Number Eleven

I rise from the table and walk to the bookshelf to the left of the fireplace, as the children fall asleep in the other room. I have to look hard for it at first but there on the third shelf, between a friend's dizzyingly analytical book on the law and structure of the international banking system, and a propagandist book on Croatia I picked up there during the war, is the illustrated literary journal received several years ago from across the ocean. On the cover of this particular copy an F/A-18 Hornet appears through a burst of cloud caused by the plane's breaking of the sound barrier. Inside, however, on the very first page, before the contributors' notes, is part of what I am looking for. It is one of several pieces done by the artist, in this first instance the clenched fist of our daughter, then a baby of about three months old. It was part of a large collection of single images done by the artist shortly after giving birth for the very first time. The original is flesh-coloured and life-like; this is in black and white. It is thumb-sized on the page, with a large white background. The original drawing of the fist was about one square foot. The children are now asleep and the artist returns to the living room. It has been a long day and both children were in school performances. I pick up the journal again and flick through the pages in search of another image. There they are. They are part of a series in the journal given the title of our daughter's name. The first image is of her unoccupied white sleep-suit. The second, again with its own page, is the smallest of several Russian dolls, given as it happens to our daughter by the man responsible for curating the various art projects in the journal. The third image is that fist again. The fourth image is a small toy with a neck like a giraffe. The final image is of the artist's nipple. I am sure I have mentioned this image before. A bead of her milk is to the left. I close the book again and remember the pleasure in seeing the artist doing these images for the first time. They said to me, I know I am a mother but I am still an artist.

Oh What A Lovely Art

The artist had a tooth taken out today. Her mouth exhibited a bloody rout. Years ago I introduced the artist to a legendary figure who once exhibited a group of bloody war artists in a large townhouse across the ocean and with me the day before draped massive green camouflage netting all the way down from the fourth floor to the ground. It was the forerunner to a later and more grand show - which I never saw - before his very sad and premature death one Christmas day in Paris. I had a Scottish-Nigerian friend make a cassette of second world war speeches and songs for him which played throughout the wild opening party of this first exhibition. Surreal Eighties cocktails were drunk to the sound of Churchill denouncing 'Corporal Hitler' and Eisenhower talking about the bazooka, jeep, and atomic bomb. Vera Lynn came into it, too. Meanwhile throughout the townhouse tiny watercolours peppered the slightly camp walls with glimpses of hell as painted by people painfully unsuited to the slitting of throats. The artist here in fact once briefly contemplated being an official war artist but felt that journalism and photography covered the subject amply, which I believe to be true. There was a time though when artists were the only visual war reporters, just like when the painters of the American frontier were the only means for the settlers to see what lay ahead. (How the artist and her husband could do with their equivalent now.) Talking of art and war, it was the aforementioned townhouse curator who told me of a possibly true and certainly artistic incident in the second world war when the British built a fake bomb factory close to a real one and how the Luftwaffe one night dropped a rubber bomb on it. (And if true, what a wonderful jewel in an otherwise ghastly crown of thorns.) Why, even 21 SAS in the UK are to a select few known also as the Artists Rifles. But, it must be said again, the TV screen today with all its compressed news from Iraq and Afghanistan burns in the corner of the room with a kind of endless artlessness and all creative thought goes out the window. What will we have next in this light? The Basel War Fair? We've already had the suicide artist. Don't you just hate it? It's like pulling teeth.