Win some, not winsome

The artist's last boyfriend before me won what a leading white-bearded actor tonight from across the ocean described rather grandly as the world's greatest art prize by ripping open the purple envelope with Zeus-like non-grace and announcing the artist's ex-boyfriend by name. The artist was sitting next to me during all this and I registered and indeed admired her response: she was genuinely pleased for him. The last time he was nominated - and did not win - the artist sat back as a guest at his table. I was watching it all on a small black and white TV alone at our flat. The TV has changed and we are still together. No prizes for that, but we feel like winners all the same. No one really makes art to win prizes but this one is rated highly - it was rated highly then and is rated highly now - though some of it has been glazed with a kind of sugar-coated slebbiness (as in celebrity). The prize itself - named after a painter of all things - used to be for artists under 40 but is now for artists under 50. Quite generously, tonight's winner said it should simply be for artists with a pulse. As a man, it must be said, the prize-winner has always been uncomfortable around me. As an artist, however, he has often impressed, though much of his work inhabits the world of ideas only, and can as a result be like watching someone trying very hard not to dirty their hands. I think the awkwardness is genuine, however, and may in fact be part of its appeal. I also believe the man to be a true outsider, uncomfortable in his skin, and one who sets himself apart, unusually so, from the clannish principles behind the art world. This does not mean I do not think some of the work is either too obscure or yet more one-line ideas executed by others at times. But they did spend a lot of time together, the artist and the prize-winner, and when you are both visual artists in a relationship it must be very difficult. I bumped into him the other day by the railway station I use most frequently in the centre of the capital. I wrote about it that day. He even came to our wedding, which was good of him, though he was as uncomfortable with me then as he was at the station. Still, social graces alone do not a good artist make. And I warmly congratulate him, albeit anonymously, on his award.

Meditatio

A white candle burns by the empty fireplace. A desert lamp leans like a cold ceramic tower to the right of the broken music box on the floor. The candlelight reflected on the white gloss paint next to the fireplace flickers like a burning lighthouse. I hear only silence within the hollow of the unplayed acoustic guitar that comes all the way from China. I sneeze, and the dust particles on the blinds stick their hands up and say it was them. A message flashes up. The so-called anti-spyware device on the computer says it has zapped 19 spyware items. Only because the items are peppered with words such as trade and click and ad and serving do I appreciate their demise. My calf muscles stiffen. The book from my dying sister is on the table. I have not written to her yet. A second lamp meanwhile looks up at me from the wooden floorboards to my left. My son's toy police badge sits on the shelf below the Eliot, Sassoon, Plath, Auden and Hughes books. I think briefly and warmly about the land across the ocean. I think about the month drawing to an end, and I think about money. I think about the art. I hear the artist's voice as she reads a story to the children in another room, and even the cars outside seem to be listening. I hear the dishwasher and smell what I find out are the phosphates, nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, enzymes, perfume, geraniol, hexyl cinnamal and oxygen-based bleaching agent of the dishwasher tablets. (I nearly place the box of tablets back in the fridge after checking the ingredients.) The TV is turned off. I am wondering why I am having trouble finding certain websites. As I await news on a possible job, travel, position, hope, in my mind I am tapping my fingers. At least I am not idle. At least I am looking, however independently, at the big picture with fresh eyes every day. At least if I am running in circles they are at the crack of dawn. I feel like some tea, a perfect cup of full luxurious tea. The candle by the fire meanwhile flickers like a ghost, and I think about my dead parents. Then I think about music. No, I don't think about music, I feel about music, I imagine music, I almost hear music. The artist has had a good day. She has met with the young woman with the gallery and the woman is coming to see the work in the flesh. The candlelight, if I am not mistaken, applauds.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it

The artist has almost finished her latest piece and amazingly enough looks ten years younger. What is going on here? The artist’s son, my son, sits next to the artist’s husband, me, on the bright red sofa and there is a small plastic toy by his foot. His eyes wander the room and he soon catches sight of the wooden coffin on TV being loaded by four large men into a long black hearse. ‘What’s in the box?’ asks our son. He is squeezing his big toe and the tone of voice is wary. I tell him - without prevarication - that it carries a dead body. ‘Is it a real body?’ interjects the artist’s daughter. I smile gently at her and say I think it is. ‘Why do you have a box?’ asks the son. I think about this a while - he is eating a banana – and wait as he chews. ('Finished,’ he says as the hearse door is shut and the banana devoured.) I look him in the eye and tell him that one reason for putting a dead body in a box is because when a person dies the body after a short period of time will give off this terrible smell. (The language is like this because I am after all in the company of a 5-year-old and 8-year-old.) ‘Anyway, what about in places like heaven?’ asks our daughter, not quite sure where she is going with that one. The TV changes tack and goes back to life again, but I am still deployed on the frontline of more questions about death - the difference between cremation and burial for example is discussed. Moments later, our son looks up at me slowly and without saying a word, then he looks down at the floor again. But then he looks up again: ‘If you bury the coffin and someone finds it, what would they do? Would they put it in a history museum?’ he asks. His eyes water with a kind of innocent embarrassment at his own question for some reason. I reassure him and tell him this is a very good question, which appears to allay any fear of imminent infant mortality or an accusation of stupidity. ‘What would you do?’ I say, trying to make real light of it. ‘I’d put it on my bed,’ he says without any hesitation. ‘No, no, I wouldn’t,’ he corrects himself: ‘I don’t want my bed to get yucky.’ He looks at me deeply. He shrugs his shoulders and smiles. I am so proud of him. I am so proud of them both. I wonder if they pick up on the fact I am proud of them. An hour or so later, the children are in bed and by coincidence the old school building housing the artist’s former studio ten years ago is on TV. (The artists were booted out and speculators moved in.) The programme is about people thinking they're defying death by making themselves look ten years younger. (As I've said, no need for that here.)

You can't wake a person who is pretending to sleep

The artist turns the volume down on the TV in the corner of the room and walks deliberately slowly to where the children should be sleeping, only they are not sleeping because they are in our bed and think this all very funny. The artist continues however at a deliberately slow pace, trying as she approaches the bed to induce in their still budding minds a sense of 'sleepfulness'. As she stands by the door – I make it sound more grand than it is - she turns the light down, only slightly, and lies on the bed beside them, because they have asked her to. There are now one or two giggles rising like little eruptions from their mouths as they try to come to terms with the fact they've just won the How To Get Mummy Into The Bedroom With Us While We Pretend To Sleep game. The laughter continues and I take this opportunity to examine the artist's work done today. It is like reading a fresh newspaper. It is full of information. The artist has worked on the contrast. Even in the half-light it pops out at you and readily convinces. The medium assists greatly with this dimensionalisation - if one can use such a phrase. I also like the live and dead nature, as if the dead somehow is still living. Something I remember as a child when puffins would dive into the sea and break their necks when the wrong wave came along, and float on their backs dead but with these beautiful multi-coloured beaks screaming out, ‘I’m alive! I’m alive! Look at the colours of my beak! I’m alive!’ I place an ear towards the room where the children are still pretending. It is very quiet. Either they are deeply convincing or really are asleep. Hang on, I know. It’s happened before. I know what it is. The artist has fallen asleep. (Unfortunately I am wrong: fifteen minutes later, the artist is back drawing at the table and the daughter still awake.) The work on the table is different to the work on the wall. It is tiny. The need to get our dear daughter to sleep however grows vast.

When even the crickets hesitate

I am tired tonight. I do not feel like words. This is perhaps why we have images. Only I do not want images either. Not tonight. No, I will watch the artist instead. She is at the same table with some of her work, which she moves like weather symbols on a small map. I love watching her work. There is nothing self-conscious about it. She is sharpening a pencil for example into a tin and I hear the shavings fall. Her head is bowed and I cannot see her face. Her nose is running. She has hay-fever. The TV is talking to itself about drunken astronauts. I smile at this lunacy. I met two astronauts. They stood in the corner of the room drinking mineral water. They had shaved heads and I thought they were Buddhist monks. Shush. Right now the artist is putting pencil to paper. There is something satisfying about watching a sharpened pencil give meaning to paper. The artist sneezes, careful not to spray her work, and resumes what she is doing. I can hear the pencil this time. Listen. How would you describe that sound? It’s like the tiniest paw of the tiniest animal making a little path. No, the artist definitely has hay-fever. Perhaps she is allergic to art. That would be something. An artist allergic to art. Perhaps, tonight, I was allergic to writing. Bless you. Excuse me.

You take the high brow and I'll take the low brow

Once upon a time - a time when hip was hop and art was smart - the artist in question was invited to present a popular TV series teaching children how to paint or draw or simply make things. This came about shortly after art school, a place considered high-brow and studiously post-modern, and at a time when the artist was represented already by a good gallery. By accepting, the artist in an instant travelled from one world to another - let us say from the high-brow to the low. The high - with its grimly trendy courtiers and ice-cold templates - continued bowing its head into interminably long essays written largely by Frenchmen, occasionally popping up again at soap operatic art openings, while the low rather charmingly opened out into a beautiful world full of children's faces, paint-splattered living rooms, as the artist laughed and smiled and played her way into the hearts of literally millions of little people, persuading them all to muck in, get down, be creative, and splash expressions across the room. Now, rather intriguingly, these two worlds have crystalized again, this time in the context of a growing body of new work: work, on many levels, about childhood; work, tangentially, in and out of discussion here - work, let's be frank, the artist hopes one day to exhibit. And this blog here, of course, is to chart, in part, the journey.