted regularly and equally by the little people and their own expressions – a joint exhibition of tirelessness and provocation. No, the only real difference between what I do and what the artist does is physical. The artist for example spends much of her time on her feet while I just sit there like a member of some obscure congregation. It is now just a question of never giving up. Just when I am closing in, though, I must spend two or three days on something else. Still, variety is the life of spice, as we must future our tells.

Everything connects

A number of years ago I took the artist to another country, a flat land with tall manners - the land of my paternal grandfather - and immediately upon hearing there was an artist in their midst, this relative of mine, an elderly man with a pipe in his teeth and a glint in his eye, snatched the artist by the hand and took her on a tour of some of the paintings on his small but fertile wall, pausing to share the stare with her so-to-speak. Memory plays tricks, has an artistic sensibility, a twisted shrine, but I do have clear in my mind this one painting of a silhouette of tall trees, skeletal, leafless branches, and a full halo of a moon glowing back at you like a blob of white metal. The two of them beneath this painting were spellbound and it was like watching someone arrive. Then: another time in the flatlands, a few years later, I watched the artist's pure delight at a museum near the capital and the breaking of the waves - culture was the thing and the culture of this country was a marriage of elegance and practicality, which I noticed the artist more than identify with, even caress like a finger on unfixed pastel. Somewhere in the mix, the artist created and worked on portraits of the entire family from this land, the very family belonging to the man, now dead, with the pipe and glint. Over a dozen faces - fourteen, maybe fifteen - stared down at me from the wall and this time it was as if I had arrived. It was like the slamming of salt and the slapping of water from one side of a sea to another. Respect. Anyway, the son of the pipe and the glint came across that very sea yesterday - for long boat read plane - and came today to see the artist and her work. All he was missing was the pipe. He had the glint, to look with. And the work, to look at. We were coasting.

Art: the handover

There has been a handover taking place, lots of aerial shots of speeding limousines and out-riders slicing through the leafier parts of a capital. In a moment - perhaps one of those moments we measure our lives by - power has shifted from one pair of hands to another. Above all, we are reminded of change, of flux. Leaves remain on the trees but the familiar is gone, and a stranger now stands in the doorway. But to an artist a handover means something else entirely. For them it can be when weeks or months of industry culminate in a finished piece of work and the artist if lucky makes a sale and the work in an instant is released - a stranger itself - into a new home. And because this artist goes to such lengths, and in such detail, and uses something so close to her as subject matter, she is often asked how she can bear such a handover, bear to surrender something so special. Well, this is not a problem, I have noticed, and not only because of a need for funds, but also her training and discipline. Besides, she has never bogged herself down with an over-possessive nature. (Even when it comes to an errant husband.) I bought a knife sharpener the other day. A sharp knife is like a sharp mind, I was thinking, as the shopkeeper wrapped it up. Well, the artist is like that. Sharp. Sharpened. Sharpening. She is not a sentimentalist, not your meek slave. If the work is personal and people feel awkward about it, presumably preferring long-distance lust or macabre re-invention instead, then they should get over it, grow up. What is so terrible about art these days that it has to shy away from simple human emotion, as if it somehow contravenes a kind of masonic vow of commerce which all artists seem to have to make these days? Art - I hope, I wish - does not have to be just a tool of fashion. Art - and long live the handover - should be ungovernable.