Her Life In A Column

I have a copy of a weekly 950-word column in front of me written by a high-profile contemporary female artist who knows the artist quite well. In fact she replied to the artist's request a year or so ago to meet up, but failed to follow through in the end, though perhaps through no fault of her own. Anyway, as well as soaking up some rays on the other side of the world, the person is now a millionaire. And some. I cut to the chase on this only because she is part of that new breed of artists whose claim to fame is always the great money they are making and never the great art. This is not necessarily their fault and may well grate them as much as it does us. But you imagine they will have a relatively stress-free time reading their bills. Besides, millionaire self-pity next to pages of bombed children does not an icon make. According to the female columnist-artist, I was the first person to write about her in a national newspaper. In her column today she talks chiefly about alcohol, sweat, blood and benders. Her mugshot looks down at you with a kind of unwitting pomposity, especially when you know she's essentially a kind person but locked inside a piece of rolling rolling-stock. Confessionalisms can be quite arresting. To some degree I suppose I am doing one here. But when someone is unhappy and the more unhappy they are the more successful they become, you cannot help but see where the graph is going and fear for the worst. It must also be difficult for the artist of this blog to be working hard without complaint, then read the complaints of an artist in the spotlight. At least the blogger's wife will have the satisfaction of having found a kind of contentment through her children when she exhibits. And will not in her work have been overexposed in public during depths of despair.

Meditatio

A white candle burns by the empty fireplace. A desert lamp leans like a cold ceramic tower to the right of the broken music box on the floor. The candlelight reflected on the white gloss paint next to the fireplace flickers like a burning lighthouse. I hear only silence within the hollow of the unplayed acoustic guitar that comes all the way from China. I sneeze, and the dust particles on the blinds stick their hands up and say it was them. A message flashes up. The so-called anti-spyware device on the computer says it has zapped 19 spyware items. Only because the items are peppered with words such as trade and click and ad and serving do I appreciate their demise. My calf muscles stiffen. The book from my dying sister is on the table. I have not written to her yet. A second lamp meanwhile looks up at me from the wooden floorboards to my left. My son's toy police badge sits on the shelf below the Eliot, Sassoon, Plath, Auden and Hughes books. I think briefly and warmly about the land across the ocean. I think about the month drawing to an end, and I think about money. I think about the art. I hear the artist's voice as she reads a story to the children in another room, and even the cars outside seem to be listening. I hear the dishwasher and smell what I find out are the phosphates, nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, enzymes, perfume, geraniol, hexyl cinnamal and oxygen-based bleaching agent of the dishwasher tablets. (I nearly place the box of tablets back in the fridge after checking the ingredients.) The TV is turned off. I am wondering why I am having trouble finding certain websites. As I await news on a possible job, travel, position, hope, in my mind I am tapping my fingers. At least I am not idle. At least I am looking, however independently, at the big picture with fresh eyes every day. At least if I am running in circles they are at the crack of dawn. I feel like some tea, a perfect cup of full luxurious tea. The candle by the fire meanwhile flickers like a ghost, and I think about my dead parents. Then I think about music. No, I don't think about music, I feel about music, I imagine music, I almost hear music. The artist has had a good day. She has met with the young woman with the gallery and the woman is coming to see the work in the flesh. The candlelight, if I am not mistaken, applauds.

From the moon to diplomacy

On a night when despite the light pollution the sky is clear and the moon is bright, and with my hopes held high like a plate on a pool cue and my mood ambitious, it seems only right I should be attending a screening later about those few brave men who have landed on the moon. (As I alight from the train, I remember the two trainee astronauts I met in the lusty south of the country across the ocean one time and thought were Buddhist monks.) One of the astronauts in the film stared to camera and recalled peering like a child out from the capsule, and how everything he knew, everyone he loved, everything he had ever been brought up to see as his world, he could now hide, conceal, block out, with his thumb. He could hold it out and make it all disappear - it was that small, that fragile, like an unsmudged smudge. It was obvious to another astronaut - like an epiphany, he said, a moment of ecstasy - that when he stared at the moon, the earth, and the sun, he knew, he just knew, he said, there was a major spiritual power out there responsible for all this. Not one of those religions we've created for ourselves in order to make our own kind of sense of the world, but a serious, all-knowing, immense, omnipresent tribal elder of a spiritual power. (Travelling home alone, I was thinking they were all like tribal elders now, these men of the moon, these wacky, far-sighted elders.) They had deep space in their eyes, the big picture. There was nothing small, dull, trivialist, consumerist, or just plain vain about them. In fact I was still thinking about them like this as I rocked and rocketed alone through the underworld on a silver train to my next destination, a talk given by a slightly different tribal elder, a shrewd and cunning man, but an elder all the same. He was talking about the war zone and special relationships, one special relationship in particular. (I thought of my own murmering.) I suppose if I had more time I could knit these two experiences - the men of the moon and the man of the world - into the one jumper. He was candid, unpublished, and at times shone the torch of experience and illuminated all manner of detail. Of his own people, correctly or incorrectly, he described them as poor on vision but good on pragmatics. (The opposite of the artist, I was thinking, who is good on vision but poor on pragmatics.) Later, as I placed all the different pieces together again in my mind, someone stared threateningly at me at the last station. I gently ignored them and stared at the moon, immediately transported. None of them along the line ...

The Messenger Is Massage

Today the artist saw the woman and artist she shared a studio with all those years ago. I gather they were both apprehensive, or excited, about seeing each other again, but it must be said the artist came back looking revitalised, enervated, full of ambition, citing the galleries she now wanted to visit and openings she wished to attend. I always compare it to staring down a tunnel of time when you see an old friend again after a long period of time - in a flash, life speeds up, in the artist's case this time by as much as eight years. According to the artist, her old friend, who looked well apparently, knew exactly where the work was coming from, to use that well-worn genealogical sounding phrase so popular with the art world, and its tangential bloggers. Out of four especially close female artists, it transpires that only one has had children - the artist of this blog. Interesting. Anyway, the artist also has a visit on Thursday to a young gallerist in the capital, someone recommended by my friend the art database guru, all of which of course is like art to my eyes, music to my ears. When you work so long and hard in a kind of vacuum, which is to say a place without immediate gratification, as the artist has done, self-doubt always looms large, or lurks behind hope, like a meddler in the soul. That's it: it lurks. It waits until you are at peace with the world and then attacks you. No, as the friend is someone who has known the artist's work for longer than me, I was more than delighted to hear about the success of their meeting. I was also thrilled it was a serious one-to-one - a long, frank, and intellectual discussion about the work itself, in other words. Furthermore it was something done without me gazing irrelevantly into the conversation. I like not being there. If people ever ask what it's like being married to an artist, I sometimes state, perhaps too clumsily, that it's great to know there is a huge part of the artist's life that has nothing to do with me whatsoever, or at least to know there is a place that is the artist's place, the artist's expression, the artist's world. While the very existence of this blog may suggest otherwise, it is hugely important to me that I can keep a kind of melodic distance from the opera itself, especially when it comes to content. (The artist would have it no other way anyway.) I am merely the messenger, remember. But these are front row seats.

Never try to clean a parakeet cage with a vacuum cleaner

We were bumbling down a nearby lane this morning when we spotted a parakeet in one of the trees. Though they do not hail from these parts, we host a great number of parakeets in this capital. Some of them work very hard. Some of them make an incredible noise. Others flit about silently and at night. I came across two yesterday. They seemed to be working all day long, probably for very little, while the owners of the tree were away I believe. Anyway, we stared up at this one parakeet, its elaborate strangeness, the emerald green feathers, ring-neck and red beak. It seemed strange that something so exotic could survive the clumsiness of our cold winters. We have since discovered online they came here originally from the foothills of the Himalayas - we like foothills - and there are well over 30,000 rushing about the capital. Parakeets of course are not the only foreign invaders in this land. We have the Chinese mitten crab, for example, as well as the more familiar grey squirrel. (Bless 'em all, the long and the short and the tall ...) Non-native species, in other words. Whatever that means. Birds, like humans, often take flight. They even say the Celts hail from Vedic India. No, we will grow accustomed to the parakeet. Successful integration, I believe, is key. It will also help of course if they don't change the culture too much, especially of our schools, and push them to 'breaking point'. Some parakeets have already developed good relations with the crows and magpies, I hear. This has got to be a good thing. I gather some have even stopped feeding themselves with their claws, using their beaks instead, just like everyone else. Unfortunately some people will always resent non-native species. (This is ignorance as much as prejudice.) As long as the parakeets don't cause too much harm to the ecosystem, or attack the other birds, I don't see too much of a problem. No, the parakeets, I suspect, are here to stay. They've already colonised the nearby cemetery.

The Artist, The Work and The Bunk-bed

It has been a working weekend for the artist. The fruits of her labour shine from the wall. The artist for a large part of the afternoon even wore a thick black mark across one cheek. It looked sufficiently warrior-like for one so determined to win the battle. Likewise, the artist's son. His painted space rocket - blues and pinks - won the sculptural stakes all right. The sculptor himself has been drawing and playing computer games since, even laying his head on the floor while looking up at the plastic pirate ship he so enjoys sailing through the straits of his imagination. The artist's daughter meanwhile came swimming with me. She was so excited by the prospect she affected the breaststroke across the park. (She likes to spend most of her time in the deep end these days and I marvel at her determination.) In order to get to the pool, we had to pass the station we used when I lived with the artist in a nearby flat. Even then she was a figure of industry, working through flurries of success and visual rechargings. She was working by day at her studio and by night as a secretary. There are already interesting tangents in the artist's career. This evening a well known singer recently recovered from breast cancer was on TV. The artist's daughter didn't know that her mother had done a portrait of her. 'You never told me,' she complained to the artist. I took the large pink book bearing an image of the artist's portrait from the shelf. 'Why didn't you tell me?' repeated the daughter. I will tell you. The artist never blows her own trumpet. She finds the idea vulgar. She will never waste energy telling the world what she has done in the past when she believes she still has so much to do in the future. (I will tell the world.) She will not rest on her laurels. Presently, she is reading a story to the children. Let me stop a moment to listen to what she is reading. It sounds like Russian at first. (I've just been watching a documentary with a lot of Russian in it with subtitles. Is that why?) Anyway, I have to go through in the end. They are all on the top bunk. (Remarkably, not our bed this time.) She is reading them C.S. Lewis. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I leave them listening to how the ancient, mysterious prophecy is fulfilled and the children help Aslan save Narnia from the evil White Witch. Then I return to my laptop and write this all down.

A Short Walk In The Urban Mush

I prepared to pick up the artist's daughter from a party. She looked fabulous when she left and I was hoping she was having a great time. The artist's son meanwhile had already built his space rocket and was about to begin painting. It stood in the middle of the room like a souped-up grandfather clock. As for the artist, she was approaching her work when I pulled shut the door and left. I buttoned up my coat and turned up my collar and headed like a pilgrim into the soft drizzle. The tarmac outside was covered in damp brown leaves and I gently kicked them away. The placing of the new paving stones underfoot looked rushed and slightly inferior. A bonus-based deadline? At the lights, a maniac driver insisted on revving up his engine threateningly, but I sensibly declined the opportunity to educate. The artist's daughter meanwhile was at a party about a mile away and I decided to walk an unfamiliar route there, threading my way through largely residential streets. I was the only person walking. (Even without rain, it is like this.) Most people in the city drive and as a result find pavements superfluous. I see them every day. They rush from their heavily-locked and often reinforced front doors into their stubbornly-appointed cars, and heaven forbid if they have to converse with a human without one. I passed a large house where peacocks once roamed the garden. Now, there's just barbed wire. I walked down a street full of For Sale and To Let signs and made my way to a busy main road again. Everyone in their cars looked dead this time and stared straight ahead, catching the eye of a pedestrian obviously tantamount to an invitation to murder. But when I reached our daughter's party I was met with a barrage of smiling children's faces and my heart immediately lifted. Child surely is the father of man, I was thinking. Without them we are nowhere. But the girl giving the party, I also remembered, had just changed schools because of bullying at the last one. She is only 8-years-old. Anyway, I asked our daughter how the party was as we headed back up the road together. 'Fine,' she smiled, skipping. 'Has he made his rocket yet?' I smiled broadly and placed my hand on her shoulder.

Don't wait to make your son a great man - make him a great boy *

The artist's son lies asleep in the lower bunk. Sometimes it is as if we are on a ship and our destination is undetermined, though I am happy to report we are fully capable of imagining it to be a beautiful tropical island. Meanwhile, the cars outside, like modern day cockerels, though numbed, status-like, and submissive, continue to announce the working day. The son stirs, but nods off again. He is lying on his back and looks like a tourist on a beach, catching the rays of his own sunny sleep. His head is like a pineapple on a plate. Afloat in outer sleep, it is rested on an anti-allergy space rocket pillow while the likes of Jupiter and Mars and Mercury orbit the surface of the duvet cover. He stirs again, opens his eyes, looks the day up and down, like a stranger. His hair is pointing skyward, like one of those great cartoon characters after they have stuck their hand in an electricity power point. Anyway, several moments of apprehension are monitored on his face before they develop into meditation. 'Go away,' he says to me when I stare down at him, like a face in a Lucien Freud painting. Puffing his cheeks, he pulls the duvet cover back over again. (I must say: he has a wonderful inner strength and is not easily swayed.) When he does rise he makes his way to the sitting room like a mountaineer slightly bored with the descent. His shoulders are dropped only for the cameras and his cheeks are deliberately loose, as the need to be alone is expressed in 5-year-old Garbo-like eyes. He slumps on the bright red sofa with a sigh. A character he has grown fond of on TV soon spirits him away. (We have thought about this, but have decided an exposure to imagination is OK at this time of day.) The character is Ben 10, who is Ben Tennyson - nice poetic touch there, I thought. It is about him and his cousin Gwen and grandfather Max. Ben has a watch called an Omnitrix which gives him the ability to transform into a variety of alien lifeforms. This he sometimes does with mischief. The artist's son has one. Anyway, the programme ends and the realities of the day begin in earnest. Passing the artist's two works on the wall after breakfast, he brushes his teeth and dresses, his hair still sticking up as if in shock. He says he wants to build a rocket this weekend. And I bet he does.
* Anonymous

The Artist as Mother

The artist as mother in this instance is the biological and artistic parent of two offspring. The artist gestated her children as normal, which as we know is called first an embryo, and then a foetus, but unlike many mothers, she also made tangential works of art about it. Each successful gestation occurred as expected in the artist's uterus, from conception until the foetus was thankfully sufficiently developed to be born. Nothing unusual there. We were lucky. And I have always considered this person to be a conceptual artist anyway. She went into labour and gave birth twice. Not unusual. I saw both, though just in the nick of time in the case of the latter. (I have been to all her recent openings.) Once the children were born, the artist produced milk - in a process we know as lactation - to feed both children. But when they were born, she also produced art - in a process called magical realism - to feed the mind. Historically, mothers have always fulfilled the primary role in the raising of children, but since the late 20th century, the role of the father in child care has been given greater prominence, certainly in most Western countries, though perhaps less so in cultures to be found in the war zone. No, the artist is special for many reasons, but perhaps especially because she has managed to combine both a fulfillment of the primary role and a fulfillment of the creative one. Currently, with advances in reproducing technologies, the function of a figurative artist can be split between single pieces and mass production of, say, prints, digital images, films, etc. Artists get very excited about all this digital doo-dah. Currently, however, with advances in reproductive technologies, biological motherhood can be split between the genetic mother (who provides the ovum) and the gestational mother (who carries the pregnancy), and in theory neither might be the social mother (the one who brings up the child). This is perhaps the more remarkable. This can perhaps put art in its place. (GM art one day?) No, the mother plays an important role in a child's childhood, and the artist plays an important role in a culture's art. Combined, you are missing only one thing. The artist's husband. Whoever thought of that?

The only way to have a friend is to be one *

The artist walked to the bookcase, her two latest works screwed into the wall to her immediate right. Anyway, on a black and white patterned shelf with the likes of Martin Amis - wrongly accused of racism by the way - and Carol Shields and Isabel Allende and Laurence Sterne and Gilles Neret's Erotica Universalis staring back, she plucks the Philips phone from its stand and taps in the numbers of a very old friend. She wanted at last to speak to the artist I bumped into on the day I went for my long walk. This is a woman she has known for many years but has not seen for some time. They went to art college together. She threw a party with the artist and a third friend one time and cursed when the artist turned up late in a taxi from the TV studio where she was recording a children's art programme. The taxi was filled with flowers for the party and this was the artist's contribution. They shared a studio together, followed each other's serious progress. I remember cooking some fish for her and remember her boyfriend at the time falling asleep on the sofa with an uneaten trout on a plate on his lap. He was a complex man: I think he was pretending. I can even remember the trout's mirrored cooked face. That said, this old friend, a successful artist in her own right now, in many ways behaved more maturely than the artist's other art school friends. Furthermore there is a residue of experience from their times together which I have always felt the artist should be taking some kind of more calibrated advantage of. Also, when I bumped into this person at the station, she was with a number of other female figures from the art world. I've probably said this before but they struck me as precisely people useful to the artist. I don't know, maybe the men in the art world, the male curators or gallerists, just don't get the work yet. Maybe the artist needs therefore some good old fashioned girl power. The artist certainly seemed energised after the phone call and it transpires they have much in common still and are in fact meeting next week. It seems this friend understood where the new work was coming from immediately. And that was just from the conversation. (The artist also heard about one or two other contemporaries. Interaction. Information. These, too, are all-important.) No, the artist of this blog is held in high regard by her contemporaries. I know this from conversations I have had with some of the most high profile female artists in the world. (Strange, but true: you would know the names.) The artist must not be afraid to tap into this world. Everyone does it. (Though I know the artist is not like everyone else.) The truth is: the artist has an audience-in-waiting. Step on up, I say. Step on up.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

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)