Rest: the sweet sauce of labour

The artist was tired yesterday and took a deserved break, watching among other things a three-part documentary on ("Pablo Ruiz") Picasso. She sat there on the bright red sofa with a duvet across her lap looking like a clothed little mermaid. As the life of the prolific legend unrolled before her like an endless carpet. (The person on the sofa also never stops working, never prefers the easy option.) She had worked until two in the morning the night before, having spent the earlier part of the day catering for a friend's two children who were enjoying a sleepover with our two children. But the fruits of her labour were at least in evidence on the wall behind her as she fixed her eyes on the inexhaustible Picasso and his work. I looked at her new piece closely. The depth-of-field in particular. I looked at the piece next to it. The two figures vulnerable. Picasso also enjoyed a long and fascinating biographical thread, we were learning: his images were nowhere near as random as my ignorance had told me. I moved back to the table, dealing with the edges of my own next steps - made small by the great man's work - and my thoughts rolled like a silver ball-bearing from memories of the weekend and my sisters to thoughts about the continued need to find a gallery. (I convinced her to write to an old and well connected friend and artist yesterday and she received a positive reply today.) There is comfort in the fact there is no insincerity. Indeed, today, in the heart of the capital, talking with a friend off to the war zone, I found myself extolling the virtues of the artist. I didn't go into any real detail. But I didn't have to. He was at her last exhibition in the capital. In fact, if he gets back from the war zone in one piece, perhaps he will be at her next.

Picasso in the drawer

No work from the artist today. No practical work, anyway. A cold desert wind blows like a mistaken lack of talent through the face of her labour instead. Work within will not have rested. I am sure of that. Only on the outside is inertia. It did get me thinking, though. When was the first time I became aware of art? What first directed me towards this captivated sideline? It could have been when I was five. There was a bureau-style desk in my grandmother's house in the far north, and in one of the three wide bottom drawers, a book, an encyclopaedia, lay there, waiting as if only for me. It was as if the drawer had been built especially for such a book, as if the book represented not exactly evil but something contentious and troublesome. Something artistic, even. Anyway, I opened the book and found inside it, somewhere in the middle, one or two large reproductions of Picasso's earlier Cubist work - art existing in its own right and not just as representation, the blurb probably said - and these images immediately unsettled me: they gave swiftly internalised heebie-jeebies. They frightened. They shook. In fact I slammed the book shut as if I had glimpsed my first pornography - lewdly compelling images of carnal self-destruction - and not visual releases from the imitation of reality. I think I slammed the desk drawer shut and didn't go back to it for weeks. But I did in the end. And again. Now, I view this kind of work not exactly regularly but with a kind of respectful nostalgia. And how will I feel about this artist's work when it is done? I am the artist's husband after all. Will images be found and drawers slammed shut? I think I know already how I will feel. Elated.