A round of claws for the artist please

A natural frustration has descended on the house and I can only assume it is something to do with the absence of any gallery progress. Not that they have been blitzed by either the artist or the artist’s husband with examples of the work – and maybe that is the problem. That said, gallerists even at the best of times don’t exactly endear themselves. I have mentioned previously their disappearing trick when it comes to incoming artists. Some are fantastic, I have said, but others are indeed like trickster absentees. For example the gallerist whom the artist emailed, as promised, recently - well, a month ago - about coming to see her work in person hasn’t even had the courtesy to reply. And they were the ones who in the first place on the back of some colour reproductions invited the artist to be in a group show. So what is going on here? Apart from anything else, though I do not wish to be misconstrued as threatening, an artist is a sensitive being. An artist is often an artist because it is impossible for them to be anything else. They require kid gloves. Yes, they are fragile. Yes, they can break. No, it does matter. And if they are talented they can deserve this unusual degree of protection, though without it they can also perish on the vine. I remember one person when I was twenty-two jumping to their death in a fast-flowing river because of rejection. Not that their circumstances were comparable with the artist's. But manners - and their importances - do run deep. I should know: I have failed before myself. Or is it nothing to do with art or artists? Is it simply a fact that grace and sensitivity has been sucked from the fabric of our culture? Are manners no longer seen as the management of emotion but the bane of commercial progress? Certainly people today seem to care only about moolah, lolly, greenbacks, doe, spondoolies. Mind you, that’s probably why they are rich and we are not. Still - bringing the blog back home again - the artist will reach her mountain top. I can promise you that. (We can't afford to disbelieve this fact.) But we will not apply the normal rules of engagement here. Oh no. The artist might just show you up.

"When the past no longer illustrates the future, the spirit walks in darkness" *

It is a curious thing seeing people again for the very first time in years. Crudely speaking, it is like peering down a tunnel of time, taking a moment of history, so-to-speak, and smash-cutting with it to the present. I did it twice today and on both occasions it must be said I was energised. (Maybe I was just lucky with the people.) It gets you thinking, though. It is almost as if the excitement comes from the fact that everything that has happened - to both parties - since you last saw a person is somehow crammed into that split second when you do see them again. You register - in an instant - each developed or developing line on the face, every subliminal piece of code in the other person’s make-up, a kind of glimmer of unexplored facts in the eyes, and a tantalising hint of wisdom. Perhaps, I have since been thinking, this is what it will be like with some of the artist's work. Hers is after all work about carefully selecting and freezing a moment, aesthetically compartmentalising it, giving it a kind of immortality, and positioning it in order to transcend time with it. At some point or another with the work the present will bump into its past again. In a sense it illustrates the difference between the idea and the reality and explains art's triumph over mere thought. My comment about the tunnel of time for example may be interesting to me but it is still only a thought. The artist’s work on the other hand makes an actual statement, a time-honoured commitment, a kind of conquest, even if years later looking at it again may be like peering down that tunnel of time. *Alexis de Tocqueville

Phone An Artist

I remember - in the foothills of our relationship - being in a medieval town surrounded from the land and sea by formerly friendly neighbours who were now enemy forces, and though this town was not your traditional frontline there was an armoury of dispiritedness – bloody hatreds, wretched breakdowns, twisted animosity, and the like. I’d spent the day touring a tortuous sequence of large and deserted buildings, hotels mostly, shells, which smelt of human excrement, anger, and in the corners of some rooms urine-doused fires. The people who let me speak to them would look fearfully over their shoulders the whole time and chain-smoke non-filtered cigarettes from nervously crumpled packs. Fear was everywhere and was contagious. The faintest of unfamiliar sounds were met with frozen looks and mass-migratory thoughts. It was hot, too, and I remember tugging my shirt between my thumb and index finger from my sweating chest. In the distance was a bombed-out radio tower, broken like a toy, and on the floor were spent cartridges, and on the broken tables were lavish and unused dinner menus printed in several languages. By one desultory wall close to where I was staying, I remember a hospital doctor waiting in the sun to hand a list of desperately needed medical supplies, and when I walked the cobbled streets, sinister figures appeared from nowhere, offering to take me back to their flats where the flickering darkness had me convinced I would be murdered. And the dogs, the dogs. I had never seen so many strays before, some of them pedigrees, whose wealthy owners had fled across the sea with cash and gold on high-powered speed boats. Conscripted soldiers were everywhere, too, bruised and back from the real frontline, and I will always remember, always, one young man in a large trench coat despite the heat with this look in his eyes – the look – which said he was a good man but had done some butchery and could not live with himself anymore. I could not take it, either, and went to a public phone exchange where I waited in a queue to phone out. Eventually I made my call. It was to the artist. I burst into tears.

Fly low, fly slow, know nothing and know you don't know

The artist worked on a larger piece today attached to the sitting room wall while the children prepared to join me for a walk. Hey, it's the weekend and we needed adventure – a user-friendly version - so we wished the artist well, gave a kind of wide but affectionate berth, and made our chatty way past the one-person double-locked travelling cars, the camera-pocked smile-shy buses, the impossibly hi-tech bicycles, and the slightly lopsided police van. We were headed for that mass of green in the middle of our urban romp. Anyway, the girl had a smile and the boy an old pair of binoculars, a rare leftover from my childhood. (I used to sit with the binoculars by the sea and watch the coasters running the feeder route and struggling through the water.) My son clearly enjoyed their maritime presence around his little shoulders as he stared from the bridge of his four small years. ‘Did you take them with you when you were little?’ asked our daughter. ‘When I was allowed,’ I smiled. We were surrounded by starlings, pigeons, sparrows, warblers, song thrushes, and woodpeckers, but I think the boy with the binoculars looked better suited for the gannets, guillemots, cormorants, and kittiwakes of his father's childhood. ‘Have you ever seen a plane crash?’ he asked, taking this flight thing a step further, or higher. ‘No,’ I said. (I had to think about it.) 'Not in person.' Anyway, we continued through the lines of sweet (Spanish) chestnut trees and time-honoured oaks and reached a secluded and vibrantly coloured flower garden and I was thinking that whenever I see bright colours it reminds me of the artist. ‘No!’ said my son. There was panic in his eyes. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ he said. (Was that man, the so-called psychic, correct when he said our son had a talent for atmospheres?) I tried calming him and remembered somewhere in the ether hearing that the flower garden was used for anti-aircraft guns when years ago the city was bombed regularly from the air, and that some of the trees – for all I know those two over there - were cut back to ensure a good field of fire. Do you think that people had been blown out of the sky from here, or was he just a creature of habit who didn't like going a different route? Back home again, the artist was continuing her assault on the new large piece and we spread the financial and holiday sections of the newspaper across the plastic table outside and set about doing our own art. My son began with a landscape, while my daughter painted an imaginary person. Half an hour later, we were still at it. When we met up with the artist she said she was excited about the piece, and for one brief and beautiful moment we didn't know which piece she was talking about. Hers? Mine? His? Hers? There were so many.

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.

Interview with the Art(1st)

Can you name a moment when a contemporary artist has really inspired you?
Yes, it was when I had our first child and I went to a gallery and was trying to find something I could relate to, and I saw this piece by Mary Kelly about her little boy starting nursery. It was her recording of his words and daily life. She was quite obsessively documenting his first days, and I just thought ... it's so brave, so radical, so heart-felt. It made me think this kind of art really is important. It's part of life and I'd rarely seen it so succinctly put. By contrast I remember some really unbeautiful photographs of women having just given birth strapped up with sanitary towels and blood dribbling everywhere and it was like they were trying to make it look like a bloody battle. The Mary Kelly work ... it was just so much more profound than that.
What is the principal theme of your work?
I suppose nurturing. Yes, nurturing. A kind of motherhood. I see my work as inherently feminist, though.
Are these themes under-represented today?
Well ... (laugh) ... I think my version is.
Would you like your children to be artists?
I wouldn’t be able to stop them.
Do you think artists need to go to art school?
Yes. I think they do. Definitely. It’s a way of questioning things. A way of learning to deal with things like criticism. You do have to be answerable to your work sometimes, and to your influences. But if it’s a great time, it can also be a very difficult time. I was pretty much left in a studio and just told to get on with it, which is better than it sounds because you then did something you really believed in. Quite a few people were having nervous breakdowns around the place, though, and there wasn’t much back-up for things like that, not much of a safety-net.
What is your favourite work of art?
Oh, I know exactly what it is ... it's this. (swiftly producing postcard bearing image of The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly by Thomas Gainsborough.) It symbolises to me a kind of complete innocence, a wonderful spontaneity. The older girl is slightly protective of the younger one and ... it's just the peachiness of the skin, the translucence, and the way the older one is holding back and more informed. I really love the way the dresses are painted and the linking of hands and the light travelling across. Oh and the fact we know now one of them had such a problematic life later on. And of course the whole thing's quite manufactured, very staged. The butterfly. He painted a dead one. No, the whole thing, it's ... really joyous to me.

The wind blows out the candles and kindles fire

Two bright red candles burn in the fireplace. They burn like a need to reflect. Traffic smokes past, computer systems jam, glass breaks, and people promised love are killed by the hour. The candle holders were a gift. They were a gift from a friend who obviously knew a thing or two about reflection. They are tall and gallant like friendship and made of pewter. From where I sit the two flames pierce the gloaming like cat’s eyes, and in the corner of the room to the right is the artist with a glass of wine in her hand. (For some reason her shadow is moving more than her body.) On the sofa meanwhile is our son and he is watching his sister stand too close to the candles with her long hair in her mouth and a plaster on her knee. I watch as my daughter, unprompted, moves out of harm’s way. It is late and I enjoy these moments of reflection. I am also thinking we have pretty much forgotten as a culture how to reflect well. Sadly, I think we imagine we no longer have time. A central premise for art I always thought was reflection. Maybe the solution lies there. Anyway, the artist’s sister has come to stay for the night again and I am watching the scene like a movie, or piece of art, as she sits with us and talks. Above the fireplace is a small ink drawing of a mother and child, and tiny rose petals form the illusion of a frame. I like it when the light is low like this in this room. It reminds me of being young again and pretending to understand. (No change there.) On the crammed bookcase are nine tea-lights. They, too, are burning and flickering like golden white ghosts. I place a mint in my mouth and continue writing. Not that I've been burning the candle at both ends this time, but I've miles to go before I sleep.

They paint things differently there

I am thinking of another country, a vast and bleak landscape, while the artist works until midnight. I was in this country to meet a powerful man. Listening presently to the artist’s breathing, I remember the low-lying mist and tall pine trees, the whiff of decadence and smell of gas. The man I was there to meet loved Hegel. He also ran one of the largest banks in the world. (‘I've got so much to do,’ says the artist.) He believed in cancelling Third World debt and reorganising the world’s financial system. I was small fry and happened to know a young woman who knew him well. I wanted to make a film, something inexpensive, unusually intimate, using a hand-held camera and natural sound. I knew getting him to agree to be the subject matter was a long shot but I was a determined young man. Anyway, word soon came from his honour-bound secretary that we could meet. I was to travel one morning to his home 25 kilometers outside the city and drive with him back to the bank. I phoned my young friend to register my delight. Each subsequent confirmation however was swiftly cancelled. The man must have visited four countries while I waited in a hotel close to his headquarters, where floors of financial acumen sported swathes of art. (The artist is still working behind me and I hear her industry.) The philosopher-banker even bought a bank while I waited and eventually I was informed we could meet in precisely two days – same plan, same route. I put my feet up and ordered a drink but the following morning I was woken by a young banker imploring me to wake up. ‘He’s dead!’ he kept shouting down the phone. ‘Dead, dead, dead!’ I leaped out of bed and raced to the bank’s headquarters and I remember still dressing while I ran. The young banker was right. The very same three-car convoy I was to travel in was hit by a roadside bomb hidden in the saddle bag on a children’s bicycle. The philospher-banker's legs were blown off and the poor man bled to death. (‘I’m done,’ says the artist, life-affirmingly, as I revel once more in the present tense.)

Sneak Preview, the 100 Extras

The artist is walking with our two children in the rain. They are off to visit a recently separated mother and her three beautiful children. I rise from the round table and take a look at the four small black ink drawings on thick white squares of paper blue-tacked to the sitting room wall. These weren’t meant for the planned exhibition but are rapidly earning a place. With typical understatement the artist wants to do 100, a great deal of work when each is so detailed yet never larger than the palm of your hand. I’m listening to the rain spraying the traffic while thinking each image politically charged and refreshingly non-ironic. They have respect. Inching my way along visually, I feel I’ve never really looked at them before. One is of a mother pulling by the hand her eight year old son with a schoolbag across one shoulder like a bandolier. Both have the bottoms of their jeans folded in a certain way and are rushing somewhere mysterious. The next is an equally small but intimate ensemble piece with two mothers, five children, and one pram - the heads of everyone never larger than a pinkie nail and one face like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, only shrunken to a smile. The third is a mother crouched by a child’s shoe, very tensely tying a lace while a second child looks on knottedly. The last piece, possibly my favourite, is a miniature sweep of a young people’s comely comradeship as one mother and six children this time – each about six or seven years old - walk away like they're playing the leads in The Usual Suspects. I sit back down at the table both impressed and frustrated and write this down. Am I doing enough to get the work out there? When I think of the artist now with our two children in the rain they are in black and white and blue-tacked to the wall and magnificent in all their subtle detail, but how I want to see them framed now and in a line of one hundred accompanying the much larger pieces still waiting undiscovered in the hall.

Sound Bites, Yellowjackets, and Velvet Ants

The artist was stung by a wasp today and I had this vague memory of the father I never knew sucking venom out of a sting like a snake-bite once, but that was impossible to verify so I verbally soothed and sat the artist down on the bright red sofa, checking for no bad reactions, low blood pressure, or welling to such a degree it blocked the air from getting into the lungs. I should probably have removed any remaining ‘stingers’ in the skin with soap and water. Stingers? A long way from the 10kg ‘Stingers’ with a distance range of 8km provided unwittingly to certain members of what became the Taliban*, but risky enough I suppose. (Some medical opinion even recommends scraping out the stingers with a credit card so there may be some connection, though I'm told this kind of stinger - the so-called velvet ant or yellowjacket variety - is only present in females and derives from a sex organ.) Anyway, I tried ice cubes in a plastic bag wrapped in a red and white cotton tea towel, but that wasn't enough, though I think the artist admired the inventiveness. (Even with a spear in her heart she’d find a way to be polite about the carving.) I used cream in the end and gave the artist some space to read a novel about an early-twentieth-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. And to think her sister only a few days ago asked if we knew what was good for wasp stings. (‘Vinegar,’ she beamed.) I even meant to get some today. A WASP. I had to cross an ocean and read about people like James Ellroy to discover it meant a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as well. Anyway, throughout the afternoon I kept checking – no rash, no breathing problems, nothing to worry about there. Then I remembered I was stung by a wasp on the eye-lid once and even shared a different kind of sting with the artist one hot summer when a large and gelatinous jellyfish wrapped its long tentacles round us in the water. I actually felt good afterwards. (It was some hit.) The artist felt bad. We weren’t married at the time and I think I saw it as some kind of pagan symbol of our unity. I'm stung if I know what the wasp means. *now unusable due to the deterioration of the battery and electronics and systems

"Every child is an artist ... the problem is how to remain one"*

The artist’s son is 4. He is a political artist because he challenges perceptions. He is already drawing cunning shapes first thing in the morning and adjudging them worthy of his wall and would consider any attempt at preventing such expression dictatorial and narrow-minded. His most recent major piece is vaguely reminscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat from the period before the famous New York Times Magazine cover in 1985. He shares the same nervous line, the fashioned letters, that melodic hint of something tribal, almost voodoo. The 4 year-old is also informed by a kind of patrician sensitivity and upon rising - in what he by now of course sees as his studio - he squints through the window at the day's light as if guaging which of his moods to use. This morning for example the artist’s dear sister was in residence - well, sleeping on the sofa - so he waited until she was fully awake before exploring - with a kind of artistic irreverence - the edges of what he could or could not do. The serious work began later, I seem to remember, with an installation. This consisted of a plastic brown treasure chest transformed into a kind of budding lagoon with a convincing palm tree erected in the middle. A man wearing something similar to armour was introduced and given a feminine stance. Still dissatisfied - not uncommon among artists - a toy Daimler Chrysler made in China and used by the artist under licence was pitched on a large pile of plastic bodies - in homage I suspect to the Chapman brothers and their own tipped hats in Hell. (There was another sculpture with cleverly shaped perfect skulls from the bogeys in his nose but they ... gone.) This was followed by collecting some bric-à-brac and in particular a so-called Hot Wheels motorbike valued at less than one unit of the national currency. Upon re-entering the flat - not quite Christ's re-entry into Jerusalem, but you get the picture - the young visualist was then observed shaking his head at a picture on TV of a man in shorts carrying a woman through at least two feet of water with a swan in the background. Which left us still with the day’s masterpiece, a Chemi-Sealed Beral Mirado 3B pencil drawing of the aforementioned Hot Wheels motorbike in the end - ‘See this,’ he said, absorbed, ‘the car goes down here … see that line … and shoots through the fire circle!’ Indeed, all that is now left is for the artist's son to inspire the artist’s husband to write it all down, but that he would probably find too political. *Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

School's Out Forever

Today against a conscientious backdrop of the artist drawing a kind of viral cornucopia of elegant and spidery images on absolutely everything - cards and T-shirts and frames and books - which are then meticulously wrapped in simple brown paper and taken generously as end-of-term gifts to teachers and helpers alike at our local under-funded primary school, I work briefly, possibly indulgently, on a small chapter where shortly after the Soviet withdrawal a former Afghan warlord complains to the British miles away in Jordan - with a kind of clumsy assertiveness - about American training and funding of Saudis in his own back yard, reminding me in the process that even with the ingenuity or inventiveness of art or craft, though in my case inadequately written words, there’s still no real match to reality, especially where issues such as Afghanistan are concerned, where truth really is stranger than fiction. But maybe that’s why I like the artist so much. Her work is locked in a kind of super-reality in which everything is true and yet certain characteristics of the so-called truth are mixed with stridently and beautifully provided alternatives. Let’s not be too unrealistic, she seems to be saying with some of her well worked pieces, but we don’t need to look at the world this way when for example we can look at it like that. In fiction – something I really don’t have much experience of – you can’t just rewrite the facts, can you? Not casually; not when it comes to real deaths, surely. Or maybe I'm just showing my inexperience. Anyway, in a culture where solutions groan, I like to think of the artist here lending a kind of grave optimism to proceedings, though I sometimes fear my own hunger for things like news – though I am not really a journalist either - has been counter-productive to a purer form of imagination on her part, arrogant though it seems for me to think I can impose myself anyway on someone so attractively independent. At least I know the teachers and helpers at the local primary school are taken care of with T-shirts and the like now. Maybe one can concentrate on the Afghan. I hope he survives. I really do. In his defence, he didn’t ask to be invaded by the Soviets. Anyway, the artist is now placing our 7 year-old daughter’s long blonde hair into sixteen plaits. See what I mean? Relentless. Creative. Real to the end.

My kind of town

Obviously I'm no real authority on art and do remember a lighter side, in particular sitting at the front desk of one of the galleries I worked in across the ocean having been told by my flavour-of-the-wall gallery boss that a group of academics were coming in shortly and would I do the cause of great art a service by giving a brief talk. ‘A talk?' I said. 'On what?’ (I’d just been in a war and was confused as hell.) ‘Oh, the history of the place, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But it’s only about six months old this gallery,’ I said. She smiled knowingly. Anyway, half an hour of obviously important history later, the door squeaked open and this erudite long face looked round and said Pee-wee Herman-style: ‘We’re here!’ I brushed aside my wheeled executive chair like a small pet and immediately shepherded everyone in. Oh there must have been at least twelve of them and I stood in the middle of the gallery nodding like a priest as they looked round before launching into a long and winding road of freshly bottled information about the gallery, gentrification, new collectors, visual rather than literary culture. Sometimes in mid-sentence I’d hang there like a fish in the middle of a fish-tank with its mouth wide open taking in the bubbles. On occasion the odd pair of eyes would prop me up as I randomly sparked my campfire thoughts about this movement and that movement, and when it came to the artists themselves I did my best to raise high the roof-beam, carpenters. Anyway, each person came up to me afterwards and firmly shook my hand. ‘Much more than we imagined,’ said one. ‘Exceeded our highest expectations,’ said another. I must admit I was chuffed. I sat down satisfied and alone at the front desk and had just placed my hands behind my head when the door opened. ‘Excuse me,’ said this person. 'Can I help you?' I said. ‘We’re here for the talk,’ he replied. God knows who those first people were.

Art on a sleeve

Lying in bed together with the foxes, maybe even rats, rustling ungovernably through the last of the weeds on the other side of the window, the artist has a panic attack about her work. Anguish rises from the propped-up pillow like a burning cactus and all reason in the room is suddenly smoked out. The artist’s lot, I am thinking, can be an unhappy one, and being an artist is not just about getting a show, though this counts high enough on my list to hang a regime of hope upon it. No, it’s about maintaining the right environment to work in, too, and I don't know how good I am at that. The children in the other room meanwhile snore on like little seraphs in their bunk beds, their growing-pain drawings blue-tacked joyously to the wall. As I remember it now, the boy actually falls out of the bottom bunk, rendering the artist momentarily obsolete as she rushes out of bed and sweeps him up like a mother. (Not that the idea of an artist and mother is an incompatible one in this household: not with this one's art.) Moments later, the whole flat is creaking, as if sharing in the family’s general aches and pains. This entry wouldn't be complete without mention also of the additional financial pressures tapping at the window like a character out of a zipped up Dickens novel. Don't get me wrong: we are trying as nobly as possible to find a creative way out and proudly and foolishly are nailing our futures – and for all I know our children’s futures too - to a creative mast, yes, in a world full of shark-like submarines. Later in the long night, I hear sirens speed past and think sleeplessly of the word liberation. I turn quietly to the artist. She is asleep now and her anguish settled. Tiny snores from the next room are my only accompaniment as I brush her cheeks and place one palm briefly on her shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. As she sleeps on, I can just about make out a smile. Don’t stop, I'm thinking. Dream on, dear artist. Please don’t stop. I find myself beside you.

Pimping iron

I popped into two good galleries today with detailed matte photocopies of the artist’s work in my rucksack. On my way to the first one, I bumped into the best man of the only art collector in my family, a mathematician banker making a killing in Moscow. (I feel like the poor relation.) Rather creepily I’d actually thought about his best man the night before, and, no, the relative does not collect the artist, preferring a kind of ice-age modernism instead. Anyway, the first gallery was showing an unusual homage to the gallerist’s late mother with a heady trawl through at least sixty years of abstract art. Not the artist’s thing really but laced nonetheless with a kind of irrefutable pedigree. The mother’s death was also commemorated in an insightful essay at the front desk, which I surprised myself by reading in its entirety. But the place to me was infused with more than one death as I knew both mother and son through a close friend of mine who died on his kitchen floor aged 46 from a brain aneurysm and who was found the following morning by his 11 year-old son. (I've been trickled back to a number of deceased friends lately.) In fact, I'd taken the lift to the two floors of the gallery thinking only of this friend when what I should have been thinking about was obtaining for the artist an exhibition. As it transpired, the artist would not have minded – she would not have minded anyway – as the gallerist was away and we know the need for a kind of continued respect for the dead, just like we know the hopelessness of leaving photocopies. As for the next carefully selected space, which was pinned like a white dress behind an orange cordon of road-works, not only was the madam of the venue absent but the aesthetic immediately grated. Besides, as she wasn't there, it seemed inappropriate to bang the drum too loudly. (It is not easy retaining a kind of tasteful allure about the artist's work at the same time as wanting people to notice it.) One of the tensions of this blog is its inherent frustration at knowing something few others at this stage know, namely the artist's work. Best to keep the powder dry with some of these gallery people, though, until the right moment. If the person you want to speak to is not there, come back when they are. Keep it personal.

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.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

It's my thirty-third daily blog in a row and though I remain excited today about art I'm as tired as a dirty blind in an unused window overlooking a dead-end street. I want to interview the little people about their artist mother again, I want to keep pushing the idea of creative commitment forward, but the 4 year-old is on the laptop tearing through an imaginary landscape and the 7 year-old is watching an adult country drama on TV. The artist meanwhile is slumped like a hard week's scoop of dreams on the bright red sofa.
I try anyway:
Do you think being an artist is like any other job?
GIRL (7): That doesn't make sense, daddy. Don't write that, though. (Studiously squinting at screen) And don't write what I just said then. (A beat) And don't write what I just said then too.
Do you not want to talk about your mother and her art today?
GIRL: (bored) It's just that I'm watching TV.
BOY(4): It just is. (tapping keyboard on computer) What?
ARTIST: Why don't you write about the day that nobody wanted to talk about art?
OK.
I respect everyone's wishes and as it's a Sunday explore in my head the not so fluffy theme of art and spirituality, a subject raised by our host at lunch earlier when he got me thinking that some of what I rage against when talking about the artist's art can be a kind of spiritual frustration, as if something sacred within art is sometimes abused in the big bad world by the notion of art as only commodity. And yet some of what is made today can in fact be compelling, interesting, and unique, and for me to link art only with a complaint about money is absurd. I know: maybe I need to clean those blinds, use that window, and open that dead-end street a little bit more.

Scold the front page

The art world is like a newspaper. It needs a story. It is tabloid by nature. The knickers really matter. The private jet. The number of security men. The banality. Art? What on earth is art? The superficial pedigree of the company the high-profile artist keeps is far more important to the machine invented to follow it than any lit-fest or brain-vain genius. Glib-celeb, that's the new fool by the whirlpool. You can even have a perfectly good artist today whose work bleeds a kind of melancholic significance but whose every story written about them will deliberately ignore the painful subtle truths for the smirk of the sex and regurgitate and concentrate on the cheekily 'sordid' or wackily 'dysfunctional', thereby turning even a potential moment of genuine high art into an easy-story portrayal of trashy low life. It's almost as if no one is listening or watching any more. We have become deaf and blind at the same time. The only thing we can say now is nothing. Anyway, it was on the back of all this that the artist this morning had a sudden loss of nerve and a real moment of doubt swept into the flat and encircled the artist's head like some thin black line of smoke rendered in a visual effects factory. And there was nothing one could say to wave away the pain. In an instant, an earlier piece of work was retrieved from the fourteen others leaning against the wall by the door. This was given its own space briefly in the living room and was aesthetically revisited, challenged, and tried. Instead of the large amount of time spent on all the work being the reason the work is so good, it was now being used as a cosh to beat the artist up with. And it was a good six or so hours later before the situation resolved itself when a golden animator and literary angel visited and saw the work with fresh eyes. In a flash, a kind of self-worth was re-established on the part of the artist and confidence broke like a news story throughout the entire flat.

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.

Beside yourself

I watch the small fingers contorted over the paper, the hard black pencil sharpened, the rustle of paper, the hair a shield from everything else, the pauperish but longstanding wedding ring, the knuckles hardened by industry, the cardigan tightly buttoned, the aura of contented and emotionally self-reliant activity. I've been lucky enough to watch a number of artists work. To remember but a few, there was the boy at school whose pen leaked like an engine and whose characters gesticulated across the paper like wannabe Shakespearian actors. There were the Iranian twins beside whom I stood and watched a formidable way with women as well as paper and how a month or so before the revolution they drew like sad young prophets. There was the gallant Mexican from Saltillo falsely imprisoned because his girlfriend's father didn't approve of his daughter's triste with an artist and whose entire world was turned into a comic-drawn reality. There was the sex-change daughter of a baptist minister helping set up an installation who always smiled when you tried to disturb her. There was the southern belle who worked twice as hard as any man and three times as well as most. There was the tall Englishman with perfect teeth and miles to go before he slept. There was the Argentinian, the Austrian, the famous Portuguese woman, the female twin, the Brazilian, the Canadian, who never knew he was an artist: I have watched a few, I have been a witness. I have seen their habits, tics, and idiosyncratic manoeuvres. On a good day, watching an artist work is like watching a river flow. On a bad day, it's like watching watching watching. But watching this one, the one a few feet away from me now at the table, the one presently scratching her shoulder, is like watching your child who is your parent giving birth to herself.

The truth of the new is never on the news

Why did you wake up this morning feeling so anxious?
Ah. I feel I'm not getting enough done in my work. Not making enough in-roads.
How much is that to do with the fact you've just finished a large piece?
Probably quite a lot actually.
What is that you are doing?
I'm trying out a very, very small picture to see if it will work. (An aside) I seem to be getting smaller and smaller rather than bigger and bigger, which would be good but no one's going to be interested anyway.
What is it with you and detail?
I think it's all the children's stories I liked when I was little. Stories like this guy (pointing to the E.H. Shephard Decorations in the A.A. Milne book Now We Are Six picked up in a second-hand bookshop), or Milly, Molly, Mandy, Arthur Rackham, or illustrated Hans Christian Anderson books.
Do you think this love of detail is made all the more interesting with your conceptual background?
You can't ... it makes me more aware of the whole package ... I don't really want to explain myself ... (head bowed and working) ... in a way most art is conceptual ... you start with an idea ... I don't know ... actually, I don't really give a toss ... except I feel quite convinced by this piece ... though I might not tomorrow ... anyway, I'm experimenting.
What do you think it's like for someone to be married to an artist?
Probably horrible. But maybe it's quite good because if you have your own thing going on like I do then you're less likely to try and control the other person. But it's good for everyone to have expression.
What is going through your mind as you work?
Just doing the drawing. Trying to get the drawing right. (a smile) This seems to be working at last. (serious again) But you never know.

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit

Today I have just helped the artist email a gallerist at a gallery where the artist has been invited to exhibit in a group show, though no dates have been confirmed and the art world is as fickle as a tampered barometer. The artist's plan is to explore the idea of a solo exhibition there too. The gallerist, a pleasant man with serious manners, has been shown a number of reproductions of the new work - plus slides and transparencies from previous exhibitions - and in an eccentric kind of way is impressed. But most of the artists he represents are abstract and this would be a departure for him. Anyway, the idea is to persuade him to visit where the artist works, her home basically, and this is never easy. Gallerists are like self-styled agoraphobics, even the nice ones. They never like to leave their galleries. Not unless there is a sale involved. Here it will be different, very. Beforehand, the artist will clear away all domestic and myth-sucking items such as the children's laundry, some toys, felt pens, their impressively competing sketchbooks, my jackets, and take the aforementioned gallerist on a kind of whirling tour around a room emptied of people, as the debris and energy of the artist's mothering manages to chime with the courage of her art and all the while the work leans against the walls in a large circle. The side of the room with the fireplace for example can be the east wing and the area behind leading into the kitchen the west. I will be hiding, a million miles away. I am not asked to hide but hate with confidence the idea of being the overbearing figure at the shoulder of a prospective ally. (More exciting I hide in the wardrobe, no?) No, it wouldn't work and I actively discourage it. Better not get too big for my blog, either.

The artist in need of a fixative

Without a work-in-progress, the artist looks lost today: an artist stripped bare. This will no doubt change in a day or so when the role - like the work-rate - returns and a new piece on the wall becomes reality again. In the meantime, to observe an artist not working, certainly in this instance, is rather like watching a freed animal, an exotic species, missing the explicit and reassuring boundaries of the cage. We parted early this morning and I was left as a result wondering what the world must be like for an artist without his or her art. Is it a kind of air rage, when all the passenger needs is a cigarette? Is it Hitler not getting into art school? Is it about the recharging of batteries? A time for important and physically inactive reflection? But then I was thinking, we can all be artists but without the art. In fact thinking in this light suddenly makes the world a more bearable place. The shaved heads next to you on the platform or the headphoned death-mask in front of you on the train or the thin dress alongside you on the pavement are all of a sudden fellow creatives. Architecture is reinterpreted by traffic wardens. Creative tensions are felt by public servants. Clouds are read by widows. Was it ever thus? Yesterday I passed a wedding party in a famous public park exploding with flowers and could have sworn I saw a large white butterfly emerge from the bride's vast white wedding dress and fly off. Was not that a kind of zen-like work of art? How about the cluster of black-coated musicians squeezed together in an over-tight bandstand tuning their instruments while everyone else wore light bright shorts and tops? Delighted by this passing indulgence, I returned home only to find the real artist looking anxious. Was it a craving already to do more work? She will be climbing up the (gallery) walls next.

My favourite artist

Through the doorway to my left are fifteen completed works of art encased in bubble-wrap and dabbed in white masking-tape. They lean against the wall and assume a kind of threatening pose when you enter the flat. To be frank, they also represent yet another part of our lives which is vulnerable and unprotected. Before the next piece is begun - the wall where the artist works is bare today - she will doubtless take stock. Of the completed works, I believe she is happy with nine of them. (She is too hard on herself, especially when you consider months have been spent on some: this is perhaps why the work is so good.) Fortunately there are some good-quality reproductions of at least nine of the pieces in a transparent plastic folder in my rucksack next to some notes on a particular war zone and a mysterious pair of socks. And because it now falls to me to introduce people to the work, which you could argue I am doing right now, and though I am not a natural salesman, especially when it comes to door-stepping gallerists, cornering collectors, or sounding out critics, I do not for a moment resent the artist her professional shyness. Apart from anything else, it would go against the grain of her essential humility to be pushy now. It seems central to who she is to be who she is, and that person is relatively private and without pretence. She has a kind of point. Why come this far and lie at the very end?

Gaudy yellow rackets and maroon foam balls

The artist stands fetchingly on a short plastic shiny blue stool in order to reach the parts other artists cannot reach: today is the last day for this piece. Every inch is under scrutiny. Among the newspapers on the floor is a large photograph of boys playing in a flooded part of Kolkata (Calcutta). But the only thing falling today is dust from the artist's materials. I spend most of the afternoon keeping a distance and playing a crude form of tennis with the little people. At one stage I pick up the gaudy yellow racket and hit the perky maroon foam ball so high into the blue sky it seems to go on and up forever, higher and higher, above the dark-green foliage and ivy-strangled linden tree, above the flat belonging to the depressed young couple and their need for three cars, above the charming Irish man and woman in their sixties, above the shy young man's flat at the top, and higher still, as if towards the passing white cloud, so high in the end my daughter says out loud that she thinks she's having a dream, but then, just then, as if woken from the dream, the now not so perky maroon foam ball admits defeats, admits to a kind of homesickness, and returns, slamming bouncily, to the grass again. I really thought I was having a dream, she repeats. I return inside to tell the artist what our daughter said and write it down. But the artist is working and in some kind of dream herself. I've discussed completion before but never the enduring habit of artists to dream. Art and its execution is like time out, like Kurt Vonnegut's mirrors or 'leaks' in Breakfast of Champions. Just like my daughter's take on the ever-rising perky maroon foam ball.

Water in the desert

I was with an Eritrean refugee. Four of his brothers had recently been beheaded. He didn't know a soul. Everything to him was alien and unreal. Only days earlier he had been granted political asylum and this was supposed to be the celebration. He was short, my companion, so small and studiously unobtrusive that most of the other people in the bar couldn't actually see him. Half-familiar faces kept nodding at me almost sympathetically as if I was alone and therefore in need of company. I kept pointing downwards, to them as though towards some mysterious bladder complaint. They didn't get it. (The bar was extremely crowded.) Later I kept sticking an arm out to prevent the passing traffic from knocking my companion over. But though he was short in stature, let me tell you, he was towering in spirit. He also said to me that night that he was superstitious and that my helping him would bring me luck. The windows were open and people were flightily discussing art. Their world and his seemed painfully apart. We spoke of the desert and I told him how a Bedouin soldier once told me after firing off a few innocent rounds in the desert with me that the moon was sad that night and how when I asked why the moon was sad he said it was sad because he - the moon - had come from neighbouring Saudi Arabia. (This was during the run-up to Gulf War One and the Saudis were hosting over 500,000 American-led allies.) My Eritrean companion drank whisky - which he said his religion forbade but integration required - and again he said I would be lucky. Across the bar and through the crowds at that moment sat a dark-haired and attractive woman on a stool looking at me. I excused myself momentarily and bravely asked what the woman did. She looked at me a while and said she was an artist.

Inter(child)view

What is it like having an artist as a mother?
GIRL (7): Great. Wonderful. (Slurp of chocolate mousse.) It's very rare to have an artist as a mum.
BOY (4): Yes. (Giggles.) Yes.
Yes what?
BOY: I like watching her work.
Which is your favourite piece?
GIRL: I haven't got one. (Shake of hair.) I like all of them equally. But you can't like them more than I do. They're 'extravagant'. They're 'exquisite'. Please say that.
BOY: Pictures.
Pictures?
BOY: Weird houses.
Weird houses?
BOY: On my wall.
Do either of you want to be an artist when you grow up?
GIRL: I don't want to be rude or anything. I really do like art. But I want to be something else. Like something sporty. Like a footballer or a gymnast. Or travelling round the world with my best friend.
BOY: No. I don't. (Scratch of head.) I don't want to be an artist.
Why?
BOY: Because I don't, I just don't. I just want to be something else.
Like what?
BOY: Like ... I'm thinking ... like ... oh nothing.
Do you think it's hard being an artist?
GIRL: Yes. Probably. But I bet it's very fun too.
BOY: Yeah.
Yeah what?
BOY: It just is.
GIRL: Can we have another question please?
What's it like being in your mother's art?
GIRL: It's really nice to think we are a part of it.
BOY: Quite weird.

While all about you are losing theirs

There have been times when I have not always been there for the artist, and I would hate for this blog to have me as squeaky-clean, or indeed any marriage as perfect. Sometimes I have arrived home not only long after the birds have begun to sing but also long after they have put their voices away again. (I have been sufficiently AWOL to deserve the sobriquet of Invisible Man.) Throughout, however, and this is my point, the artist has never shirked from her work. This dedication is almost as extraordinary as her patience with me. This is thankfully represented in the kind of work the artist does, too, which is to say long and for all I know painful work that can only be done with unmatchable stamina, because there are no short cuts to be had here and so many high standards. (Sometimes I have seen her bent over her work with her fingers almost claw-like as they graft away late into the night.) Of course, such well crafted work is not always what a quick-fire art world wants but I like to think dedication can have its rewards. It means for example that much of the recent work about to be touted for a show has not been seen before. It is without the disruptive oxygen of a premature audience - like so much work these days - and is literally without peer. And if for a number of years the artist has been building up this fresh body of work without so much as a flash of commercial spotlight, it may very well be her dedication to you, dear viewer, not necessarily to me, which keeps her going.

Artists: from a long line

The late Dave the Grave, I'll call him, was a great artist, one of those many great artists belonging to my wife's tribe - the tribe of artists - I met before we met. This was across the ocean in the land of plenty on an ancient piece of rock. A new confederacy of artists had gathered on the island and my hugely significant job was to label slides for them. Outside, a collector's noun of limousines splintered the ungentrified streets, dumping short men in real estate and tall women in furs, all of whom smouldered with cheque books: greenbacks in order to buy into this gifted confederacy. As a little fish, my work also entailed sitting in the front of some of these shrines where the deals with the artists were done, in these places called the places where the artists would show, and Dave the Grave was right up there, and not just because he was so tall. I saw more money in cash than I had ever seen in my life one time when he sold a piece of work. Anyway, in this one place where I spent a good year of my life working he would lumber in with his yawning and grimacing and over-rubbed face and his general long-boned and bashed-about uncomfortableness. Sit down, I'd say, chill, and he'd stretch out like a giant accordion in the deep low ledge often painted in turquoise between the floor and window. It would be an absolute miracle once he settled, because so much effort had been applied in getting that long railway-carriage body into position. Then, more often than not, he would be still, very still indeed, as if some kind of mysterious trance had nabbed him. His hands would be wrapped around one knee which he rocked and rocked and rocked. And then he'd say something, usually along the lines of how he couldn't actually remember what it was he was going to say. But he was a great artist, the late great Dave the Grave. Oh yes. I'd usually get through about five or six more pages of slides - each dutifully labelled in tiny black handwriting - before he'd come to life again and then while I was holding to the light a slide of his work - maybe of some amazingly shamanistic comment on the old world and new - he'd say: Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. And then he'd drop his head again, the leg would stop rocking, and he'd be gone. I'm history, he'd say. It's only recently I realised the quote was Kahlil Gibran's.

Another one smites the rust

The most recent piece of art is nearly finished: I know this because there are increasing moments now when I am in the room and the artist is stepped back. Arms are folded in greater confidence, too, and the head tilted with increasing patience as completion nears and fear subsides. Of course, a blemish or imperfection in the work is spotted regularly and the piece is swiftly attacked with a kind of last-minute benign intolerance, but I have witnessed it before and know it always to be good. I first saw it in a former studio belonging to the artist in an old school building, now an achingly trendy block of flats. It was so cold the artist had a hot water bottle strapped to her waist like some kind of physical manifestation of a phantom pregnancy. I saw it again as she worked all the hours in a day towards an efficient corner in the Cologne Art Fair. I saw it another time while she prepared for a solo exhibition by Lake Constance in Austria, and then for another show in a woman's gallery across the Alps in Milan. I saw it on the top floor of an empty old hotel building in Northumberland overlooking an inky blue sea as she finished 'doing' a Danish family. I saw it in the foothills of Snowdonia one cold and crisp winter when it was indeed ourselves that were being done. (Have I got your lips right? How about your smile?) Outside of this home-spun realm, I have seen it with exhausted feature film directors when they finish films, too. (Let's see that one more time, they say with a kind of prepared finality.) I've seen it in the field among soldiers, alas, when they've reached that moment of obliged withdrawal. Why, I have even seen it in the act of love. It is the moment. It is the idea becoming reality. It is art having moved from the academic to the anthropological, to paraphrase and abuse what Seamus Heaney said about Ted Hughes. And I have been lucky to have witnessed this time after time, that is to say this key moment, this point of no return. If you love your child send him on his travels, they say in the east. Well, it is the same, this week, with the artist's art.

Broken news

Just as art to the artist is like an unpeelable truth, news for me is like a daily tattoo, and can be very painful. It is on everyone's watch but for some reason always feels like my watch. Sometimes when peering out at the world, it is as if the body politic and human body are one. An explosion in the north for example is like a bloodclot to the shoulder, only worse; arrests in the west are like water on the elbow, and so forth. (A feeling of doing nothing is like a kick in the balls.) This must be what it is like being an artist. Everything connects when watching the news. This must be how she feels. Henry Moore said there is no retirement for an artist, it is your way of living so there is no end to it. While this must be perversely reassuring for an artist, it is exactly how I feel watching the rollercoasters of faith steaming into each other. And knowing the enormity of the situation is like predicting the news, though there is no pleasure in anticipating outcomes. Nor is a bloggish intimation of art being like the news a means of saying art needs to be hostile or truculent. Art is a friend especially at times like this. For most people life begins and ends at home and the rest of the world doesn't exist. Furthermore the insularity of greed is punished only when obliged to admit the rest of the world exists. This is something I supect many artists have always known. Could admitting the rest of the world exists now save lives? I ask the artist. She suggests tomorrow's entry be lighter.

Riders in the storm

The artist takes a rightful breather, burying her head inside a 600-page novel like a head of corn inside a giant balloon. The mood of the news is not good; it is local and dark, like the weather, and packed like (an) unexploded bomb(s). Soft and relentless rain on the windows creates the right sort of feel in a movie but in real life just makes you restless. The artist's daughter has the right idea - watching TV with the artist's son - though with too many angry voices for something so well meaning. I admit to the idea of the ideal taking a day off. I also admit to the reality that a creative environment is not always a flourishing one and that sticks in the mud cannot always be sidestepped. But there is reward to a creative household. This last piece the artist has been working on can thrill like a walk in the woods. There is a kind of paranormal light across it. It plays yet never deceives. There must be two thousand leaves in the image, one or two hundred broadleaved trees and shrubs. As I write, it remains screwed like a statement to the wall. The density of the medium means its presence has no doubt, but because all the scattered newspapers protecting the floor have been swept up and binned, and all signs of work temporarily removed, the piece sits within the domestic landscape like a cross-armed stalwart, a permanent member. It is a part of our lives - we are having a relationship - but soon it will be gone.

The Blogger's Wife

How are you feeling right now?
Responsible.
Is there anything I can get you?
The children to bed.
OK, when was your first impulse to draw?
Probably when I was around four: it stopped my tantrums.
What to you is the purpose of art?
For me it's a way of helping to understand the world we live in.
What is your advice to other artists?
I wouldn't contemplate giving advice, art's something terribly personal.
What is your idea of summer?
An idealised view of my own childhood, such as closed curtains in the bedroom when it's still light outside.
How important is criticism?
I hate it.
What do you hope to bring to others through your art?
A celebration of the gentleness in life.
Can art make a difference?
Of course.

A man hasn't got a corner on virtue just because his shoes are shined

After supergluing the heel of my right boot, I take a journey into the city with the artist, a city of four world heritage sights and over 300 languages, a city of 15 shooting and stabbing victims aged between 14 and 19 in the past six months, a city of music impresarios and suicide bombers. A city - it almost seems frivolous now - of the artist and artist's husband. We hit the chewing-gummed streets. (It never used to be like this: not this good.) Crucial art supplies, parked and perky on clean regimental surfaces, are purchased. (Final touches, before the assault.) Then, across the road in a witty woman's shoe shop, by a shelf of improbably high heels, the nation's second most famous children's author is spotted, and told by the artist how much the artist's daughter loves her work, so the author draws something for the daughter, a face, innocently unaware of the artist's own work, but somehow connected. (Unexpected mission accomplished.) We snatch a hushed, vigilant moment together at the national gallery - the eye, the eye, soft breaths on the neck - looking at an exhibition of 17th century artistic freedom, presumably like the sockless man in bright, almost sculpted, pink lace-up shoes in eggshell-blue trousers I later see outside. And then it's the real world again, coffee with a friend bombed back from Beirut, another walk on foot, fashionistas hand in hand bumping into mirrors, pickpockets lighting expensive cigarettes, hyper-intelligent spinsters dashing in the sun. And, heading back, a man, by the station, scabs on either cheek, a man, broken, bashed, with no shoes.

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.

Tramplers beware

Blogs are nothing new; I realise that. I even have a young poet in my book pretending not to know what a blog is, so convinced is he of their omnipresent triteness. But, let's be honest, life's blood can run through them just about forever. It's not like the factory lights get killed and the printers all go home. Words still spin from the ethereal presses, continents still chatter, 24-10, as somebody said. A friend across the ocean for example responded today by wanting to mention this articulated search for a show for my wife to a gallerist. Even though far-fetched, could, I wondered, through some kind of keyed-in fate, a show after time be offered? Is this what you call a garden? Are seeds at this moment - as I write, as you read - being planted? Or just by saying it am I doing the planting? Or, as sometimes I fear, are we all as a people just tramplers, the world's best tramplers, as we flatten our way through a field of bulbs and continue our march to nowhere? My eyes flash right now from the intregrity of the artist's work to the mangled debris in Iraq and the two somehow understand each other. One may be peaceful, the other in deepest despair, but humanity and devotion in great art will never do injustice to suffering. And this, I believe, is one of this particular artist's great strengths. It is not politics. It is not religion. It is not bristling muscle. It is simply one person's response to that unexplained world within, that undiscovered realm, whose very lack of dogma says it all.

The quiet exhibitionist

The necessary process for an artist, any artist, of showing work to someone in order to get an exhibition is a difficult one, especially when the artist is coming out of a self-chosen period of hands-on mothering and wrestling with work at the same time. The world has changed, though the work is timeless. So many of the better galleries - places where a good artist might want to show - imagine themselves as already sorted, count their money with a kind of inelegant relish, while having a well tuned, slightly over-orchestrated, line of defence, presumably in order to rebuff with an ostentatious flourish any incoming artists. I feel for them. It's a painful process watching them drop like flies, especially up close, and one I've seen on both sides of the ocean. Besides, social confidence is not always an artist's strength. And today's habit of crushing something if it is insufficiently robust in presentation is - in my opinion - a mistake. But at least the few people allowed to see the work have responded impressively. One major art world figure shown examples responded brilliantly. As one of the world's foremost collectors, they had their office email two galleries - chosen as ideal venues by the artist - and recommended the galleries view the work immediately. But what did the artist get after making contact with the galleries following the collector's emails? Not so much as an acknowledgement - and that without them even seeing the work. (One suggested the collector never got in touch with galleries about artists, insinuating it a lie.) Still, their loss. Their mistake. Onwards.

Interview with the Artist

When were you happiest?
My first night in hospital with each of the children after giving birth to them.
What is your earliest memory?
Lining up in an orderly fashion all my toys over me in bed.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Aung San Suu Kyi, because of her humanity.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Envy.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Excessive consumerism.
What is your most treasured possession?
My art.
What would your super power be?
To be invisible.
What makes you depressed?
Frustration with my work.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
More space.
Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Sylvia Plath, Rachel Cusk, Lionel Shriver, Alain de Botton, Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen, you.
What is the worst job you've ever done?
Working in a well known law firm as a receptionist.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
The power of love.

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.

Draught(wo)manship

The art world today is a confusing place. Usually when a high-profile figure is bathing in the news - they never feature; they always bathe - the story is freckled with words like 'fame', 'money', 'bad boy', or 'bad girl'. Seldom is an epic sweep of creative majesty acknowledged instead, or life as hard labour made good by art discussed as one of the creative world's mainstays. For years I thought I was simply missing something, that in the ideas of people like Derrida and Baudrillard there was a kind of lofty, intellectual justification for the abandonment of skill in the name of semiotics, and I just did not get it. Painting or drawing for example was absurd apparently, surplus to requirement, certainly in a world peppered with easily accessed imagery. In time, more and more well-known artists grabbed the limelight doing exactly that - work without any personal investment of their skill, or even labour. No, art became something only other people did for you, which is not to decry some of the more genuinely gifted moments of conceptualism. In some cases, a kind of master and slave mentality developed. Artists became neo-colonialists. 'Oh, I've an idea,' they might quip, then get a load of frustrated other artists to do the work for them. Years ago, I made a film, an ugly documentary, about this fact. I never thought then it would continue to burn with such relevance. Now, however, when hands-off artists are interviewed on TV, each, one by one, comes out with the fact they only moved from doing the work themselves - from painting, or drawing - not because they were drunk, say, on the power of alternatives, not because of forward-thinking ideas, post-modernism and the like: but, no, simply because they could not paint, could not draw, or did not have faith in their draught(wo)manship. They are negativity's children.

Working Space

The space where we live is small but adequate. It is a flat off a busy road, set back just far enough to create a kind of barrier between you and the traffic. (I can hear it now.) The artist works in the main room, an open-plan affair with one large red sofa, a round table, floorboards, books, a TV with news bleeding in from Iraq, and an atmosphere of industry, irritability, and hope. As I have said before, the artist gave up her studio some years ago in order to spend more time with the children. As a result, there is this extraordinary coexistence in the room between an artist's and child's sensibility, not so much an atelier as playground. As for the hours, they vary but can go on late, however much interspersed with child-caring tasks and general emotional wear and tear. As I am in the room frequently at present, though I am on standby to go abroad, I feel closer to the process than usual. Also, much discussion about the work can be had. We can try things out like http://www.resonancefm.com/. I can read out sections from a book I'm attempting to write. We can glory, no doubt prematurely, in the fact that despite my adventurism and nocturnal past, we are closer than before. All the while, the piece the artist is working on builds and builds. There is much layering, intense detail, and this develops slowly, like a well-honed argument ultimately delivered with warm conviction.

Portrait of the artist as a young blog

Yesterday I was walking in the sunlight through one of the city's leafier parks with a very good friend. As well as discussing Yonkers-born author Richard Yates, motherhood, the world's mass bruises, we talked animatedly about the artist, and discussed various aspects of art, including portraiture. I was reminded in the course of the conversation - as we passed veiled women, diplomats, government employees, hyper-active school children, and appreciative tourists - of my own modest history of having a portrait done, though none were commissioned by me, I hasten to add. Anyway, the first portrait came about when a young photographer asked to 'do' me in his squat, which is now a major police station, and where he took these slightly over-devoted - I thought - photographs of me. I see his name everywhere now and still think with a guarded smile whenever I do. I actually saw him in the flesh years later. His profile - on the back of a portrait of Princess Diana - was massive. He pretended not to know me. Anyway, the second portrait was a very delicate gouache done by a man who is now a production designer. I was made to wear a thin-striped jean jacket, I seem to remember. Funnily enough, it was done in the same building where Princess Diana lived when courting Prince Charles. I don't know where that one is now, either. The third portrait was a sculpture done by a muscular devotee of art as an extension of might. He 'did' my friend in the park, too, by strange coincidence. (Neither of us have our heads now, as a matter of fact: they are both across the ocean, we believe.) But the most precious portrait done of me ... came in the form of several portraits-as-one by the artist. They were of us both, in fact. You see - what am I trying to tell you? - we are united at times even in her work.

The drill drills on

One thing about this single gush of blogged thought running like a river alongside my life at the moment is that I do not mean it or wish it to be some kind of glorification of an ideal. Art hurts, basically. It can suck, too. Or, as CS Lewis once said, it doesn't matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap, the drill drills on. Today, for example, I saw and felt the artist in this room as she agonized over what she was and was not doing and what she knew she still had to do. And because I was in the same room, this mood of frustration inevitably tried to ensnare me. It was like being spun in a dryer. But the artist, this artist, my wife, my partner, is not lazy. Her work when completed is as time-honoured and thorough as a tropical canal. It is just that she is incredibly hard on herself. But all great artists are self-loathing zealots at times. Some of the art-loving world meanwhile celebrate celebrity when it thinks it discussing art. Light-thinking stowaways on board the art-plane rabbit on about truth when what they really mean is cash. But just you wait until the wheels open and their bodies of work come tumbling out of the aircraft and end up flattened and eventually ignored on the runway. This will be the moment when the artist unpeels herself from her low self-esteem and walks into marble-floored greatness.

The object of their love

She gave up her studio to be with her children, the artist I married, and to the children it must seem strange when friends say they do not have an artist as a mother, as I imagine nothing is more natural to their seven year-old and four year-old selves than the object of their love, their mother, standing by the wall creating.

It is st(art)ing to work

I can hear her behind me. First there are the feet. They move across the wooden floorboards. The short heels drag. The soles twist. A different sound is the work itself. First a kind of enforced dabbling, some dabbing, some smoothing, gentle scratches, the odd scrape. Then the feet kick in again as the artist steps back and presumably reviews - I can't bear to look - her work. Relief descends on the room as the artist is not dabbling, dabbing, scratching, or scraping within, but is committing herself, outwardly and with progress. It is st(art)ing to work.

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.

Like gagged spectators on the riverbank

Today has been a different kind of day. You see, the ideal slips from time to time. It is not all poetic roses and prosperous heights, you know. It slips and the neck grows a rash. There are the irrational tics, the slumping on bed, the twisting of soles. If you watch closely, whatever the artist is doing, he or she is always accompanied by thoughts, sometimes dark thoughts, which follow them around like kids in a playground. Only these thoughts are meaner and tougher than any normal kid. At times, they are even like murderous stowaways. But this, we must preserve, is also what we must call art, and it may very well serve us well, that is to say importantly, that is to say we who try so hard to be there for the artist, to remember this. No, today has been different. True, but different. Some love was exchanged but there was an overflow of torment and self-doubt on the part of the artist, too. At one point I saw the eyes of a child and at another the deep grazing of senior wisdom. Of course, we must not interfere too much with any of this: the process of self-reconciliation has need too much for integrity. Besides, we are not the artists. No, we must let it all grow, even fail and rise up again at times, of its own accord. But we can urge it on, we must urge it on, quietly, internally, like gagged spectators on the riverbank, willing and willing the artist on against a backdrop of cultural blindness and spiritual amnesia as he or she cuts through the water like a bloodied but wilful salmon.

You do not know what you are missing

So this is it: the moment I commit to words my attempt to reveal something I consider special. Please don't get me wrong, it is not my art. It is someone else's. In fact they do not even know I am writing about them or their art. And it will not be easy, this journey. But I know it is important. Because it is important for me and the artist. It is what binds us together. This is what it is like, I am beginning to learn, being the husband or wife or partner of the artist. We watch from the sidelines and feel all the anguish. We feel the blows of perceived failure as if delivered to our very selves. And yet we must remain positive. We of all people. We, the friends of the artist. When lucky enough to find it we must defend the greatness from the insecurity. So, dear reader, there I suppose we have it. Some of the work I will show you one fine day is done, but much of it still being done. On the artist's behalf I am only warming you up. She is sleeping right now, the artist, her head deep into the pillow. As the room grows quiet, I peer through the dim lighting at the wall and see it. There. Her work. Intricate. True. Brave. You do not know what you are missing.