In my adolescence, I visited the artist in a London flat. There was a room designated for the studio; I could not smell turps or white spirit; I could not see a Francis Bacon tsunami licking the prosaic off the floorboards, spitting it into the tide of detritus lapping the skirting. Here the artist no longer speaks of childish things to a child artist. He is now, I realise, the professional lexicographer; verbal expression is the test and the tease.
Doorways were a feature of this space. Caught in a corridor, I stood before the one for the studio and glanced at another; the guest room. Who are the guests of the artist when he is away from home; living in this flat away for the anchor and the source? Away from the summer lawns, replacing them with something, someone, people that held him hostage for weeks; anchored and weighed, adrift from the banal and paternal. I am today’s visitor and we do not speak of childish things. He has become a resident writer in another orbit and I have become his caller; although welcome, the space shifts and shapes around the presence of more preferred visitors; patrons, lodgers and paying guests; the bill payer, the emissary, the trigger, the executor; I only brought a doorway back to neglected summer lawns.
In the guest room a bed was made; I had arrived without luggage, I would not stay. I had found his art school folder, remembered some promises he made when I was young and when he made me laugh. I scan, cut, glue and paint our lives together, each of us guests in each other’s work; I weigh and anchor him back to me and women’s art.
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