Rest: the sweet sauce of labour

The artist was tired yesterday and took a deserved break, watching among other things a three-part documentary on ("Pablo Ruiz") Picasso. She sat there on the bright red sofa with a duvet across her lap looking like a clothed little mermaid. As the life of the prolific legend unrolled before her like an endless carpet. (The person on the sofa also never stops working, never prefers the easy option.) She had worked until two in the morning the night before, having spent the earlier part of the day catering for a friend's two children who were enjoying a sleepover with our two children. But the fruits of her labour were at least in evidence on the wall behind her as she fixed her eyes on the inexhaustible Picasso and his work. I looked at her new piece closely. The depth-of-field in particular. I looked at the piece next to it. The two figures vulnerable. Picasso also enjoyed a long and fascinating biographical thread, we were learning: his images were nowhere near as random as my ignorance had told me. I moved back to the table, dealing with the edges of my own next steps - made small by the great man's work - and my thoughts rolled like a silver ball-bearing from memories of the weekend and my sisters to thoughts about the continued need to find a gallery. (I convinced her to write to an old and well connected friend and artist yesterday and she received a positive reply today.) There is comfort in the fact there is no insincerity. Indeed, today, in the heart of the capital, talking with a friend off to the war zone, I found myself extolling the virtues of the artist. I didn't go into any real detail. But I didn't have to. He was at her last exhibition in the capital. In fact, if he gets back from the war zone in one piece, perhaps he will be at her next.

"Light (God's eldest daughter) is a principal beauty in building" *

The eldest daughter, which is to say my eldest sister, who had arranged it all, had also been zapped with chemotherapy, though in her most recent case in the hope she may have halted the march of the ghastly disease of the cells. A retired doctor, and old enough to be my mother, she now worked as a volunteer at one of the largest religious buildings in the country, whose head coincidentally - and as a result arguably the second most influential religious leader in the country - swam each morning in the nearby hotel pool. (I told my sister how amazing it would be to meet him for a swim when she told me this.) We were all gathered in the bedroom of two of my other sisters for some champagne. Though I had chosen to drink only tonic water, I let the bubbles explode in my mouth as if champagne, and studied the sides of my two eldest sisters' faces, which is to say the faces of the two with varying degrees of cancer. They were actually talking about when they were children and both enjoyed scholarships to the large girls school eighteen or so miles away from our small family house by the sea. As a result of the scholarships, the state paid a taxi each morning to take them to the nearest bus three miles away. There they would sit together on the bus, they said, staring straight ahead, and often without saying a word. ('She was my best friend,' smiled the younger of the two, the dying one, presently.) Then they giggled, as sisters often do, in fact pretty soon they were all giggling, and we soon forgot about the poignancy of the occasion. I was busy thinking about the fact the eldest sister had lived for many years on another continent, the second-largest and second most-populous, in a place not so very far from where the religious second-in-command, who enjoys swimming in the nearby pool each morning, came from. Some of the other sisters meanwhile flashed more smiles and drank more champagne. It is a strange and no doubt privileged thing to be with five sisters, none of whom you know particularly well when it comes to the everyday features of their lives, but all of whom you can feel like a kind of soft, familial electricity in your bones. It is of course equally strange to be the only male, even if I was already the only male in the family as long ago as just before my voice broke. Anyway, the following morning, while my sisters all slept, rocked but not uninspired by the magnitude and uniqueness of the night before, I dived in the pool and awaited the religious leader. He never came.
(* Thomas Fuller 1608-1661)

"Fair quiet, have I found thee here / And innocence thy sister dear?" *

'Thanks, you've just woken me up,' said the dying sister when I phoned through to her room. The others were in the pool and I imagined I could hear their splashing. I carried my bag slowly through the rain to where my own room was, and once inside stood completely still and in absolute silence. Moments later, I saw a 1981 first edition on the shelf of a book written by a journalistic tribal elder who once came to an exhibition given by the artist. The crowning moment came ten minutes later, shortly after reading about the deliberate running down of the railways of all things to support the car industry: the sister I had rung so unsuccessfully suddenly knocked on my door. Gleaming with the certainty of inner peace, she embraced me most wholly and warmly. Her hair was an honest blue grey, illuminating the blue of her eyes. Her skin showed none of the ravages of the cancer or chemotherapy. She wanted to tell me she had a present for me - Machiavelli's The Prince and The Art of War - and there was a serenity to her movement which challenged all negativity. I sat her down in the armchair in the corner of the room and sat myself on the end of the bed. We sort of fell into each other's eyes, and yet were strong and unsentimental and as thrilled as we were energised to see each other. Without hesitation, our late parents, whom I never really knew, were discussed, and I was told immediately how splendid they were as parents - a bonnie woman, she said, our mother read five books a week and made everyone's clothes - and how our father loved our mother so much it was small wonder he found life so hard after she died so young. She didn't need to mention the fact that by the time he'd pulled himself together, on the weekend of her wedding he literally exploded from a mass haemorrhage. She also mentioned the mysterious plate in his head after an explosion in a training exercise during the war. But the personal was soon swept aside and political issues were now my sister's required subject matter. (She felt the troubles in the war zone were deeply regrettable and probably avoidable, though I said I wasn't so sure if they were avoidable.) She then spoke of her new found faith but how she felt no need to be evangelical about it. The truth is, I'd never seen her look so well in my life and had never felt her strength so much as I did in that room. There was no pettiness - something I suppose we are capable of - and as I opened the door to let the first of the other white dressing-gowned four sisters in after their swim, I felt a huge and fortifying sense of pride in the lack of self-pity on the part of my sister who had stared at the cancer devouring her and most confidently and philosophically taken it as a sign that life was a precious and dignified thing. Thanks, I should have said, you've just woken me up.
* Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Different Flowers from the Same Garden

I am writing this early as I have an important and emotional reunion a few hundred miles away, and I will not have time to write this later. (As a result, there is also one more entry before this that you may not have read.) Anyway, I have risen early in preparation for this trip. It was still dark as I lumbered across the main road in my running kit past the unfinished roadworks. (I am not a natural jogger but do it because I know that it is good for me.) Once I had connected my breathing to the rhythm of my running I was fine. Thoughts. The space you inhabit when you run is a great place for thoughts. For about eight years as a schoolboy I ran every morning, through wind, sleet, rain, and snow, and I don't believe it ever quite leaves you, this feeling that you should be running at the break of each day. At one moment, steam rose from a building's hot water system to my right. I was thinking about my five sisters whom I will be meeting later today. We are coming together in the heart of the country - in the former capital for our illustrious ancestors from across the choppy seas, in fact. It will be a poignant reunion. It always is but this one will be more poignant than ever. One of our six (five plus one) is dying. We are talking months not years. For as long as I can remember there have been no parents around - those whom the gods love die young - so the whole procedure will have its characteristic rudderlessness, though it will be bound with affection. I am the only male and the youngest and have tried hard at times, I like to think, to bunch us together. (I make it sound like flowers in a vase.) When you come at something like this from as abstract a beginning as my own you also experience a kind of alarming clarity about what families really are. When, if you like, any kind of unconditional familial protocol is not in place, only one's wits can take over. The love is secure all right: it just isn't grounded. When you have your own family however, and I am only just beginning to grasp this, it is almost as if the slate is wiped clean, and everything, including the hope, respect, and love you have anyway, is fresh again. No, it will be quite something, something very tender I suspect, seeing my five sisters again, especially as most of our attention will be directed towards the sickest in our ranks. The truth is, I am not very close to my sisters. But I have, in my own way, looked out for them, kept a quiet eye on them, all my life.

The challenging absence in a spirited world of what we might call the serious and unjaded...

Before I met the artist, a small part of me was on a kind of spontaneous voyage of discovery about artists anyway. When for example I made my film about an artist - a con artist, he famously liked to call himself - I was living across the ocean. I had meant it as an article, this exploration into the soul of a so-called modern artist, but ten minutes in I just knew it had to be a film. I have mentioned this film before. It was strange because there I was, excited about what I knew was essentially an ugly story about a man who believed modern art was a con and that he was the world's greatest con artist. (He enlisted other people to do his work for him.) In retrospect, what I think I was also doing at the time was mourning the absence of the kind of serious and unjaded work I liked. The kind the artist does here today. Of course I never thought the cynicism in the art world back then would burrow itself so deep in contemporary art's psyche that once I did come across such work, it would have such trouble finding a place to show itself. So what went wrong? Did it all start with postmodernism and the faintly unexamined belief that nothing was as it seems anymore and that nothing therefore could be taken simply for what it was? (Even the long-windedness of that last sentence reminds me of how much I disliked what postmodernism so swiftly became.) Anyway, in my film I had about six principal interviewees who appeared throughout, one or two of them well known writers. The main thread of the film was done in the style of cinéma-vérité, which is to say unbiased documentary realism, and these interviews were an opportunity to take stock of the madness unfolding in both the artist's life and the art world itself. What I realise now is that they were like six horsemen of some kind of art world apocalypse. When I see a human skull now riddled with diamonds I understand everything. We don't give a fig about human dignity. We don't care whose skull it was. We just care about the money. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. I care, and the artist cares, about the man whose skull it was. We care as deeply about the person as you can about someone you did not know but whose dignity you wish to preserve. Diamonds are not a skull's best friend.

Every loss contains its own seed

I have just lost tonight's blog. I spent time with it and now it is gone. I am never convinced it is as good second time around. As I was talking about megacorporations offering more and more megabytes (and counting) of free storage, it may not be such a bad thing it has been consigned to the digital dustbin. But it does leave me hanging around these sentences thinking about the one that got away. (You should have seen it.) I guess I will have to reach for a verbal paint brush and do a still-life instead. So here we go. Two large works of art are attached to one wall, and when I look at them in the half-light I am aware of the atmosphere of the room being absorbed by the medium. I am also aware of the light in the work bouncing back. It is like a swap. Nature as much as portraiture seems to rule both images and this is perhaps no bad construct in an urban setting. The artist is sitting on the bright red sofa after a hard day's work at the art face, not to mention her tireless mothering, and she smooths her sole like an athlete, in between gently closing her eyes. She is actually watching a programme about children adapting to the death of a parent. (A huge subject and one I am an authority on.) Our children meanwhile sleep, or try to sleep, in our bed. I am still irritated at losing my blog but begin to find my way around this sketch. It is really about loss. It is about loss and not talking about it. I am half-listening with headphones to Nick Drake as I write. (His song 'Northern Sky.') A pack of rich tea biscuits lie open and a warm cup of tea sourced from Fairtrade-certified tea growers in East Africa and North India is waiting for me. Losing a parent is worse than losing a blog. I sit back in my chair and feel the cool of the wood press through my shirt. A book of poetry stares at me to my left. I pluck it from the shelf. It is an anthology of modern verse first published in 1936 and I bought it in a Red Cross shop. The first page I open is Wilfred Owen. This is strange as I half-quoted him a few days ago on Remembrance Day. I won't say what it is I read. It is about loss.

The Nightwatchman's Report

I was dreaming presumably and there was a noise. Anyway, I was suddenly awake. The noise was outside. There were sounds and I didn't know what they were. The artist was sitting up in bed too by now. The room was dark, with only a hint of light breathing through the blinds. Whatever it was, we could still hear it. Things were being knocked over, slowly, as if one by one - plastic toys, skittles, a Frisbee, an easel. It could be anything or anyone, I remember thinking. Vigilantly I crept out of bed, one movement at a time, feet placed firmly and quietly on the ground, and made for the children's room. I paused by their thick curtains and made sure to keep very calm. There. Another noise. There was definitely something out there. (I am still careful not to make my presence known at this stage, at least not until I can reach for the light switch which will illuminate the patio like a football stadium.) Click. The light comes on - the same light I used to illuminate my daughter and her friend singing the day before - and the noise is suddenly louder. Then I switch it off again, deliberately creating confusion. Whatever it was, I hear it quickly disappear into the distance. I check the time, keeping as still as possible, though I am conscious of my breathing. It is three o'clock in the morning. Absurdly I think of a Leonard Cohen song. No, that was four in the morning. ("The music on Clinton Street all through the evening.") I switch the light on again and leave it a while. I am now officially unpredictable. Nothing. I hear nothing. I have decided, after much consideration, it was a fox. Fortunately, you see, nothing about the noise indicated something human but half an hour later I am still awake. The artist has fallen asleep. She is curled up beside me like a child. I can hear the children sleeping, too. I lie on my back and lull my toes to sleep and the next time I am conscious it is four or so hours later and all I am thinking about, strangely enough, is how refreshed I feel. No one mentions anything. I wonder if the artist remembers.

The Artist's Daughter

She has been excited all day. Before she left for school with her brother, before she had even dressed, it was written across her poetic face. She was having a friend round later, a slightly older girlfriend, another child of an artist, two artists in fact. (And there is an element of artistic pride in her take on friendship.) Anyway, I manage to get back before them. I have bought a guaranteed succulent medium Oakham chicken, some broccoli florets and full flavoured fluffy Maris Piper potatoes, plus some fruit - apples and bananas - from the open-air fruit store. The artist's daughter is beaming when she comes in the door and presents her friend like a trophy. We have met but I go through a kind of ceremonial greeting procedure. (The artist's son, I notice, will have nothing to do with it: he is on his own agenda and swerves past everyone and parks himself with single-minded strategy in the middle of the bright red sofa.) The artist's daughter meanwhile manoeuvres herself into the kitchen, which of course is suddenly hers, and climbs atop one of the two stools - as if her father had never fallen off a stool himself and snapped his arm like a match. But there is good reason for her climbing because parked behind culinary dullards such as flour and bicarbonate of soda are some secreted sweets, strangers to me, which she pulls out with a kind of heroic flourish and presents to her guest. (I cannot knock the inherent generosity, even if I have no idea how they got there.) The artist's son meanwhile watches Sportacus, one of his superheroes, contriving acrobatic loop-the-loops in a wonderfully fictitious, almost confectionery, landscape. At one point during cooking I hear voices and go out into the darkness of the garden to examine. The artist's daughter and her friend are skipping fearlessly in circles while singing a medley of songs in preparation for an upcoming concert. I switch the back light on and they laugh. Inside, the artist's son turns to the artist, also on the bright red sofa now, and tells her that he loves her. I elect to write it all down before the chicken burns.

A Day In The Life Of An Everbrown

A huge ball of smoke. A crisp blue sky. The ball of smoke rising, growing. Memories of attack. The ball of smoke now like a raised side parting. I walk across the open space taking photographs. I am on my way into the capital, having finished a short script for someone in the war zone. The artist was toiling away by the wall as I left and her mood was single-minded and self-contained. The sky above me now is like a thick grey blanket, a hellish firmament, and the light darkens as if in preparation for thunder. But I have now learned that the smoke is from a fire that was not created by an attack. It is what you might call an innocent fire. (How we measure our dramas these days has been changed.) I show my photos to the man selling coffee at my station. He has been stuck inside his kiosk unable to get out. I show him the images of rising smoke he has been missing, and the idea of me doing so amuses him so much he refuses to allow me to pay for my coffee. Ten minutes later, as my overland train races into the centre of the capital, I stare at the long and bulbous trail of what now looks like pipesmoke animating the sky. In the center itself I meet with a visitor and tell her of this fire. She is from across the ocean and the friend of a good friend. We compare cultures like car enthusiasts. The light in the centre is rich and autumnal but when we come across a giant evergreen turning a sad brown we don't know what to say. Eventually my visitor friend suggests it is trying to blend in with the others. I say it will turn completely brown and the others will suddenly turn green and say they were only kidding and it will be too late. Later, I pop into the gallery which the artist visited the other day. The gallerist is engaged in conversation with two others, so I refrain from asking why he has not got back. I am glad I say nothing to him in the end. The space is good and the work serious, if a little dated. On the train back home the smoke has disappeared. Inside the flat, the artist has stopped working. And there are pancakes on plates.

RIP: Red lips are not so red

It is especially useful to take stock of all that is good in one's life on remembrance day, memorial day, decoration day, ANZAC day, call it what you will day. Just as it is important to commemorate the dead or slain, now or in the past, which is what we do, and will continue to do, though it properly aches when we do so. War is war today. Art is art. Take the battle represented in this blog, which is to say the fight to get an exhibition. It bows meekly, and must, in the face of human sacrifice, though it can for the artist sometimes feel like hell. There are not shells exploding as she walks - and she is the first to acknowledge this fact - and the real battle for the artist is not in trying to get an exhibition anyway. The real battle, the true battle, is in the work itself. The constant, daily straining to keep up with the rigours of the original idea. The deliberate, subsequent tending of the task at hand. No, art is not war, and the artist knows this fact, and it is not always true that a great war leaves a country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. There can also be an army of artists. Yes, art can have a role in this recovery. It should be a kind of celebration of peace as well as any visual valediction. Besides, all sorts of battles are going on all the time, and each have their own ways of being remembered. One writer who wrote about war in his very first novel lost his battle against death only yesterday, but for him everything was a fight anyway. His second love was boxing and a kind of lyrical pugilism ran through just about everything he thought and did. (Oddly, he was both an anti-feminist and liberal, which is tough to digest.) His battles were largely masculine. As are war's. (Though I do remember on the edges of one recent splintered campaign on the continental mainland seeing women on the sidelines positively baying for blood.) War kills. Sometimes it must. Art breathes. It lives forever. Let us make great art while remembering the dead. But let us not forget why.

True Story

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

When words express

The image is a powerful thing. But it is also a very personal thing. For example I lived much of my childhood in a property by the sea and was a few moments ago looking up information on this area when I came across part of this property for sale again. Furthermore there was a photographic tour through the very property available and like a person passing a childhood venue for the second time and finding the door open, I couldn't help but pop my head in. In fact I took the artist to this very building on a number of occasions, and have mentioned it in this blog as the place where she finished a series of images of my relatives from the flatlands across the roaring sea. Anyway, some of the rooms on display during my virtual tour had been tarted up: I use the phrase correctly I believe. What once were bright and often pale-walled modest rooms were now brash and bordello-like expressions of ghastliness. (The price, too, was obscene.) Through one of the windows I could see one of the gardens and could not bear to think while staring unblinkingly at this latest rendition, that once upon a time I ran about in such gardens, picked rhubarb, weeded, watered them. It was to me such a beautiful place, a special place, and is now about simply sixteen uncommunicative and cramped looking flats. I could feel the spirit in my bones tingle, like a lampshade of knives clinking in the wind. Now, to anyone else such images would probably represent only the unremarkable. Another example, say, of people's poor taste when it came to what they imagined prospective buyers liked. (Worst of all: they were probably right.) To me, though, it was like someone was meddling with my past and though this is not an experience peculiar to me it was only me feeling it at the time. A great artist, I suppose, is capable through images of conjuring up such feelings, but when it comes down to it in this instances, only these words will I think do. The past is indeed another country. Boy, they do do things differently there.

Strategic communications

So the artist, looking like one of those intelligently fetching female characters in an early Truffaut film, met with my friend in the art database world the other day. He was very helpful and companionable, as indeed he often is, and they discussed at some length the artist's various strategies, certainly to a degree later considered both helpful and kind by the artist. As I think I have alluded to already, the artist then met the gallerist in person, though for one reason or another, or maybe none, he was too busy to meet at first, but they did sit down together in the end, about an hour later, across from one another like characters in an oil painting, card players perhaps, discussing the precise merits of the artist's work and its subject matter. The email, which the artist was then asked to follow up with, took place the following Monday, in fact three days ago, but she has heard nothing back yet. (Silence can be painful for the artist, even the artist's husband, as it reeks also of a kind of bad manners.) Anyway, people who work in galleries are often telling you how busy they are - unlike aid workers, or frontline soldiers, or secretaries for absentee bosses, who really are - though from my experience this so-called 'busi-ness' invariably incorporates simply moving from the phone to the newspaper and back again, in between a cigarette perhaps, though less and less, a sip of wine, or a strong coffee, oh and the odd stroll around the gallery if someone with what looks like a fat enough wallet walks in. I hate to say it but there is nothing, or at least very little, sacred about the capital's private art galleries, certainly as far as I can see, which admittedly may not be very far. I have seen more manners in a small seaside store selling crayon drawings than I have in any artistic venue in the capitals of the world. (Talking of which, not even Vincent Van Gogh could sell in a major sale last night, I also noticed, which must be saying something not only about our economy but about the fickleness of fashion, also.) Anyway, the gallerist in question, a man I must respect, has told the artist he will think about it, so I suppose the best thing to do is to let him think about it, and without any further disturbance. I wonder, though: where he will do this thinking? I suppose it will have to be in his head as he has none of the artist's work, not even reproductions, though the offer did reappear in the artist's email on Monday that she is willing to bring the work round to the gallery, if in fact he is insufficiently motivated to come and see the work for himself. No, where, I wonder, will he think about it? Will he stare out at the masses pouring through the capital and think about the artist's claim that there is little of the big world pouring through today's great art? Or will it come to him while staring at the glint in a child's eye as they stare up at their father, say, while feeling momentarily fearful of the world? Or, like much else in the world, will it rely totally on self-interest? As sure as this sentence will end, the artist will get a show somewhere.

The Artist's Lot

The artist's daughter wakes up on the top bunk, a crisp light streaming through the gaps in the long thick curtain. She yawns. Her mouth is dry and her head still full of dreams. Slowly, she raises that head and bends her shoulders and looks round. From where she is looking she can see the artist and artist's husband in their bedroom with the door open across the small hall. She shuffles across the duvet cover and makes it down the small stepladder attached to the side of the bunks. I hear her feet reach the carpet. A few moments later she is standing by our door yawning. Her eyes are rubbed and she makes it to the living room. Our son, her brother, is still asleep. He is lying on his back and like a gunshot victim has his arms spread back. But there is a smile on his face and it is the smile of humour and warmth. After he wakes up and also wanders into the living room the two of them are instructed to wash their teeth and dress. After some breakfast, toast on this occasion, a friend of theirs arrives whose sister is ill and father unable to take the healthy one to school, so she has come to spend a half an hour with us. These, I was thinking as I watched from afar, are the underlying realities of life. This is the true canvas from which the artist's work is primed. And yet there is no humdrum in the work. There is no ordinary. The work is on a far larger plain than that. And there is nothing plain about it.

Sgozzata Studentessa

The murdered British student killed abroad last Friday was studying in a town where I lived for almost a year when still in my teens. As a result I can imagine only too well the innocence with which she would no doubt have taken her growing self through those first few doors into suddenly unpredictable early adulthood. Any tale of innocence slain is a sobering one, but this one for me is made especially sad when I remember only the abiding warmth and loveliness of the city where she died. They say she was a Facebook user. Perhaps her killer - or killers - saw postings about the upcoming party and planned the moment from there. Maybe they were the three friends or acquaintances arrested today. Or was this all a terrible mistake? I survey in my mind the romantic contours of the centre, like a torch down ancient lanes. A friend of mine died this year. He was an internationally recognised thriller writer whose central character was a detective from the country in question. (He, the writer, like me, also studied in this town.) Anyway, the writer's alter ego police commissioner with his existential manners and love of simple cuisine would have been baffled by this one, certainly by the seeming absence of anything bigger than a penknife and, once again, the poignancy of innocence. For what it is worth, I can remember wandering this provincial city whilst enjoying the company of people from all over the world, and I find it hard to imagine now such a ghastly event taking place within the old walls. We had no Facebook then but did have our own magazine, a small journal I began with a Mexican muralist friend. We did not have CCTV cameras but did have borrowed cine ones, usually on their last legs. It would be better if something simply went wrong for this reportedly witty and caring young woman, this much loved daughter of a freelance journalist and his wife? Did a hand slip, a bottle break, a fall take place? After meeting someone and fumbling back home with them through a kind of crazed courtship one drunken and unplanned night, did an accident take place? Or did a true kind of darkness, the kind we cannot and must not tolerate, be it in domesticity or terrorism, raise its head? I remember walking home alone close to where she died. I would sometimes have to walk a full six or so miles to the small farmhouse out of town where at first I lived. Okay, it was not an entirely peaceful time. Political kidnappings and executions were not that uncommon. But there was courtship and poetry and song and young love and manners in the air, and the waters in the fountains danced with joy, and there was no mention of the fact that we lived in a world where people might slit your throat. So what a shame, a crying shame, we have to know that now. It is like the artist's work. Innocence through experienced eyes.

Can spring be far behind?

You could feel it even if your eyes were closed and your body wrapped in ermine. I am of course talking about the approaching winter. Sometimes I feel like I am on a boat in the middle of a lake and the mist has descended. My recollection of the shoreline is as misty as my view but I am quite happy just to float across the surface, though I know the water will not always be this calm. With winter there comes a kind of subliminal withdrawal from the world. Not by me but by or in the thoughts of others. I have noticed this despite the imminent parties, the profits, the lifestyle, and inevitable questions about faith. Talking of faith, I persuaded the artist to get in touch with someone today relating to her work and she felt much better about it afterwards. Her initial reluctance is cousined to that same reticence she has about galleries. She also emailed the gallerist she saw on Friday, which is good. It is of course ironic that I should be doing all the cajoling when in fact I can always benefit from some encouragement too. That said, we are supportive of each other and this not only is the key to the work but also the life. For my part, I have been juggling with the various potentials surrounding me. (Do they see me as still on my boat on the lake?) The stakes are high and the possibilities include pretty serious responsibilities, which I welcome. One chance. That is all I need. Likewise the artist.

Spirit in the Sky

The artist's lot is presently a busy one. In fact we are both tearing across our options. For example, we park the children at two separate houses with friends - something we do so seldom - before the city explodes in a mass of trailing fireworks and sparkling derring-do. We travel across the capital like salmon against the flow and make our two meetings. The first is with a husband and wife team - she one of the most successful soul and R&B singers in the world and he her charming and friendsome co-writer and producer. (Even more importantly, two great folk.) Where we meet is like having walked into a gabled timeslip, with the ghosts of famous characters hobbling in rhyme down long cobbled alleyways. I even imagined Eliot's fog rubbing its poetic nose against the building as I stared out at the smokers sharing grins and giant sighs. In a kind of cinematic half-light indoors, we discuss relationships - our relationships, maybe all relationships - in the face of creativity, and the need therein for non-judgemental support, uncramped style, and playful honesty - honesty about one's life: life often mirrored in the work - at a time when most of the art of our culture is a one-liner idea executed by others and glorious life as a result completely blanked. Anyway, we, the singer's and artist's husbands, chatted among ourselves, admiring the progress of the sisterhood next to us. Two hours later, we said goodbye, promised to do it again, and disappeared into the imaginary fog. Now, we had to see the huge fans of the artist's work at a party they were having. There on the wall below the skylight in their generously sized living room was a freshly framed image of their four children adorning a felled tree, with perhaps three thousand leaves bristling within. This had been done by the artist. Immortality as a theme in discussions about portraiture is nothing new. But as everyone spoke and I stood alone by the image, I was made aware of something else. A kind of frank indivisibility. Three brothers and one sister. Whatever else happens, their unity, certainly in this image, remains intact. Is this what they mean by an artist's gift?

Setting One's Stall Out

This blog I am noticing is like a form of occupation. As such, it has been over one hundred and forty days of work to date and to miss one day, as in a way I have done, is rather like how I imagine a diligent post office teller might feel the one winter day when influenza gets the better of him and he is unable to attend to the needs of his communicative and literary village. But, and this is the point, I am here now and that has got to be a good thing. As I write, the artist is asleep, as indeed are our children. I have not yet fully established, in other words in great detail, how exactly the artist feels about her day and her meetings with possible progress in the exhibiting stakes. I know we are to write an email to the gallerist, whom she did meet in the end, and that there are reasons to be positive. I also have been very busy myself so once we have fully caught up we will be better poised then to selling the stamps again to the important local population of our need to do things. I think it went well. I hope it went well. I know that the first meetings are key when an artist meets a gallerist, and there is no indication that the meetings went badly. That said, no one the artist saw yesterday has seen this new work in the flesh yet, and so, presumably, some kind of meeting is in order for this to take place. As for me, after what for me was a hugely important meeting I had to attend to various other matters, each coming thick and fast. It seems I am not without options in my future pursuits and I must weigh these all up in the course of the weekend, at the same time as demonstrating I hope to all parties nothing but willing. Perhaps I can do it all. That would be perfect. If I can retain a fitness, I don't see why it can't be done. Of course, married to all of this is a real need to see the might of the artist's work in the best exhibition space possible. At lease we have reached the weekend, which in theory should allow at least some of the issues of the day to ease off slightly. We must certainly regroup, and I must hear all about the artist's day.

Creative Sanctity

The artist has what she hopes will be a good meeting tomorrow. (As indeed have I, though another.) Presently she is watching a drama about a brother and sister and their two different ways of dealing with a perceived major injustice, the brother smartly trying to keep the peace and the sister reckless on havoc as revenge. I know a part of the artist's thoughts, the parts you cannot skim over, such as are deployed within and not on top of the brain, will also be thinking about what she is going to say tomorrow, as well as what and indeed which in terms of the reproductions she will show. (The soundtrack on the TV grows tensely cross-cultural.) This meeting is with an old friend of mine, a man I like, whom she was going to meet a few weeks ago. He is the one arranging for a gallery the artist likes to see her. Observing the back of her head, I am obliged to consider it must be frustrating to be expected to represent your work in discussions without the work being there. The reproductions are good - the colours intense and the printing on matt, which enhances the medium. But the artist's work requires being seen in the flesh, far more perhaps than most people's, as the experience of seeing it is as physical as it is cerebral. One idea is to arrange for a vehicle to take the work to the man's gallery. This may happen, in a week or so, after the initial meeting, as the artist has a friend with a large vehicle who has said she will help. I don't have a vehicle but don't like anyway being seen at such meetings or deliveries as I feel a husband can be an impediment in such situations and can apply sometimes unintentional pressure on otherwise working situations. It's not a man-woman thing, more about what I'd call the creative sanctity of the artist. Someone who knows the artist better than the person meeting her will inevitably make that person feel self-conscious. No, this is all about the artist. Not, despite this blog, the artist's husband.

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.