Digitalia et al

A trip into the heat or heart of the capital, where I meet with a former colleague who specialises in the digital arts. It is all numbers and keys and screens and pads and swivel-chairs, his work. The consequence of his actions is something similar to reality, but its foundation is all in numbers. He does not work in the static arts, this number-crunching visualist. That would be too, well, static. He works only in moving images, which is to say 24 and 25 frames per second. You know, someone once described this kind of work to me as akin to polishing turds, which was probably unfair of them, but I do know this world myself, because during one period in my life I had the task of working with people in this field. I will say this, they are talented, they come from engineering rather than pure creativity, and in some instances are genuine world leaders. A strange tribe, too. They all wear the same items of clothing - cloaks of heavily laundered grunge. Also, these so-called digital artists each have the same semi-glazed expressions. They love what they do so much that you often have to peel them away from their screens. They are not highly talkative, either. They are often over-worked and under-paid - so nothing new there - but what sets them most apart is their utter ease with mass computer failure, as if it is like waiting for the rain to pass while on a long, gentle walk. Unusually perhaps, the person I saw today has great respect for the static arts, including very much the artist's work, which he has never actually seen in the flesh, but has seen in reproductions. This love of painting and drawing makes him a better digital artist. Digitalia, I was thinking. It is a both a huge industry and an over-simplification. It is like being given the keys to the kingdom and yet the door is already open. It is egalitarianism made real, yet addictively unrefreshing. As most people know, the entire world has gone or is going digital. The artist is digital. Did you know that? She draws with her fingers.

Correctional Facility

I made one or two errors a few blogs back and it was only because of some fact-checking about the physics of flying that I came across them again. Ouch. They hurt. I couldn't bear the idea that these little mistakes had been floating about in the ether, uncorrected, for over 48 hours. (To those who understand, I apologise.) Now, of course, tweaked and trimmed, the situation is normal, and placed in some kind of perspective. But, I wonder, what is it exactly that makes us ache so in the face of imperfection? Is it not arrogant to think we can achieve it? Are not our mistakes in fact there to teach us? In some areas of my life I am seriously disorganised, and yet, in one or two others at least, I am not - the latter only existing because of a kind of dedicated attention to detail. An unintentional mistake for me in something creative is like a slur. Also, it is plain irritating, like a fly on the face of one of those mime artists pretending to be a statue, when something is not right, especially when you know exactly what it is, can often physically see it, and yet can do nothing about it. Anyway, I've witnessed all manner of this with the artist, which is in fact the point I am getting at. Ever since I have known her, I have witnessed almost daily her art as a manifestation of perfectionism. (Hers for example teaches me that perfection can be rewarding.) The standards this dictates is reflected in the quality of the work, and is therefore necessary. But is not this basic need to get things right also a form of respect? Is it not about not being lazy, not allowing the great expectations of what you are hoping to achieve to slip, and not wishing to disappoint or insult others? Be that through a lack of stamina on your part, a fear of failure, or both. Admittedly perfectionism can also be the reason for the person who is convinced they have left the iron on and have to travel all the way back home to confirm that in fact they have not. But it can be as worthwhile as confronting your demons, grabbing the bull by its horns, grasping the nettle - call it what you will - when you push it. No pain, no gain, may be too simplistic, but the genie only appears if the lamp is polished. (Though the woods, as someone else said, Henry Van Dyke I think, would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.)

The Markswoman

There are so many ways to leave your mark. A dog leaves his with a stain on a tree. The pole vaulter with an extravagant leap in a crowded arena. The lover, with a love bite, or hickey. An aid worker, with just one saved life. A newsagent, with a revamped shop. A horticulturalist, with an orchid. A wasp, with a sting. An economist, with a currency. A soldier, with a bullet. A banker, with his bonus. An interviewee, with a quote. A comedian, with a joke. A tyrant, with a massacre. A songwriter, with a song. A postcard, with a punchline. A promise, by being kept. A plumber, with his network of pipes. A guitarist, with a riff. A friend, with loyalty. A celebrity, with their profile. A thief, with prints on the glass. A child, with its blackcurrant squash. A job, with its potential. A politician, with civil rights bills. A swimmer, with her strokes. A diplomat, with peace. A nightmare, with its sweat. A past, with its unearthing. A stream, with current. A job, with mission. A religion, with tolerance. A thumb, with dirt. A candle, with its wick. A fish bone, with its spike. A biro, with its point. A drill, with its bit. A car, with its brakes. A secret, with its telling. A wound, with its oozing. History, with time. A hobo, with a train. A train, with its crash. A flower, with its scent. An assassin, with a gun. The artist ... with her work.

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things *

The artist's brother has learned how to fly. He has since taken his wife up in a plane and he has flown with her, dipping and weaving above the expanse of fielded countryside surrounding the market town where they now live with their delightful young son. I have always thought it must be an incredibly liberating feeling flying a plane. Nothing original to this thought, I know, but true all the same. In fact, getting above myself, I think I view the feat of the pilot pretty much as I view the artist. (The two are not so very different.) The pilot for example must know the magnitude and order of space and choose a direction in which to fly at the same time as soaring with a kind of composed relaxation above the humdrum. Well, the artist is the same. Flight is the process by which an object achieves sustained movement through the air by generating lift or using buoyancy. Well, art is the process by which an idea achieves sustained meaning sometimes on a wall by generating belief through the use of stimulation. Both chart a course, both can loop the loop, some prefer straight lines, while others, not always the most reckless, simply dive-bomb. No, the idea of a flight of fancy existing in real terms is very appealing to me. And I come at this with a kind of creative respect. If I had a plane right now and the freedom to do whatever I wanted with it, with no limit on fuel, a total ability to fly the damn thing, and great navigational skills, I would fly it with the artist in what I suppose would have to be a north-easterly direction and head towards the nearest sunset. We would watch the pinking clouds above the polar ice-cap, avoid throwing the plane into too steep a dive, and draw crazy patterns across the sky. There is a popular piece of software, a kind of virtual globe, which more and more people, especially children, are using as if only a flight simulator. Of course, they should really know that nothing can match the real thing. But they don't. Well ... nothing, that is, except the artist.
* Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

Parlour Scene in the House of the Working Artist

What do you like about this new piece?
The theatricality of the leaves and the trees and the roots.
You've been lost in this since we returned from the foothills.
I know. I know. It ... feels like the right thing to do.
(BOY: Mummy, can you tuck me in?)
Mm.
(Artist - distractedly - leaves living room, to tuck 5-year-old in bed. Artist returns, smiling to herself.)
What are you thinking about when you work?
That you'll shut up. No, don't say that. I'm joking.
(GIRL: What have you written, daddy?)
He'll put it in.
(GIRL: Don't.)
He will.
(BOY: Can I have my pillow?)
Yes.
(Artist leaves to get pillow. She returns. She is soon working again.)
What are you doing right now?
Concentrating, I'm concentrating on the colours. I'm not thinking about anything else. I've had a really good, concentrated, day. I'm just trying to get the hours in. I've done about twelve today.
(GIRL: He'll put that in as well.)
Hang on a minute.
(Artist steps back, angles head, and returns to piece.)
Do you like this new piece?
(GIRL: Pardon?)
Do you like the new piece?
(GIRL: Yes. Very much. Em, it's very detailed. Um ... )
(BOY: Can you get my blankie?)
I'll just get his blanket.
(GIRL: It's very ... a very kind of wild picture. Well, not wild. And in a way it looks ... it looks kind of, well, quite magical. And it's definitely mum's kind of picture. You can ask me more if you like - a beat - but don't write that in the blog.)
(Artist looks at Girl.)
You should just write about her. She'll give you a fresh look at the world every day.
What gives you such motivation?
I just want to make something beautiful ... really, really beautiful.
(BOY: Daddy, look. That's what makes my toy go really fast.)
I thought you were in bed.
(BOY: I'm having a quiet play.)
Do you like your mummy's new piece?
(BOY: Yeah. Has she finished?)
Why?
(BOY: I was just wondering.)
What do you like about it?
(BOY: Er, I don't know. Anyway, I see something quite funny. The white bits.)
(GIRL: What white bits?)
(BOY: Those.)
Listen, it's just nice to be doing a fresh image to spur me on. There's really an awful lot to do here. It's the sort of thing ... to really get me going.
Shall I say that?
(Artist is six inches from her work, staring at it and working on it intently.)
Em.
You're not really listening.
Pardon?
I could say anything and you'd just nod.
(Artist nods.)
(BOY: Night, night.)
(GIRL: Daddy's still writing.)
Did you say something?

Perfect Freedom

One of the most reassuring things in life is when you meet highly influential people and immediately discover them to be warm, progressive, witty, courteous, and wise. Remarkably, this has happened a few times to me recently and makes a welcome addition to one's outlook. It not only wipes away the crumbs of wariness from one's face, it makes a basic or even developed mistrust of power sometimes unfounded. Outlook, like attitude, is important. The sound of the engine can denote repair. I have been targeting and following through on various projects and a present refusal to be negative is paying at least the rumour of dividend. The artist meanwhile has skilfully and admirably reattached herself to her new piece on the wall, and a kind of umbilical cord-iality has been resumed, though mostly between the artist and the art. It makes for a busy but fertile house. Jacques Brel is singing on TV and the children are trying to settle down to sleep and dream in what happens to be our bed. (We will carry them to their own later, their heads drooping as they cross from room to room.) Normal service has been resumed. As I write, the artist has her right arm raised while working on the top right corner of her piece. She is wearing clogs and their wooden soles brush and sometimes thud on the wooden floorboards. The general order of the room has been - shall we say - relaxed. Only one or two toys litter the red and blue African mat behind the bright red sofa, but the 5-year-old's Dungeon of Doom is askance and the table is cluttered with various newspapers spelling out a new chapter in the war zone, a pocket plan of a nearby museum boasting various handwritten telephone numbers, and a sticker book remaining in part unpeeled. For all I know, an artist's husband may be surplus to requirement when it comes to the art, but when the artist is happy and the husband is learning with a kind of progressive pleasure something of the world, it is a spirited union. Perfect freedom. That's it. We must forever perfect freedom.

Think global, act local

Our four faces were blank and emotionless as we stared out at the clusters of people in the capital rushing on foot along the pavements by the side of the road, as we were driven like innocents from the railway station back to our flat after several days of bliss in the pure and mountainous countryside, which is home to the artist's parents. Staring out from the taxi, it seemed insane to us at first that people should really be living so on top of each other, but then we sort of looked at each other and remembered, hey, we lived here too. In fact our children started singing and I took various pictures of this. In each of the images, examined later, they did not look like that first sentence at all. I could have begun: 'Our four faces were expressive and emotional as we stared out ...' Isn't it funny how a description based on one moment can be so invalidated the next? Trust me, though, when I say they were not exactly unhappy to see their flat again, even though the rain wept on the leaves and the grey sky was not how we had left it. We stumbled in and abandoned our bags. The artist made no mention of her recently commenced piece on the wall, but I know she will already have sized it up. (I think her main priority has been to get the children resettled.) I have meanwhile been reading up on things. I have been examining what they call in war the struggle for people's minds. I have been looking at what is said about propaganda as a force for peace. I have been comparing how much terrorists 'spend' on video publicity, effectively, versus how much a major power spends. And I have been concluding in my small and powerless way that effectiveness is more important than performance. The big picture. I must always aspire towards the big picture. On the train back, staring out at the last of the mountains, I was thinking globally. For now, while the children try to get to sleep, I am acting locally. Think global, act local.

All Bar None

This is our last day in the foothills. Tomorrow we return to the capital. I just received an email from an old friend in the capital. I think they were wondering why I haven't been chewing the fat and out carousing with them. The truth is, I have so many other projects developing and being developed and needing developed that I have not been able to afford the slipstream of recreational socialising for some time now. Besides, I find the hard edges of some of the subject matters I am mingling within these days unable to lend themselves well to simple cheer and they in fact often require sober discretion. I hate to say it, but maybe I am experiencing a kind of late flowering of seriousness. Are these intimations of mortality? I don't know. But I must continue forward. I certainly feel extremely connected to my children right now and also determined to see the artist into that space which adores her work, up into those heights which I know she can sustain, and among those people for whom marvel at the work can come easily. Meanwhile, the extreme beauty of our present location has continued to dazzle and inspire. To be reminded again of the magnitude of nature has been a shot in the arm. Tomorrow when we return to the capital by train I shall be looking at the three refreshed faces with me, including the artist chomping at the bit to do more work. Good fortune favours the bright and cheerful. I need to complete this full transfer from sentimentality to sympathy.

The trick is growing up without growing old

The light plays tricks with the leaves and the sun paints the valley. A lick of paint. A long lick of golden paint. The lone buzzard from the day before patrols the sky. Here on earth the dog I am with is happy. He has I am told a sense of smell to die for. He does not bark. Bark, however, splinters from the trees. Fast-flowing water mocks the stillness. Back in the house, as I walk, the artist is finishing her book on someone spiritually trying to find themselves. I find myself walking faster, the dog at the lead. But so successfully am I clearing my head, I do not know what to say. And yet I wish to acknowledge this freshness. I wish to witness the artist still relaxing. I wish to see the children playing like mountain people and their grandparents enjoying them. The dog pauses meanwhile and I examine a dying crane fly, or daddy long-legs. Its larvae will last the winter in the soil, if the crows or rooks don't get it. I see garden spiders by confident webs, capturing small flies. Ahead are gathering starlings. Here on this particular earth, there is no irony, no 21st century commentary. No spin. No heraldry even. Here the word sits unselfconsciously in its sentence and the full stop is always on time. We have no use of sub-text. There is no hidden agenda. There is no one person to vote for. No act of nature to veto. The dog tugs at the lead harder and I am off again, past the spot where I proposed to the artist. (I wonder if the character in her book has found herself yet.) As I approach the house and stare into the distance between to the sides of the valley, I am thinking that I was wrong, the light is not playing tricks with the leaves. Here, there are no tricks to play.

Peaking

I climb a mountain before lunch today. I saw it yesterday and decide to climb it today. It is impossible not to feel philosophical when climbing a mountain. The small thought is squashed by the large one, like my boots squelching through the bog, drowning the smallest of weeds. Slowly, I size up the mountain, my eyes following the contour like pencil on paper, before deciding on the approach. The first thing to enter my mind is physical perspective. (That old chestnut.) Forget the large and small thought, there is me, in the physical dimension, so small and short-lived, and there is the mountain, so vast and ancient. The second thing to strike me is the light wind sweeping across the valley, like air from the lungs of one of those painted cherubs in Italian paintings. (A fly, I can hear a fly. Sheep. A frog? My shirt is sticking to my back.) The third thing is the ease of imagination when no one is around. I see some magic mushrooms for example and some I notice have been nibbled at. I imagine a council of sheep having eaten them and during their sheepish high imagine they are fanatical religious leaders, consumed by bad trips and in the end eating each other to death. I move on. I can hear the mgnui call of a buzzard in the sky and the gurgle of an underground stream. Years ago I had to climb mountains and always the man in front, ordered to ensure I never stepped on a mine, showed these bare calves. They were like polished teak. Come to think of it, it is impossible not to measure one's fitness now to one's fitness then. The body is not the same but the mind, amazingly enough, is more in tune. (The fearlessness of youth is not dissimilar to an absence of sense.) I think about the artist, how well she is. She is away in a nearby town with her mother and our children, buying a winter coat for our son. From the summit I can see where they are, ten or so miles away. I pass two very small caves, like shrunken versions of the caves I knew in the war zone, and feel proud of my family. I stand perfectly still and stare at the view. Alone. But not alone. The only thing I can hear is the very distant hum, miles away, of cars travelling along the dual-carriageway. ('I should be working,' whispers the artist later.) It is bliss.

Relief Map Of the Soul

I wake up to the sound of a fast-moving stream as my mind opens up like a folded map. I even out the creases. I wipe the surface. I explore the relationship between gradient and land. Which way, I wonder, will the day go? The artist is downstairs but reappears with a cup of tea. (I am still stirring when she hands me the cup.) I hear the children. They are coming on a long walk with their maternal grandparents and us. We lace up our boots. At the beginning we pass a real couple with a real map. (Ours remains in our heads: less cumbersome but not as reliable.) Slowly we continue climbing, the straits behind us growing in scale as fast as the panorama of hills and mountains ahead. Clean air meanwhile pumps into the five-year-old's lungs. Exhilaration courses through the eight-year-old's veins. The artist is so blissed out she doesn't even want to discuss her work. The grandparents show the way. I peer into the distance, though much of what is happening is within. Then I realise that what I am looking at is like the map we did not bring. Tiny paths lead rather than meander. Boundaries are marked by stone walls. Sheep move sheepishly from tuft of grass to shard of branch, cow-pats sit slap-happily on the ground, and small streams trickle into larger ones. The couple with the map are in front again. They know where they are going. Two mountain ponies move gently to our left. The gorse is thick and unchallenged, until a mile or so away a fire sends smoke from some into the soft blue sky. Suddenly we are under these giant pylons, their arms outstretched and power intact, running the exact same route a conquering people ran more than two thousand years ago. Pylons. Ancient road. Smoke. Panorama. No map. We reach a crossroads where two people are fixing their mountain bikes and a third, a man, peers at his neat selection of maps. (Strange: he does not look like a man who has lost his way.) We smile and pass. The light on the land is like sunlight on a large map. I stare at the artist's eyes. They are very blue. They are like maps, too. Only I do not know where they are leading. I am as much her map as she is mine and nobody can really know where their map takes them. We hug the side of the final summit. The man with the map has followed us. We point him one way and hope it is correct and make our own way down to where our walk began. Later, we watch a new version of a film of our wedding nearly ten years ago. I am amazed not so much by the footage as by the continued unity. This is no mean feat when you consider there have been times when not only has our map been taken from us but it has been torn to shreds and scattered all over the mountain. I don't know. Maybe it is an art. Maybe there is an art to marriage. (Just as there is an art to being married to an artist.) All I know is that if a map tells you everything, it doesn't tell you how to refold it.

You Took My Sleep

It is still dark when the four of us awake, and there is a kind of film-set condensation on all the windows, tiny dribbles of morning struggling down the glass like artists looking for galleries. A few stumbles and much laughter later, we are hurtled like fugitives across the capital in a bright red people carrier, the river glinting with alien colours, the light brightening only slightly, and the city still asleep. Our driver talks to himself. He smiles at what he is saying. (It must be good.) As passengers, we set the camera at various speeds and experiment with shots of the street lighting as we weave in and out of people still walking home. Eventually we reach the station all photographed out and clamber like comedians aboard the train, as if straining to get out of the fumbling metropolis, desperate to shed our urban skin, before it all wakes up, before several million reasons for humanity shake our dream and pluck us all back in again. Result. The train pulls out of the station and we are unrestrained: we are safe. The capital peels off. The carriage is warm, maybe too warm, and we are so sleepy in it, it could be that we are in fact dreaming all of this and are still tucked up in bed. I drink coffee. The artist peers at me from across her plastic cup. The eight-year-old writes and the five-year-old stares out the window. A round of newspapers sit like facts on the table, their news of yet more devastation round the edges of the war zone no real surprise. I stare into space. 'You took my sleep,' I hear a child say. 'You took my sleep.' The child is not ours and her father has just woken her. 'You took my sleep,' she repeats. What a beautiful phrase, I am thinking. Meanwhile, the artist looks relaxed and strangely at peace without her work. There is a light mist hanging like a spectre above the green fields and a bright sun now burns through, to the frost still clinging to the grass. We are off to the foothills. We are off to the mountains and nothing can stop us.

The secret of life is in art *

The artist almost stabs the paper-on-board screwed to the living room wall, while our son, who cannot sleep, plays with his toy Ben-10 watch. ('Do you know what time it is?' I want to ask.) But of course our son will soon be asleep and the artist does not really do that. She is not a stabber. A stickler, yes. But not a stabber. Her work is intense but always exact. There are no moments of rashness to it, or at least not when it comes to its execution. The windows could blow in, walls could split, the ceilings crumble, yet once it was established the children were fine, the artist would be by the wall again, half-bending her back, standing straight again, wiping her nose with her forearm, and working, working, working. She is enjoying this new piece. It has fortified the spirit, starting it. We hear of conviction politics. (Perhaps not as much these days, come to think of it.) Well, this for me is conviction art. It's funny, because at a time when a lot of the pantomime masquerading today as modern art is making the news, especially as a picture story, or a moment of understated mockery, never has the absence of such frivolity in the artist's work come across as such a strength to me before. I have said this kind of thing before but when the artist's contemporaries were attending every opening under the sun, the artist would often be found at her old studio or at home working. She would be perfecting her craft while wrestling in her head with the ideas that lay behind it all. Now some could say she should have been out and about the whole time, attending these parties. But she's simply not like that. And I don't see why she should have had to pretend to be like that. (She values sincerity almost above all things.) Besides, I doubt whether she could have found the very serious and beautiful pitch the work exists on now, not if she had copied everyone else. In fact this is what lies at the heart of this person. Freedom.
* Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Mission Statement

If you are reading this blog - a feat I cannot of course take for granted - and wondering what on earth it is all about, I suppose the best way to describe it would be to say it is a kind of diaristic homage, a series of sometimes practical dedications, and these to the artist, who happens also to be my wife. I should also state that I never quite expected this whole thing to come so thick and fast, and quite so regularly. (I haven't missed a day since it started.) Nor is it, by any stretch of the imagination, the only thing going on in our lives. In fact, I omit many things which I consider to be either too thorny or indeed sensitive to cover in such a public display of what is essentially affection and respect. What I will say in the blog's favour, however, is that it provides a welcome opportunity for me to drift in and out of various inter-related topics, rather like a tide still trying to find itself, and in-so-doing I get to regularly wash the beach of any distracting flotsam or jetsam. Another thing: it not only charts the very practical progress of an artist working towards, and trying to get, an exhibition, it also gives spine to the idea that it is a good thing for a man to enjoy the creative independence of the woman he is living with. I suppose, in other words, it is essentially feminist, not at all submissive, and, interestingly enough, not that possessive. What else do I choose not to cover in this blog? Well, the artist's husband, like the blogger's wife, remains anonymous. For one reason or another I have not always been so focused on the artist, though I have always been her fan. I don't like to be too literal about the work, enjoying instead the rumour of its greatness. (Ultimately it will be up to you to decide: perhaps the work will not be revealed until such a time as an exhibition is found, dates confirmed, and work perhaps already hung.) I do not find it appropriate to cover our sex life, musical though it is when expressed. I don't see any merit in recording petty squabbles: these may be a common denominator between reader and writer but, come on, who wants it? I don't like to go into any real kind of detail about the artist's relationship with her own family, good though these relationships are. (As for my own: am I saving up on them?) And I never like to be too literal about people or places, by which I mean that where we live for example I always refer to as the capital. Where for instance I spent much of my childhood, I often call the chilly north. The various embattled places on the globe I know fairly well, and to which I may be returning, I call only the war zone. Where our children's maternal grandparents live, I term with affection the foothills. A vast country I knew, loved, and lived in for five years, I describe only as being across the ocean. And the city where I mostly lived there, I will tend to describe as the city of scraped skies. As for where my paternal grandfather came from, I call it the flatland across the sea. And so forth. Anyway, welcome aboard if you have just joined us. Keep coming back. The artist worked on the new piece on the wall today - green, peaty, root-like, profoundly reassuring - and it shows all the signs of greatness. It would be a shame if you missed it.

I don't believe in art, I believe in artists *

There is a boy in our son's foundation class whose mother is also an artist. It is a class of about thirteen children, all of them between the ages of four and five, and two of them, not just the one but two, our son being one of them, have mothers who are artists, which is to say full-time, committed artists, and not just your faithful hobbyist types. Anyway, this must be very unusual, I was thinking. Certainly in a normal, run-of-the-mill, state school, such as the one our children attend. What is more, our son's teacher, who is male, which is rare enough I'm told in a class of children this age, is also a bit of a creative spirit: an ex-surfer, in fact, who once played in a band. Add to this the fact the artist has been working on the mural at school - in between the major new piece at home - and you have a potent mix of creativity, autumn chills, and manic looks ricocheting off walls. The boy's mother came round the other day and it was impossible not to make comparisons between the two artists, especially as they sat next to each other and I could see them briefly as one. Our friend works on a fairly esoteric level, I was thinking. To me her work relies as much on theory as on any kind of soulful occupation of physical space. (She is a sculptor.) The work is slightly mysterious, and with so many potential meanings flying about, it can be difficult to work them all out, which may very well be her point. I don't always like art beating a clear and unambiguous drum. But I am a friend to private artists and do not need to be mistrusted. Artists, I would like to think, can relax in my company. Though this is not connected to our new friend, who is unpretentious, a great deal of what others more pretentious probably feel more comfortable in calling obscurantism does exist in art today, and it is a convenient place as a result for many people to hide. (You could argue there is a whole movement of this today: Hideous Art?) Words, on the other hand, or at least I like to think, though I would, are more revealing. Only the very cleverest of writers, and I am not one of them, can hide undetected behind the words. In our friend's case, I totally understand that if you work alone in a studio, one with a rat problem, as our friend does, there can - and must - be a kind of comfort in one's own sculptural unknown. But when you have already shown a glimmer of something special, as she does, it is perhaps helpful for others to coax out its meaning, to lure its hard surfaces into a position where it can yield its inner significance. This is what the artist is doing. She is good with other artists, especially if they are serious. No, I can detect an important relationship developing here. Just as I can celebrate the rest of the creative mix, from children to mothers to teachers alike.
*Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

War's not about who's right, but who's left

I remember as a young man waking up in the war zone. It was a war back then, too, but a different war, and this was long before I met the artist. Anyway, I had just been awoken by the azan, or call to prayer, and it was a handsome thing discovering you were still alive. By the entrance of my tent, a small one-person home donated by a western government, stood a tall figure. I squinted and rubbed my eyes again. It was still dark outside but I began to see that the man staring over me was holding a metal plate with some naan and yoghurt. Also, I noticed, he had my camera under his arm, my film camera, and it was half-wrapped in a light grey blanket. I took it from him immediately, before I took the naan and yoghurt. What was he doing with it? This was mine. This was my lifeline, why I was there. Without it, I was useless, both to the people I was with, and to the people I hoped would be paying me later for being there. I devoured the food he gave me and thanked him. I think we both chuckled in the end. An hour later, I was filming with this man's commander as about two dozen others were preparing for battle. This transition from prayer to war had been seamless. A buzzard, I seem to remember, swooped down and rose up again before jinking behind the facing mountain. Weapons were dragged like bodies from the cave. Barrels were cleaned – something I'd been told never happened - and I kept filming, kept peering at it all, through my peephole, only occasionally losing my balance. It kept coming, too. Fresh ammunition cases were stacked on top of each other. Pride of place in this expanding ritual was a twin-barrelled heavy machinegun, plus the usual assortment of what are and were the most famous assault rifles in the world. As we moved closer to what would become my first ever firefight, I told myself that if I made it out again, I would always try to be a man of peace. Well, I feel I have tried to keep to this. I have erred many times, many times, in other areas. But I like to think I have at least tried to keep the peace. Is this down to living with an artist?

A Hard Day's Night

The artist slept deeply beside me. Knowing her, she was probably dreaming about the new piece on the wall, unfestering, already certain, autonomous, but the body at least was enjoying some kind of respite. It needed it. I could hear the children in their room too. They were also sleeping: their sigh-like breathing and occasional small splutter drifting water-like across the small bay of the flat. It was like something conspicuously unpainted, our little scene. The new and slightly imposing security light from the next door garden sent shadows across the window's one wooden blind, as a long branch waved with might not indignation in the nocturnal wind. I couldn't sleep but was not restless. I could see our four selves as if on camera from high above - an overhead shot of a sleeping mostly family - and was reminded that much that is beautiful in life is often unwitnessed. It is a serious business this life thing, too. I like to think I am at ease with it, but it is not always easy being a father and husband, and I am still awaiting news of a possible posting abroad. (I have been waiting so long now I feel like it has all been sent to test me.) But at least I have in my way been fortifying the artist's spirit, in between raised hopes and baffled patience. This fortifying is important. It is also fundamental. It is not easy, I imagine, being an artist at the best of times. But to be a great one does and will involve sacrifice. That the artist makes what she does seem like no sacrifice at all is to her enormous credit. But there are sacrifices. She does not for example indulge in a normal person's idea of recreation. She is not a zombie to whatever life in the form of a weakened culture throws at her. For her, any time not spent mothering is time that could be spent working. When some of the other mothers complain of exhaustion, I always think of the artist, and of what she goes through. At least the artist's work is good. It would be a nightmare if I loved this person and the work was bad. The love would be fine but the horizon would feel less worldly. No, I have said this before but the more I am familiar with the new work, the more I am convinced it is very serious. I fell asleep eventually. I must have, otherwise I wouldn't be living this dream.

Laugh together, work together

These days in our basement flat here by a park in the sunlit capital, we seem to live and breathe and love and work in one room. It's a few rooms actually, but they're close enough to feel like one. You would expect something as close-knit to create fireworks, but in our case it seems to create only more industry, as one cell of work gently competes then computes with another. The artist for example has her new piece on the wall alongside her old. She has worshiped the clean surface for two days, as she begins the assault in earnest now to build those first few layers so elemental to the finished work. She passes it like a dog on heat, brushing her eyes across it, not out of vanity, not with any self-congratulation, but like a dancer commencing some ancient dance, full of private ritual, slow unfurlings of meaning, vocation, spirit, skill, need. Our daughter, perhaps to stave off early bed, unzips a colour pencil-case given by her grandmother. Our son challenges himself to get out of bed and get some fruit from the kitchen. Now, though, the artist has sat down on the bright red sofa. I am watching her profile as she lies back and rubs her eyes, all the while staring up at the new piece. I wish I could say some Mozart is playing, or Alabama 3, but the only sound is the washing machine and the relentless tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. At least the lights are low and the day's battering of industry is partly abating. It is always the same when the artist begins a new piece. I always lose her for a while. She becomes someone else's. I don't mind this. I married an artist. She does everything she said on the can, and some. If anything, it is me who is unpredictable. At least I know the purpose of this blog: to chart the crucial journey through thick and thin towards ultimate exhibition. It will be the mother of all shows.

The Naked Portrait

After the myriad of nudes at the art fair yesterday, I see there is a large article in the press by a well known feminist about a major exhibition of the nude in art presently showing in an exquisite pile in the countryside. This is where the friend of the artist was going when I bumped into her before my rigorous hike the other day through woods and fields outside the capital. In fact the more I think about it, the more I believe the artist should have been in this show. She would certainly have earned her place. The card from her last solo exhibition in the capital for example bore a colour reproduction of a nude. It was a large self-portrait by the artist of the artist standing in her former studio by an empty white wall. Well, empty apart from the residue of lines left from some peeled masking tape. By her feet were splinter-ready floorboards. Above them were honest sock lines. I seem to remember dirt on the skirting boards, too. Another very important element you should know: she was about five or six months pregnant at the time. This, you could argue, was conceptual art at its purest. Unfortunately the young but successful gallery at the time failed to run through the proofs for the cards with the artist and as a result she always felt the image on the card - as opposed to the original - was too large, suggesting a kind of clumsiness to the image which simply did not and does not exist. I must say, it is a strange sensation watching other people look at your wife naked, which would happen almost every day during the run-up to the show, as I innocently handed out invitations. I suppose the fact she was pregnant did kind of desexualise it, but there was little left to the imagination. I admired this piece greatly: I still do. Even though everything except this piece sold in the show, it was for me the most important piece, as it showed the beginnings - or at least outline - of what has since developed into a full blown project, namely her subsequent works done of her children. This desire on the part of female artists to take their clothes off is not exactly new; nor does it ever quite go away I realise now. The last time we were in the foothills for example, the artist wanted to take her clothes off in order to gather some preliminary images by photograph. It was for another self portrait. I don't know why - I hope it wasn't me - but she decided against it in the end. A close shave, I was going to say. But that wouldn't be quite right either. Anyway, I swear by that piece. It is covered in bubble wrap right now and leaning against the awaiting new work.

Going, Going, Gone To The Great Art Fair

A large metallic white tent in a rich green setting. Self-conscious queues and heftily priced tickets. ‘It used to be so fresh,’ says a well known film producer. ‘I'm not so sure now.’ One of the first things I see is a Japanese booth. It displays studied Tokyo manners and detailed western-style art. I float through crowds streaming down long corridors like packs of svelte-like greyhounds. Young female art students with notepads and lipstick hunt for the unusual. ‘I like this,’ says one, fingering the work like a bag. I stare at someone’s framed urology appointment slip. (Dry, I think.) I bump into an old friend, the man who was to meet the artist, with his beautiful baby and partner. ‘Unsurpassable,’ I say, staring at the baby's face. I move on, past large heavily graded nude photographs by David LaChapelle, and more from a younger gallery nearby. A post-ruralist David Hockney painting stands alone, like a peephole into a California-tinted English countryside. ‘Is it for sale?’ someone asks. ‘Ninety thousand,’ they are told: politely. I am enamoured by a pair of colour photographs of a mob of deer in curiously unromantic and neatly clipped flat fields. Over in the distance I see a female member of the world’s most famous royal family squeezed by an Italian male she neither seems to like nor know that well. The stud is reprimanded by his wife and his face drops like lead. A pretty Swedish woman with hair in plaits sits leafing through a newspaper. Behind her is a small painted bronze sculpture, entitled ‘Memory from the North,’ consisting of a six-inch nude woman - another - on her back with her legs apart, and a man with a hamster on a lead and ‘EU’ written on his cap walking towards her, while two upright citizens watch from the plinth's sidelines. I see a photograph of a well known female artist and wince as one of the saleswomen deliberately screeches her chair. Ah, over there is the work of an artist who shared the same studio building as the artist. I see a large acrylic by one of her ex-boyfriends. (All this is like stepping through friendly mud in comfortable boots.) Ahead is the stand of maybe the most powerful dealer of all. In the first image I see - his wife’s - a nude young woman (yes, another) with a stuffed swan aiming ridiculously – and with deliberate visual kleptomania: François Boucher's 'Leda and the Swan' (circa 1740) – for the woman’s vagina. Before recovering fully, I see a vast photograph taken I am assuming of one of the pyramids. (No awareness of the slaves working in deadly temperatures there then: let other people do your work for you.) I stumble out. I'm at a Moscow gallery with intelligent, sad drinker-faces looking up from a small table. There is a black curtain behind which great secrets or measures of vodka are passed. Then there’s the Beirut gallery next to the one from Tel Aviv. (Whose idea was that?) I can hear it now: ‘It all began at an art fair,’ people will say, in years to come, when peace – not that you felt many people at the fair would notice – breaks out completely in the Middle East.

Aide-mémoires

I have just lost today's blog. I wrote it very carefully. I wrote it perhaps too carefully. Anyway, I didn't save it and something happened and I took my eye off the ball and now it is lost. Perhaps this is a conceptual moment. Something unusual has been written, which no one shall now read. I shall just have to write beyond my means, give some kind of glowing report on what I had written. Well, it began promisingly enough with our walk through a thick white mist across the open space close to where we live, which I wrote reminded me of 'Under Western Eyes' by Joseph Conrad. (The mysteriousness conjured by the mist. And, remotely, the location.) We were actually off to buy materials for the school mural, but managed to see an exhibition as well. (I hate losing text.) This was at a fairly large national institution where the artist once showed. In fact a large blue book from that show seventeen years earlier was still on sale in the gallery shop. As people milled around like children, and two women in their seventies played with and chuckled over a mechanical wooden hand for artists, I studied closely the artist's text from the show. It was impressive. Her words were as honest then as they are now and the medium was the same too. (Few of the other artists in that show can match her for consistency.) That's right: I also wrote that I stood in a queue beforehand, behind a maybe-famous artist, and waved at someone I once knew who waved back. The maybe-famous artist cursed impatiently as the young man selling tickets grappled with the broken computer system: 'Jesus!' he was saying. The person I once knew then came up to me and just as I was about to shake his hand, he shook the hand of the maybe-famous artist. I wrote of the twenty-two artists in the present show, three stood out - Vija Celmins, Liu Xiaodong, Johanna Kandl. It would feel too precious to try to remember it exactly but we liked these three in particular because there was something of themselves in the work - the show was largely images sourced from photographs, each telling us something of modern life. (I'm sure I wrote something else about the artist saying in the book without any kind of pomp that she liked finery and detail.) The blog also contained something about the small and delicate painting we liked painted in oil. It was of an American fifties war plane, in black and white, like its sourced photograph, above a bed of clouds. It was pinned behind glass like a butterfly, eternally, in space. It ended I think with the artist of this blog really positive about her new work as she marched back home to pick up the children from school. The sun had burned through the mist and there was a clarity now matched only by the artist's zeal. I forget the last sentence. It certainly wasn't this.

After Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'

That’s my artist-wife’s drawing by the wall,
Looking so like her work: alive. I call
That person a marvel, now: Her bony hands
Working busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you stare and look at her? I said
‘Marvel’ by necessity, for we never need
Others, like strangers that plant disrespect,
The inability and slight of lesser art,
But to the artist I turn (since none but her
Is the quality raised that must be shared)
And more enjoy as she creates, as she must,
A medium as to look like colour-dust,
And alchemy, to die for. Sir, ‘t was not
Her works’ presence only, called that spot
Of joy in life’s corner: no, perhaps
The artist chanced to say ‘life overlaps
the face of art when art is good’ or ‘Art
Must ever hope to match the heart,
Half-pumped, that lives within:’ such stuff
Was good, methinks now, and has enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She has
A heart … how shall I say? … unsurpassed,
Never matched, and her eye is everywhere.
Sir, ’tis all one! My favourite artist,
The purpose of daylight on the list,
The lift of energy from delicious fruit
Picked in the garden by her, the cute
Children made to love each country stile,
She showed them green lands – both and each
- That cross from fields out of reach,
To others, gated, at home. She taught
Them what she knew from others she aught
The gift of life as one creatively retold
With artistic lift. Who’d want any else
Than this aspiration? Even if of no skill
In art – (such as with me) – we must thrill
Quite sure to such a one, and say, ‘One colour,
Alone, from you, makes all colour duller,
Or some such thing’ – and if you halt
From giving so, without such seeming fault,
There would be lack to this, and much else,
- E’en dearth in breath and laughing, less
Eyes, yes. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The masterpiece, then. I repeat,
The husband your equal’s known pages
Are ample evidence that much respect rages,
And we are, together, unsurrendered;
Though our fair children’s selves, as rendered
In your work, are enough, we have far to run,
And keep going, ma’am. Notice the sun,
Explaining all, like a sage, even through dusk,
And with your craft draw o beauteous musk.

Old Flame

I am sitting by a tall white candle. The flame is sure and perfectly still. Not even my typing seems to influence any movement and it is rather like sitting here with a soul. Our daughter walks in. The candle is getting flustered. It leans to the left. It leans to the right. It swirls all around. It lopes like a drunk. Ah. It is still again. You see, the artist is trying to get both children to sleep. They are quiet again. The artist now returns to the sitting room. She leans across me for an empty cup. The candle flickers regularly, steadily, like a pet familiar with the caressing manoeuvres of its master. The artist puts the kettle on in the kitchen and returns to the room again with a large yellow plastic bag, carrying various images collected for her from the centre of the capital. Feel the heat. She is looking at them now on the bright red sofa. As she rustles the crisp and semi-transparent packaging, the candle sways, almost like a waltzing ghost. The artist now leans back on the sofa, sending another gust of air across the room, but this time the candle does not respond. It seems satisfied with the artist's position. It would appear not to wish to grumble. I stare more closely at the naked flame. The burning wick leans to one side like the right-hand side of the letter 'n'. There is a red-hot tip to the top. The actual flame carried by the wick is perhaps two-and-a-half to three times the wick's height. It looks like a Klansman. The artist, though, is as still and as serene as the flame. She will be working tonight. I just know it. In fact she rises presently from the bright red sofa, comes towards me, and moves a variety of working items onto the table. She is also moving the flame. The candle is still but the flame is definitely moving around. It is dancing, strutting, jigging, twisting, two-stepping, tangoing, tapping, hoofing it, doing the rhumba. This candle is going to watch the artist tonight.

Get Well Soon

It is not often that the artist is ill. It's the first time in 118 daily blogs she has been sick, under the weather, beneath the clouds, below the early autumn wind. For most of the day she has been camped in bed and, to be perfectly honest, pretty miserable. She has what we call these days 'some kind of virus'. Rather attractively, she doesn't really know how to be ill. I believe this to be fairly common among very active people, though not necessarily among artists. A number of today's artists - if you think about it - have taken to their beds long enough to have made entire wards of iconic works of art about them. Beds in one form or another litter the contemporary art world's subconscious like sweetie wrappers across an unruly playground, or condoms across a bordello floor. You could even say some of these artists are greater authorities on their own beds than on any other area in today's tumultuous designer showroom of an art world. Turner? No. Beds? Yes. Doig? (Who?) No. Sheets. Why, sure. I have read or heard of many such artists calling off sick and staying in bed all day because they are unwell, which can admittedly be some kind of euphemism for genuine depression, a hangover, a drugs problem, or all three - not perhaps unique to the art world, but true all the same, when all they are doing is researching their next bed piece. But many of these people are what on a sick day you might call professional fakers by calling off sick the whole time, and you have to wonder what that says about their art. No, in my small book, or blog, you have to admire more the artist who tries to shrug off his or her illness. Even if illness, faked or otherwise, can be like a protective blanket, especially to an artist thrust into a limelight which through no fault of their own they do not know how to deal with. Even if no one in their right mind would ever condone the ripping away of this blanket. And nor is illness - oh no - peculiar to today's artists. The history of art is littered with it. Caspar David Friedrich, Jackson Pollock, Adolf Wolfii, Edward Dayes, Edvard Munch, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Mark Rothko. And that's just mental illness. (Nor do I mean to belittle that, either.) One thing I can add, though, is that long before the artist of this blog is fully recovered, she will be supervising the attachment of two new and large boards to the wall, stepping back with a kind of professional detachment, and mentally whacking her virus like a fly. In fact, she's stirring now.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it *

I was thinking again about my lasting but deeply informal interest in art, and where exactly - before I met the artist - the seeds of this interest were planted. I can say with personal authority that I have parked neatly somewhere in my psyche memories of some of the paintings my grandfather collected, and I can recall in my mind many of these images by simply closing my eyes. Indeed, I am recalling many of them now. They were otherworldly: indicative of places I did not know and therefore yielding of a mettle-like potency. For example, there were two polar images in oils with ornate old frames. One of them had an Eskimo in the foreground and a harness of huskies leading a sleigh across the ice. In the distance of the other was a pair of magnificently pinking glaciers. Both enjoyed these long and confident sweeps of ice - like the gestures of a wise man - but instead of these polar images generating the notion of cold, both had the power to warm, with an almost exotic strangeness. On many a summer's evening I would sit opposite them, staring at the unlikeliness of it all, while waiting to go downstairs, arms linked, for dinner with my grandmother. Another image I remember well was one of a country field with a five-bar gate whose shadow was deliberately incorrect. (Have I mentioned this before?) There was the slightly kitsch image of a seaside village - not the one we were in - with birthday cake colours on slightly simplistic buildings. (This one, I think, I simply tolerated.) One of my favourites was the small image of an old ship on a storm-tossed sea. It was done in ink and watercolour, and the white caps on the water were like a myriad of nervous scratches. Another favourite was a beautiful inland river: somewhere in the corner of the large oil painting was the concentric ripple from what you presumed was a fish having leapt from the water, a salmon perhaps, or handsome brown trout, only every time you looked at the picture you kept missing it. I use to sit there for ages, entranced by the tall trees on the riverside, imagining somehow that it was a river I knew as well as any place in the world. (My river.) It pains me now to think of them, in that for whatever reasons they suddenly disappeared from my life. And yet I like to think this is more a reflection of a kind of pure love for their beauty than it is of any possessiveness. This is the point I am leading up to. If the precise nature of one's early interest in art has a profound and lasting effect, mine taught me that a largely flat and two-dimensional recreation has the power to transport you in seconds from the ordinary, the mundane. In short, it taught me to respect art's extraordinary power as something bigger than me.
* George Eliot 1819-1880

Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt *

It is the time of year when people get out from wherever they keep them their sweeping brushes, old and new, and scrape away the dry brown leaves, mostly old, as they fall in greater and greater numbers from their tall and creaking trees, often ending up scrunched like bank notes beneath our feet. I am minded to concentrate on one of the pieces done by the artist along this theme. A meditation. It has for example several thousand dry brown leaves in the foreground. These are also at the foot of and around a single modern pram, and in the pram is a child, the artist's son as it happens, aged perhaps three or four, in an autumn-coloured coat and brown trousers, with his hands gently clasped on his lap, and his eyes staring out, upwards slightly, from beneath a hand-knitted hat. Now, between him and the leaves is a slightly frosted stretch of grass, like a blue river, and lining the distance, beneath an almost moody sky, a faintly thunderous blue sky, are some fifty-odd trees, and the hint of a bandstand with its allusion to music, or ghosts of bands past. Hanging from the side of the pram is the artist's handbag, a mad affair which looks part-tapestry, part-lingerie, and part-Victoriana. On the back of the pram is a navy-blue plastic bag. Who knows what this contains but it could be milk or food or tissues or all three. The shadow of the pram points leftwards - the sun is bright and the light as crisp as the leaves - and haunts further some of the fallen leaves. The dominant feature though is one of contemplation. The child seems to represent life and the leaves seem to represent death. It is an iconic image. It is an image that will be subliminally familiar to many people, especially mothers. It does not look down at us, but it seems to know more than us. If you look closely enough, the eyes of the child may even be peering at the sky, or towards the heavens. What is interesting, too, is the presence of green leaves on the trees in the background, some of them not evergreens, and this pricks our interest further about the tree, which we do not see, that has shed so many crisp brown leaves in the foreground. It is life and death done with love.
* William Allingham (1821-1889)

The Importance of Being Artist

If a man or woman is creative, and ideas, as well as actions, pour forth the whole time, I know for a fact the world is a better place. We are not here for so very long on this planet - of ours? - and though these words smack of an over-tender idealism, it is none the less good to give a positive account of ourselves, especially if we are lucky enough to do so in a way that can give pleasure long after we are gone. Also, there is the atmosphere created by a person when they are unleashing their best creative juices. This atmosphere is intense, sometimes rigid, occasionally fraught, but also moment-enhancing, light-giving, granting every second a kind of spit-roast glory, and turning each breath into not just a shrewd investment but a pleasurable moment. If this sounds faintly spiritual, let us remember that even some of the hippies who grew out of the west coast of the Sixties were just as spiritual as they were creative. (And where, you wonder, is the peace movement now?) It may seem banal, especially in these greedier times, these protest-free times, to be thinking rosily of all those who preferred to withdraw from the rat race, those who lived on little, who raised families, almost entirely with creativity in mind. But they gave a pretty good account of themselves, too. Some went on to become global leaders. One of them owns most of the software I use. Many of the people leading the movement today towards a healthier planet acknowledge the Sixties as the place where their ideals germinated. In this day and age when you talk about people being creative, it is not unusual for the talk to be met with a cringe or a shrug. (Indeed, you may very well be cringeing now.) But when creativity is in pursuit of something essentially good, something restorative and tonic-like, like a sweet and plaintive moment with a violin, it takes a cruel man to knock it. There is also the self-compassion inherent in expression, which is not to be confused with self-love. I know songs written in pain which produce light, and I am familiar with paintings sourced from darkness which hundreds of years later continue to enlighten. No, the next time you do something creative, ask yourself, go on, how does it make you feel? (See.)

He who limps is still walking

The artist with effort pulled out three of her large pieces from their neat but ever-expanding parking space by the door, and I must admit I was stunned. I think I have said this before but when you don't see the work for a while you are immediately struck by the intensity of detail. There was an element of defiance in this gesture, too, after yesterday's failed meeting, which is being rescheduled by the way, but there is also a kind of regrouping taking place as the artist contemplates a new image she wants to do, which both corresponds with the others and yet takes them all forward. No, the artist left in high spirits when she went off to work on her mural; I had business in the centre of the capital and left similarly propelled. After doing what I had to do I went to see a film made by a friend and former colleague. (I seem to be surrounded by images these days.) It is set on the fringes of the war zone and is based on a true story - frankly speaking, the beheading of a journalist. It was an unfussy film and - through the eyes of the journalist's surviving pregnant wife - just got on with it, if you can imagine such a thing. For me, the message of the film was clear: terrorism only succeeds if you let the terrorist terrorise you. I came away from watching it, still depressed generally about the situation, maybe even more so, but also reminded of the danger of blanket cultural dismissal. On another front, a more selfish one but all the same important, I had a huge amount of communications taking place in between the events of my day, and my world feels like a busy place at present. A dear friend, a musician, got in touch. He is building a small studio. Two big players in the work department also got in touch. Also a newspaper. And a TV news channel. But perhaps the nicest message of all, certainly as far as the artist is concerned, came with the offer from another friend of a list from him of all the galleries he knows well as an art critic, so that the artist can let him know which ones she wants him to get in touch with on her behalf. Champion.

I Beg Your Pardon

I take a seat in an empty room full of chairs. A rude film crew stumble in, noisily setting up, the legs of the chairs scraping. They are laughing, speaking what I think is Persian or Farsi. One of the people organising the talk enters with her arms folded, defensively. 'Why didn't you give me a phone call telling me you were filming?' she says. The man in question deliberately ignores her. He nods, saying one or two niceties, but basically he is very busy hoping she does not tell him he cannot film, which is something he does by looking away and studiously engaging one of the men he is with. There is a Dylan song that comes to mind, in which he sings about how everything is broken. This morning the artist went off so positive and polished, only to have the person she was meeting stand her up. This was the important art world connection. The man who was going to put her in touch with a gallery. But the man she was to meet is busy, he has just become a father again, he is running one of the largest databases, he is hanging a show, he was about to fly off to Milan, he is ... bla-bla-blah. He had an appointment with the artist and did not make it. Of course, the artist forgives him. She is the last person in the world who ever wants to be a bother to someone. But that is not the point. Anyway, the rude guy in the room full of chairs waits for the woman to leave, which she eventually does, and he sighs with relief, even laughs. I feel like going up to him and pulling out the plugs to both his cameras and mikes, but I, too, am a guest. Anyway, I am at a talk and the room soon fills up. Appropriately, given my mood, the talk is on war. There are photographs of suffering on the wall - famous war images. Why is it that when reportage shows suffering you take it seriously but when so much of what passes itself off as art these days contains suffering, a large part of you simply does not buy it? (One female artist who makes millions for her art was worried about her cat in the national press the other day.) I look around the room. There is a man to my right. He didn't get back to me either. Someone a few rows behind was going to get back, too, get someone to get in touch with me. He didn't. What rank odour do we create that has us treated so? Or has there in fact been a total breakdown of manners and respect in our culture? (Everyone seems to care only about one thing and that is themselves.) Fear not. We shall not cease from exploration. At the end of the talk, given by a very senior soldier, someone told this very soldier that he had been filmed throughout for a TV programme and he hit the roof. He thought it was in-house. A couple of government image minders were called to the stage. They didn't really know what to say. There was chaos. It's not my job to watch people's backs. (I'd be good at it, though.) But someone ought to. They might want to deal with people's manners while they're at it, too.

Space, Sponsor and Spiel Ltd

I received an email from a friend across the ocean today who has always been a good ally to the artist. I have mentioned him before. He is an extrovert introvert. He is also a great communicator and I marvel at his witty take on the serious side of life, as well as his seriousness on fun. He was in part getting in touch to inform us about an exhibition curated by the man - the ally and friend - whom the artist is seeing tomorrow. I had already seen some reproductions of the work this contact is showing in collaboration with another gallerist. One was in the email, too. They are sometimes large and detailed drawings, as in the artist's work, though the artist of the images uses only pencil. The subject matter is more public and kind of earnestly symbolic. More masculine, in a way, too. More butch. There is no hint of any of the motherhood, say, or out and out acknowledgement of childhood, in the artist's work. But not everyone, I concede, is interested in that, or brave enough to admit its overwhelming importance. Life hangs from it. Tomorrow relies on it. I hope the artist enjoys the experience of seeing someone about her work tomorrow, even though that person is not the person with the actual gallery but the person with the connection to that gallery. I am sure she will be more than fine. Even if nothing comes of it, she is still a great artist. It is absurd in a way that the artist should have to do all this leaping, so precariously, from one rock of hope to another, when in fact her work is really so much bolder than most people's work, and her ideas so much more developed and evolved. I don't wish to come across as arrogant in any way on behalf of the artist but it must for her be rather like being the brightest person in the room, and, one by one, having to wander with your cup and saucer up to every living soul, and listening to their life stories without ever once being asked about your own, which is epic if only they knew, gripping, dashing, industrious, eccentric, passionate, sweet, sweeping, grounded, and ongoing. Who knows, maybe we will just have to end up putting on an exhibition of the work ourselves. With this and the previous 111 daily entries as part of our catalogue. All you seem to need these days is space, sponsor, and spiel.

A Blast From The Artist's Past, Part 2

I was walking towards the exit of the train station in the centre of the capital, wary of the torrents of rain about to consume me, when I saw coming towards me, like a familiar shape rather than face, one of the artist's ex-boyfriends. I had met him like this once before, which is to say at a station. Anyway, I called out his name, just as he was about to pass, and he stopped in his tracks, wheeled the bike back a few revolutions, and returned the greetings. He is presently nominated for some major art award, but I did not mention this, although I did make reference to his appearance on a well known arts TV programme. He and the artist have not for some time seen one another and I was keen to pass on the artist's new details. The ex-boyfriend did come to our wedding, it must be said, so there was no particular axe to grind. No, I found myself discussing the artist's new work, just as I did at the previous railway station before my long walk when I met another of the artist's contemporaries. I was like an ambassador for the artist as I made my update, filed my piece, came on air. I explained, without any sentimentality whatsoever, the huge progress the artist was making, and I said that she was now in a position to begin showing the work around. (She still has her meeting on Wednesday.) He did seem interested, he really did, but it is always difficult to tell with artists. They are by and large interested only in themselves, but instead of this being any kind of self-love thing, it is usually a simple case of creative self-preoccupation. I don't know. All artists are like children. That's probably why I like them so much. Anyway, he looked marginally uncomfortable after a while but he was soaking wet and it is no fun being stationary and wet and increasingly cold. We spoke for some time, initially about children. I mentioned the uncollected conkers in the park and he seized upon this, at least I liked to think so, as if the next piece he does might very well be a lone chestnut, say, on a tallish white plinth. 'The Collected Conker', it could be called. Stranger things have happened.

A Work In Progress

The artist sits down opposite. She positions herself to one side on one of five wooden chairs and places a pile of papers on her lap. Shifting again, she clears a purposeful space on the table, sniffing slightly, and flattens a sheet of paper. She now opens a large Cadbury's Milk Chocolate Fingers tin containing what must amount to several handfuls of Derwent Graphic pencils. I am looking at one closely now. It says HB. Just then, our son comes running in. He is wearing his pyjamas and really should be asleep. He wants a drawing book. He wants to draw something. Instead of being reprimanded, he gets what he wants and races back to the bottom bunk to do a drawing while his big sister on the top bunk reads her Horrid Henry book. The artist now gets down to work in earnest. She is beginning a new miniature. At this point, our daughter declares in a loud but musical voice from the bedroom that she is in fact ready now to go to sleep, and the artist, still sniffling, rises from the table and walks to the bedroom, leaving the HB pencil on the table, pointing randomly north-west, and the image in a fledgling, unspent state. 'Am I a nutter doing these pieces?' she says, returning. 'Yes,' she replies, to herself. A strange radio programme is playing American music with a slow country feel and steel guitar. I am asked about now how many tiny figures might work best on the right hand side of the image. This will happen sometimes but what I say has no bearing on any final decision. (I am happy to report.) No, the artist, like all good artists, always does what she wants to do and I would expect nothing less. I look at her now. The pencil is very sharp. Her fingers are clean, too. Her wedding ring and engagement ring, modestly purchased as they were, shine prominently, like marriage, from her wedding finger. I have no ring on my hand but some paper by it, like the artist. On one page I am told of lichens and mosses. 'Soak overnight,' it reads. 'Add to stews.' The artist meanwhile is on her feet again, pouring a glass of milk for our son, in response to a spoken request I didn't even hear. Now she has to get some water for our daughter. The image, like an unfinished miracle now, still awaits its creator, who sits down in the end with a sigh, wiping her tap-wet hands on the sides of her jeans, before resuming work again. I can feel the sharpness of the lead this time, scratching the paper. Her breathing increases, too. She is getting into this. With any luck, the children will remain asleep now. (Oh-oh. Our son comes back, head bowed, but is taken back to bed.) 'What is this?' says the artist: it is George Formby on the radio. (What's he doing in this blog?) A light flickers from the children's bedroom. The artist is off again. They are not asleep. 'Night night,' I say, making my point. Silence.

Stephen Fry

I woke up this morning without too many aches and pains in my legs from my walk and made my way cheerfully enough down to the shops with my five-year-old son by my side. He has a wonderful way of walking. He walks fast, then slow, then fast, then slow again. It goes on like this for some time. We entered the newsagents together. One of the available newspapers carried an article about Stephen Fry, I noticed. On our way towards the coffee shop, fifteen minutes later, an article fluttered in the bin. I swear. It was an article about Stephen Fry. Passing by in a green car, I'm sure, was a good friend of the artist. Now she is always going on about Stephen Fry. 'Watch QI,' she says, affectionately professing like-minded intelligence. Then, as I sat down in the cafe and looked at the newspaper more closely, I realised that on one of the TV channels there was dedicated an entire week to Stephen Fry. But hadn't another channel just done that? Didn't they do that about two or three weeks ago? I know: I never usually mention anyone by name like this in the blog. I feel slightly vulgar doing so. But I feel this need now, I really do, to report far and wide, despite my small readership, the outbreak in this one country of what I suppose we should call stephenfrytis. Or Fry Flu? Don't get me wrong. I have been lucky enough to meet this man who can no longer remain nameless on a number of occasions. He is a terribly nice man. The first time we met was at a magazine lunch and I was on my way to the Middle East. He didn't know me from Adam, which was perhaps not inappropriate given where I was going, but he was very friendly and attentive. He was to everyone. The next time we met I was coming out of a shop having purchased a kilt jacket which he remarked upon kindly and loudly. One of the last times we met was at the launch party of his directorial debut. On each occasion, it must be said, he was wonderful company. But I do not quite see why everything now has to have the Stephen Fry stamp. Bipolar. AIDS. Genealogy. IQs. Poetry. Comedy. The Novel. Royalty. Prize-giving. Apparently he has just turned fifty. I keep thinking of the woman's headstone yesterday. 1877-1977. Freida Jepson was her name by the way.

A Small Notch In The Green Belt

The artist said she missed me today. I was honoured. I left early this morning. I met a friend at the station by accident, then a friend of the artist at another. (For years, a cast of her naked breasts leaned against the wall of the artist's studio, and it was impossible - in a clean sort of way - not to remember this as she gesticulated across her coffee.) An hour later, the friend I had really come to meet - an Arabist with a military bent - was walking in front of me at a cracking pace through pure countryside. Two men and a country trail. Tall trees, as a community of branches, met overhead. Lonely tracks, searching for something, went this way and that. We were, in fact, aiming on walking for the next six hours and we were just warming up. It was amazing to think, as blackberries scraped and nettles bent, that the city was only half an hour away. (Incredible: nobody around.) We were playfully showing off by running now, probably unnecessarily, up a steep hill - which went mockingly on and on - and we encountered a harras of horses to our right, at the top by a long swooping line of pylon wires. For the next half an hour, we walked through dense forest, past dangling hawthorns, before emerging into the green damp light of a small proud field. And the only sign of human life, when it finally came, was in the form of a woman on horseback using a mobile phone. She soon galloped off. We were walking in a giant rectangle and the booklet we were using as our map enjoyed quaint phrases and signs such as 'ignore ways off' and '(!)'. Just then, a hare darted in front. (!) A sign warned of baby deer. Two pheasants took flight. More horses, these ones like shire ponies, puffed and neighed. My legs were doing well, though. I have a bad right leg at the moment but it was equal to any task, I noticed, including a regular succession of sometimes gnarled stiles, which left me thinking it was not as bad as I thought, which is a good thing. We nibbled on our dried and sliced mango nicknamed 'calf's tongue'. The damp meanwhile had turned into a sharp and biting rain and as a result my waterproof leggings justified their inclusion in my rucksack. We approached a famous old poet's cottage. Respectfully, we lowered our voices as if careful not to interrupt his train of thought, even though he has been dead 325 years. At one point I peered into the smoky windows, looking for clues, and saw a colour TV blazing back. We ate brown bread and salmon by a church. We moved on, past a wall of blackthorns, or sloes. Several miles later, we passed through a small Quaker graveyard and one of the graves bore the name of a woman and the dates of 1877-1977. Remarkable. Now, the artist and the children are in bed and I am sitting at the table with unbelievably aching legs and feet, so glad I've written this down before collapsing in a heap. Nature. I tell you.

Skateboards and Art Boards and Overlords

Our son really wants a skateboard. I left the artist with an old friend and went off to the station alone. A skateboard? He's only five. Anyway, much of the city was coming one way and I was going another. I forgot about the skateboard, though I could have done with one. I thought about salmon instead, bouncing their bloody bellies upon tooth-like jagged rocks. They, too, go one way while everything else goes another. Staring out the train window, the sun was out and the sky was blue but there was an almost nostalgic sight of the faintest of condensation rising from people's mouths at the platforms. I was also thinking about the artist. She also exudes - energy, in her case. She was receiving some new boards for her work later on, she had been working on her miniatures earlier, and she was still doing her mural. The stuff of industry, she is. Anyway, I am going on a long hike tomorrow and needed to get some new boots, my previous pair having come away at the heel. I used to know a great deal about boots. I still know, for example, that it is bad news to go for a long hike with a brand new pair but it's either that or wear some brogues which will not protect my ankles if I go over on them. What has this got to do with art? Well, I was also on my way to see an exhibition in an old brewery. The exhibition is by a man in his seventies whom I first met as long ago as 25 years. We have a pleasantly sporadic history together. Across the ocean, when I was with him on his fiftieth birthday, I developed appendicitis. It was with him I once ate lambs' tongues from a giant pan of boiled water when I went to see him one snowy January in his reconstructed castle in the land of the northern chills. Anyway, his work has taken a significant turning again. After years of impressing traditionalists with his early swing from Pop Art to formal sculpture - largely figurative, bronze sculptures - he has gone all Pop Art again, but with a savagely delivered anti-war message and a sweeping back-up of images of torture, Masonic undertones, consequences, and death. The space, it must be said, was gigantic, but the work somehow justified it. Art still talks after all, I was thinking. It was also fantastic to see him again, and to be reminded of this incredible engine he has. I spoke to one of his sons, who was there as one of his father's biggest fans, about this very point. (And to think: he once drank tea with his brother in my little flat across the ocean when he was only thirteen.) He agreed wholeheartedly: his father had one hell of an engine. I think we were all impressed, even if the work is so convinced of its anti-war stance it has to forget the true complexity of the paths still running today to and from the war zone. (Indeed, if only it was a simple case of right and wrong.) Anyway, when I came home and finally sat down on the bright red sofa, I saw our son had made a card. It was of a skateboard. A beautifully rendered diagonal of skate and board. I tell you, art really does still talk.

We Shall Overcome

We have arranged and confirmed the artist's preliminary meeting next week with the old friend who will orchestrate the follow-up encounter with the gallerist with the new white space. It is something to jolt the undoubted labour into a different kind of interaction. And this is good. The artist in the meantime stepped out into the sudden cold this morning and worked for hours in a blustering wind on the mural she is doing as a gift and significant gesture to the school our two children attend. She has been meticulous, practical, seeking advice on paints. Today as a day has turned up its collar. It has been the sort of day to wear only what a polar ice-cap can inform. The heavens have been moody, too, with various warrior seagulls gliding sideways hundreds of feet up in the air and deliberately miles from the sea. Talking of stature, I saw the mural yesterday. It is quite some piece. I think I was taken aback by the scale when I first set eyes upon it. To paraphrase J.D. Salinger again, it raises high the roof-beam, carpenter. In fact, the entire tone of the building's otherwise tawdry architecture is somehow lifted. As I write, the artist is now working on the miniatures, an action matched by our eight-year-old, who is doing an image, also small in scale, of something already done by the artist. Like mother, like daughter. Like art, like art. Our five-year-old is on the floor, checking the various angles he can look at his detailed plastic boar-drawn chariot from. He is like a small film director, a tiny Cecil B. DeMille, doing a kind of surreal bible scene. Come to think of it, what we could enjoy now are one or two sumptuous miracles. Keep the faith.

Save The Children

A controversy rages today over the attempted inclusion in a major show in a leading art museum of a piece containing child nudity and deliberate sexual provocation. Quite rightly, in my opinion, a gallery worker complained to the police about the work. Now, the gallery, as well as the artist, and the extremely well known collector, are under investigation. What the art world seem to forget in attempts to defend such things is that we have a minor being photographed naked here - with its legs apart, according to some reports - and without that minor being in a position to prevent it. Before going anywhere near the issue of what this kind of imagery might ignite in a particularly sick mind, it is exploitation anyway. (I have another gripe - that of the use of dead people in clips, presumably without their permission, such as Steve McQueen in a famous TV commercial, but here we are talking about the living.) There happens to be another artist who has been under the spotlight for this kind of thing. Years earlier she was a model on the other side of the ocean with a fashion photographer boyfriend with a rather tiresome habit of discussing pornography in a loud voice. To have heard this woman a few years ago defend what she was doing - she was photographing her children in studiously lurid poses - was, bizarrely enough, like hearing a child going on about what it's like to be an adult. I believe totally that art should be free to express itself. I believe that people should be free to express themselves. But child protection laws are in place for very good reasons and must be upheld. Of course one must defend the undefended, but this is not the same as defending the indefensible. The only good thing is that the museum may be safe from prosecution by virtue of the fact the piece had not yet been exhibited, and it was a museum employee who contacted the police. (People need their museums.) The artist and collector are different. It's sad. Children, clothed, are also the principal characters in the work of the artist of this blog, so there is a kind of clean authority on this subject here, but such a lasting anger at the exploitation at the heart of today's story. I saw the artist in question across the ocean once. It was on a wintry day and she was sitting by a table with vodka bottles. It was during the opening of a photography exhibition. I don't remember much else, except for the fact she looked unhappy. Was she a victim? Maybe she was a victim too.

The dock leaf grasps the nettle

The week has been hit running and today I have made contact about the artist meeting up with the gallerist in the heart of the capital with the new white space. My old friend, the go-between, is also helping arrange all this. All that needs happen now is confirmation of a time and a place for the artist to meet the person doing the introduction, with some recent examples of her work. This will happen some time next week and coincides happily with a rush of work on some miniatures - black ink on white paper - which accompany the larger pieces, excitingly, like a magnifying glass on some different but connected path. I am watching the work being done right now, four feet away from me, with the unusual sight of a sharp and old-fashioned nib in her hand and an opened bottle of ink. I am tapping on the keyboard deliberately gently in order not to rock the work. Also, her head is bowed and her eyes are covered by her hair. The hair is like a drape across the door to a studio. But I am happy there is a hint of progress on the long road which still lies ahead, and I can sympathise with the artist fully that it does not and will not happen overnight. It is not as if she is not doing the work. No, all she really requires now are some intelligent allies who have a great deal more power in the art world than her husband. (There is only so much I can do.) I also sympathise with the artist because the good news is always needed to outweigh the bad. That said, I have received a fresh blast of possibilities due to an important pair of eyes viewing today something or another about me which I am told has muscularised my chances of a posting. Wait a minute. The artist in the course of that second last sentence has questioningly and diffidently presented me with another small image to look at, her natural modesty preventing the work therefore from receiving immediate praise. This is what happens when you show something - which is good - guardedly and defensively - which is bad. People are put on the back foot. I must make a note of gently suggesting to the artist that she be more confident in her meeting. (Easy enough for me to say.)

A Familial Garden By Day

The artist returned with the children. They had just been to the park to do some cycling and drawing, in an age when few mothers take their children to the park to do some cycling and drawing. I had vowed to stay at home in order to attack the obstructive but friendly chaos taking root in the flat. I do the sitting room first, working from one side of the room to the other. My head as I clean is still filtering the myriad of news stories - war, politics, sport - gleaned earlier from the newspaper and Internet. I am also thinking about a friend of mine from school. He spent some of his morning interviewing on TV the most powerful man in the country, in a chummy but penetrating way. I smiled to myself when I was cleaning. I bet he wasn't visiting the skirting boards of his living room with a brush and bent back. When the artist returned they all looked just as they did yesterday after watching that film. Refreshed, in other words, and visibly revitalised. I am full of admiration. I move to the garden with the children and set about playing football with them, plus our own rather eccentric version of rugby. They grow stronger by the day. It is not even them doing the growing, it is nature's relentless and inspiring growth march. In the garden, there are other signs of this thing we call nature. The holly leaves remain a fetching dark green but their berries predict Christmas. An unidentified plant, for most of the year the colour of a dull grey cloth, is suddenly a subtle but gorgeous red. To our right, twining vines of honeysuckle adorn some wooden beams. A dead bee, examined the day before with a magnifying glass, is tipped from a green plastic chair to the grass. Sycamore seedlings lie scattered on the ground, though one is reintroduced to the air again in order to demonstrate its aerodynamic beauty. At one stage as we all wrestle with the ball a few moments later we collapse in a heap of giggles. The alien parakeets I heard screaming in the garden earlier would not have known what to make of it, sunbathing no doubt being more their thing. Later, we return indoors and as a family are all one.

Home Cinema Verite

A channel this weekend is dedicating its entire playlist to a writer whose many stories have been made into films and TV programmes. It is against this backdrop that I study the backs of three watching heads – one adult, two children – on the bright red sofa, though in this instance watching what our man wrote only the screenplay of. I watch on and listen further. The boy’s laughter is the loudest, the girl's concentration the greatest. A man on screen with a makeshift rocket on his back meanwhile squirts water from his mouth. It is a film also from the artist’s childhood, which gives the occasion an added dimension. Indeed the artist says while watching that it really has left an impression on her. This film for some reason passed me by. I think I used to avoid what I considered to be viewing clichés, or obvious events, but it was no reflection on a thing’s merit, more a need I suspect to reinstate a kind of emotional independence on proceedings, brought on by having from an early age no parents. Basically, the idea of a happy family gathered around a film or programme which everyone enjoyed was alien to me, and I think I resented the idea of too much cheerfulness lest it insulted the tragedy of my parents’ early deaths. (How warped is that.) Anyway, thankfully, this didn’t infiltrate my take on art. If anything, the idea of the artist as an independent creative tour de force was incredibly reassuring. I look across the room again. The film is finished and the three figures have dispersed satisfied from the sofa. The boy is lying on the floor with a small plastic boar-driven chariot in his hand. The girl says she is doing nothing but I know she is flicking through a shopping catalogue, just like her father used to do with his grandmother’s favourite store’s catalogue before Christmas. The artist has now returned to the bright red sofa. She is sitting to one side with an ‘unashamedly spiritual’ book on her lap. Actually, the boy is this side of the sofa now, with his dungeon of doom. I think what it is is that they are all energised. The film has stimulated them. It has given them a boost. This is my point about creativity. It is a life force.