True Story

Once upon a time I met a young painter, a male, in the capital. I was in my early to mid-twenties and it was at a party given, I seem to remember, by a girl who was studying anthropology at the time, though I do not remember where. (It's strange what we remember: I don't know her name, or can't remember it, but know for example she was wearing a bright emerald green sweater.) Anyway, I got on well with this painter and made a note of his telephone number. He said he was crossing the ocean some time soon and that we should definitely keep in touch. This we in fact did. We not only kept in touch, we met up soon afterwards in the capital again and stretched some canvas onto a large frame, primed it, and set about doing a collaborative work of art - tri-laborative, really, as a girl added some background to it too. Anyway, my new painter friend drew several figures and faces in distinctive black, white and grey, though mostly grey, and I wrote many words across and within it, perhaps a total of five or six hundred - seemingly random words but in fact more considered than that. The completed stretched canvas lay against a long white-painted brick wall in the room I rented in what was a converted timber warehouse, and home for me after coming back from a war, for at least six months. The piece would stare at me when I went to sleep at night and still be staring at me when I got up again in the morning. A good six more months passed - all very tidy - and I had crossed the ocean myself again. Well, for only the second time in my life. The painting had travelled too but not with me - the painter had arranged its safe passage to his wonderfully credible turp-smelling studio in the city of scraped skies alone. A few months later, it was to me rather like meeting up with two old friends again - the painter and the painting. Another year later and there was an auction in an old club in a decrepit looking building. The derelict street was misleading - art was selling sometimes literally by the bucket and the scene was rich with cash. Our piece sold, though I did not know the person who bought it. It sold for quite a lot. Yet another year later, I was invited to someone's loft for a dinner party and there on the bare brick wall again was the piece. I kept quiet - there were about twenty people at the dinner - but I did hear someone shortly after the first course ask about it. The owner, our host, whom I did not really know, said the name of the painter - the man I had met at that party in the capital. Someone else expressed surprise and said they did not know he used words in his art. Oh yes, said the owner, knowingly, he's really a writer.

Lines not mines in the lands of sand

I heard from a friend today, a good man who has spent an accomplished period of time in the desert, and I was thinking after emailing him back that the desert is like a giant canvas. And I hope it still is for the last of the Bedouins, badawi, or desert-dwellers, people my friend knows well, still scratching, etching, even caressing their nomadic way across today’s desert sands, the rest reportedly having already begun their possibly last migrations to the cities some forty or fifty years ago. War aside, man’s expression in such places from what I can gather is largely humbling. I love, also, the misleading simplicity of deserts being split into three basic types: semi-arid, arid, and extremely arid. (That’s your lot.) Even aside from my own experience, squeezed as it was into the run-up of a war, I know it to be a hostile place, but how complete and spiritually fulfilling the sense of perspective must be when you are actually born there, brought up to respect it, bound to watch it, and there is no war. Sometimes when I speak to the artist about these things, as she steps back from her work, there is an initial feeling of none of this being real, so abstract I guess is the idea of the desert. And yet when she thinks about it as an artist she seems to understand it immediately, and responds first and foremost to the scale. I also tell her things like how I remember briefly the utter cleanliness of the sand, the harsh coldness at night, the purity of the mornings. (Alternatively, as William Blake said: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand.’) This goes back of course to the idea of beauty and the eye of the beholder. It’s funny that the friend who triggered all these thoughts about the desert is across the ocean in fact in the heart of what I think is forest, not desert at all, reminding us that it’s not just the desert which accommodates the big idea. (And as for the sea...) The one thing possibly in common with all these themes is nature as your teacher. (Can there be safer hands?) I'm also thinking: there are so many places I have not been, so many canvases I have not seen. (The desert is indeed a giant canvas.) But the last thing we need now are more desert shots of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems - MLRS - shooting mournfully across the sky.