First performed with the title " I SEE YOU " at 'Beyond Believe" , Emerson College.
1
I recently had day job which only lasted about 10 days .
An old school friend, who was working for civil service ask me to look after somebody, as he remembered that As a child I was always staring at the world was object surveillance oso. ( outside only)
But it involved looking and gave me the most pressures thing on earth , time.
I enjoyed the first 3 days and than it became boring.
The home office had parked a parked an old blue Vauxhall in a side street as my station so I could get out of the rain
The observation on day one was :
OS 78/5 NL left the house at 8.30
Brown leather boots, beige trousers, ¾ duffel coat dark brown, a flat woollen, knitted hat, black leather shoulder bag and an orange, Sainsbury plastic bag which may contain books or shoes. OS 78/5 NL walked north in the park following the path and crossing the wide main road at the hight of the bus , to continue an another park path north which would lead to a small alley that would bring her to so and so Avenue , where she entered tat Nr 178 through gate belonging to a school. No encounters with other people. Duration 28 minutes.
In the evening : OS 78/5 NL leave the building on 178 Main Street through the front gate at 5.30 , walking in the direction of south up the hill, turning left after 500 yards into an alley leading to the park. She walk through the mark on a path lined by street lights, crossed a busy two road, stretching in a straight line form east to west, entering the south part of the park at ta bus stop ( nr 24 and Nr 168) . Continues her journey down hill to the street , turn right into an alley where she disappearance into house Nr 3. And switches the lights on. No encounters with other people. Duration of walk 32 minutes.
The observation on day 4 was :
OS 78/5 NL . ¾ black leather boots, jeans, imitation fur coat, dark brown, white knitted hat with blue ball on top, black leather shoulder bag, left the house No 3 at 8.30 to walk through the park, direction north towards her work place a school building ,arriving at 178 Main Street at 9 o’clock. No contact with anybody on the way.
I will not bore you with a very similar description on day 5,6, 7,
On day 8 everything changed, almost . But we are not there yet.
It was a quite location, there was a little park and much to my delight a bench, a road with traffic that got busy once the school started or finished. And young mother came in their Chelsea tractors to pick up the little brats, jabbering along about their multiple choice worries Thanks to their preoccupation, nobody ever noticed that man on the bench behind the newspaper. Me
I liked the neighbourhood , it was suburbia but old enough to have history and charm and tall trees. Friendly family house, except that one where the blue Vauxhall was park. That house never had any light on or a window open. I never saw anybody going in or out. It must have been locked up for years, Moss was growing everywhere, the gutters full of last winters leaves. The garden with an over grown green house.
In spite of the friendly appearance I never met anybody on the street.
2
The only person that noticed me was not a person either.
At around 10 o ‘clock a dog came strolling down the road, mostly on his own, sometimes with an elderly lady who for obvious reasons, particularly when it was raining, did not like the walk as much as her dog did. The dog made it his habit to piss on my car. Did it annoy me ? you ask Yes, of course it annoy me.
The next day,
That was the day I confronted the dog. I stepped outside the car before he could lift his leg and kicked what was lying on the pavement towards him to get him to run away. Wrong reflex
, he was back in second , wagging his tail in great excitement as he understood my action as an invitation to play. He dropped it right in front of me and I quickly kicked it away. The wrong reflex I noticed, too late. In no time he was jumping up trousers with joy and wild noises dropping the stick in front of me. I took the stick in my hand and threw as far as I could and then jumped into the car and drove off. Even a dog can blow your cover you know. I drove around the block for times until there was no sign of the dog and my previous parking spot in front of the old house was still there, hurrah . I reversed carefully and stepped out to make sure I parked with enough unsuspicious distances , when I stepped out I almost fell over the sticks the dog had left right there where he had last seen me. There was brown paper bag too , with his teeth marks. Oh my God had the silly dog nick a parcel that a UPS courier had left in front of a house. I picked up to get the half drenched item out of the rain and put it in the back of the car to let it dry. I had the best intention to find the house where it belonged to the next morning but than forgot about and as it was till raining the next morning it slipped my mind.
When the rain had stopped at around 10.30 o’ clock, I heard a scratching noise at my car door. It was the dog jumping up and down, wanting to play. He had even brought a stick. I planned do the same trick as yesterday, got out, trough the stick , this time not into the direction of the bus, but up into a front garden of abundant looking house. The dog ran, I turned the car key but the car did not start , it was simply too damp, the bloody thing had not been moved since weeks. I stepped out to open the bonnet when the dog had arrived back , wagging his tail and in his mouth , no not the stick but with another brown paper package, half drenched by the rain and half munched by the dog.
The old lady came down the road calling the dog, Alfie, Alfie, I quickly shaft the brown paper package in the car and closed the door . The dog turned round and ran towards her. She was too far away to have recognized me.
OS 78/5 NL left school earlier that day, at 4.30, took the bus to the high street and shopped for groceries, nothing suspicious. I knew it was not enough to write that, they wanted to know what groceries, what shops. Green grocer, optician, bookshop. Should I know what books she bought, that question could come up. I deleted bookshop from my observation. What the hec, if they wanted to know what was going on they could consult one of the thousands of CCTV cameras, that were on every building and bus passing by, they could use mobile phone tracking and satellites.
The odd thing about my job was that I was looking at the world carefully but I was not really seeing. It was watching with a purpose, - to entertain my bosses.
Seeing was in between of all the tensions and attractions, objects and movements. Something you know and something you can not predict. That’s when I discovered the most. Seeing is part of an intimate dialogue between the absence and the presence or the presence and absence. In one hand I held a lot of knowledge and in the other improvisation which is not controllable. Put both together and that’s when you discover.
3
I all in a sudden remembered the brown envelop that the dog had brought. Where had I put them? I looked at the bottom of the back seat. It must be somewhere here, there they were. I hastily tore off the 15 x 20 inch padded envelop, much to my surprise - it was a painting in one , and another painting in the other .The brown envelop had dried i, the part of the address that the dog had not bitten away, was that of the empty house the blue Vauxhall parked in front of. The paintings were undamaged, not teeth marks from Alfie. No sender, but addressed to a Mr. Arthur Brand.
I was going to google it but then thought that would make me suspicious, my search could be tracked , my cover could be burned. Beside that the problem with the forest of google was that it grew and grew, during the first year of the pandemic it doubled and it went on growing and growing. People lived in this, for ever growing forest of information, never saw the light as most had forgotten that information wasn’t a usable thing itself. It was not the cake but the ingrediencies in a cake. Information only became a cake if you interpreted it, but many people had lost their ability to do that. They bodged it together with opinion and feelings – but it didn’t stick . So luckily one day, Godfried Otto Denk , also known by his initials, invented the strudel.
It did the same as google but in form of story telling .
Look, if I go on STRUDEL and type in Arthur Brand up comes: Arthur Brand who had recovered that many stolen paintings that he was called the Indiana Jones of the art world.
On the night art detective Arthur Brand finally laid his hands on the long lost painting Bust of a woman, his apartment became the most expensive in Amsterdam. The piece, a favourite of Picasso’s that had hung in the artist’s own home, had gone missing 20 years earlier, pinched from a yacht off the coast of Antibes. For two decades, the canvas had zigzagged across the underworld, bouncing between terrorists, the mafia and the international jet-set — and now it was in Arthur Brand’s home.
Picasso and Brand, in conversation tells you almost everything you need to know about the world’s most successful art detective — the charming, compelling saviour of lost causes. By the time the insurance company came to remove the painting in an armoured car the next day, the empty space on his wall was priceless.
The CIA believes that the illegal art market is the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world. We’re talking big money here. But it’s not only money at stake. As soon as you start to mess with art and antiquities, you mess with our understanding of the past. You may as well be tearing pages out of a book or tell storytellers to shut up because they are going over time.
You see, the great thing about strudel is, it doesn’t even mention which “Bust of a woman” painting it was, Picasso did 100 of those. STRUDEL instead focuses clearly on what the story is about ; not the stolen painting but ARTHUR BRAND .
4 I had taken the two brown envelops with the paintings back home with me. Following my new found hero, Arthur Brand the India Jones of the Art World, I had placed them on the mantel piece and closed the curtains in case anyone was looking in. They were intriguing and speaking to me.
The way the black and the yellow stood in a contrast the blue in pink one, was fascinating. Opposite qualities but somehow they belonged together in a strange way.
Scribbles, scrawls, doodles and free-associates with light, composed with “wet-in-wet washes”, a liquid squiggle can suggest anything. Painting after all is the exploration of light as it plays on or even sets fire to structure; but here it was impossible to tell if light is being tinted and suffused with colour or colour is being dissolved in light.
At the yellow and black one I felt drawn to by the atmospheric and enigmatic light, but not as easily drawn into it. This may in part be due to the simultaneous sense of flatness and spatial opening, which is both eerie and puzzling in its ambiguity. Background and foreground are consistently interchangeable The intense colours achieve an ambiguous spatial structure.
5
My flow of thoughts got interrupted by a knock on my door . I walked on tip toes to the door to look through the spy glass but before I could get to the door I heard a key in the key whole. The door opened ……
It was Agnes, my cleaner She was the only one who had a key, it was Saturday and already 11,
“ Ohoho , did I frighten you ? Did you think it was your ancestors knocking on your asking you to join them in another other world . We laught . ‘ You should have seen your face, you frighted me. You frightened me first . Agnes had the most wonderful simile, a wide as the Grand canyon and as warm as 100 suns. She was from Nauru, one of the 1000 islands that make Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia- not the Philippians - we joked about that often. To tidy up people house was her day job , the equivaled of my day surveillance job , really she was an accomplished anthropologist writing her PH.D
Agnes had put down the HOOVER on the carpet in the living room. But before she pressed the button which would make any conversation as difficult as speaking on a run way next to Boing 747, she noticed the paintings on the mantel piece.
The hoover was brought to silence before it could even take off.
“ What do I see , what do I see, you blessed man, where did you get these : (668 words)
This is the story, the people of my islands tell, how Old Spider made the world from a clam shell, many, many years ago. You see before the sun and the moon and the land were made, there was only TEKORE - Nothingness ,
nothing but sea and a vast emptiness above, and in this vast emptiness floated Old Spider. Areop Enap
One day, looking down from her lofty position in space, Old Spider saw a giant Tridacna clam shell, drifting on the sea. She reached down and examined the curious object to see if she could open it, but she could not, so she tapped it to see what was inside, and the shell made a hollow sound. Old Spider chanted a magic charm over the shell and the two halves of the shell parted like the unfurling of a flower bud, and Old Spider slipped inside.
Inside the shell all was dark as pitch for there was no sun or moon to light it. It was cramped, too, so that Old Spider could not stand up and hat to bend herself double to fit into the small space in which she found herself. She began to explore the interior and feeling her way in the dark, she at last came upon a smooth, rounded object with a coil-like form – it was a snail.
She took the snail, and, in order that some of her magical power might pass into it, she placed it under her arm and slept with it there for three days. After this time, she set it free to wend its slimy way. Then she hunted around the interior of the clam shell once more, and this time she found another snail, even bigger than the first, and she treated it in the same way. Then she turned to the first snail, who had not gone far for, as you know, snails are very slow, and she asked it:
‘Can you make this room a little bigger so that we can stand up?’
The snail said it could, and no sooner said than done. The halves of the clam shell parted just enough to allow Old Spider to stretch her legs at last.
But it was still very dark inside the shell, so Old Spider took the first snail and set it in the upper half-shell of the clam, and made it into the moon, setting it in the place where the moon rises. Now there was a little silvery light to see by, and in this light Old Spider saw a large worm.
She asked the worm the same question she had asked the snail:
‘Can you make this room a little bigger so that we can stand up?’
The worm said it could, and no sooner commanded than begun. With all the strength of his mighty body, the worm pushed and stretched and heaved until gradually, bit by bit and with a good deal of creaking and groaning in the joints and sockets of the shell, he had prised the halves wide open. The upper half, raised high above his head, became the sky. The lower half became the land.
The effort of this work caused the worm to sweat profusely, and his salty sweat ran from his body and collected in the lower shell, where it became the saltwater sea. At last, with his task accomplished, the worm felt his strength ebbing away from him and he lay down and passed away..
Now sky and moon, sea and land were formed, there was still one thing wanting, and that was the sun. So Old Spider took the second snail, the one that was larger than the first, and placed it in the east of the sky, in the place where the dawn first comes, and it became the sun that lights the day.
Finally old spider turned to Rigi the worm and wrapped him in a cocoon of silk and hung him in the sky to become the Milky Way.
We both spend a few minutes looking at the pictures in silence.
“I wonder what the artist might have thought, painting these paintings, I said.
“I am sure she heard some voices “. I did not know how to answer that one.
6 “What is the creations story in your island ?’ Agnes asked .
I come from an industrial part of the world , a great mix of people from all over the world. If myth are like unwriten laws than A sense of duty; commitment, solidarity and reliability in work and in neighbourhood were unwritten laws of my hometown. I grew up with huge black mountains of coal and a sky that was red on many evenings of the week , not because kitsch sunsets but because of the many steel rolling plants. The Colours were indestructible, this is where the myth has its physical immortality: the colours of heavy industry are the colours of my myth. First come coal the colour is black. They called it the Black District .
Then we have the red of the hot iron and the somewhat lighter shade of the blast furnace slag. Here, the colour scale ranges from sun-bright to bright yellow . The colours of hot rolling steel is a different glowing red, to the steel material refined into sheets in the cold rolling mill. This varies from shiny metallic to matt grey metallic .Water as a vital substance too with its symbolic blue. colour forms Without water cooling, the blast furnaces would burn out from the heat of the smelting process. Colours are immortal. Through their symbolic powers, the myth of the region where I was born lives on and on.
The Dyson 747 banished all meaningful conversation. I did not tell Agnes that I had found the paintings on the street or that they might be stolen.
7 BERLIN – good observation leads to a fair price
What if they were stolen. I knew an art dealer in Berlin who I could contact. We had studied together but than our ways parted in two very different directions. I send him a snapshot of the two paintings asking how much they were worth. What do you want for them was his answer. I was not going to do him the favour of saying ‘ I don’t know’.
I looked at his web site and the size of his gallery, in which part of town it was and how many staff he employed, on how many art fairs he was represented. You see simple observations like that can tell you a lot. It is like looking at somebody shoes and being able to tell what the monthly salary, and the tax bracket of the owner is. At a location like that my dealer friend in Berlin , he would pay so and so much rent employing 3 fairly young assistants and only being present on two of the 12 international art fairs, meant he could not sell anything for less than 20 000,-. He would normally double his price or take 50% of the sale but as I was an old friend, he would want to screw me and make at least 4 times of what I would get. I texted 5000,- . He texted back: agreed. ‘ Agreed ‘ I answered knowing it would put him in the cheerful mood of having won the game effortless. “I come and pick them up myself, haven’t seen you in years, old chap. It’s has been too long. “
8 Day 8 , started as usual. OS 78/5 NL . ¾ black leather boots, jeans, red rain coat , matching hat, black leather shoulder bag, left the house at 8.30 to walk through the park, direction north towards her work place a school building ,arriving at 178 Main Street at 9 o’clock. No contact with anybody on the way.
It was 10.30 the dog scratched at the car door and looking into the distance if it was safe and quite enough for me to step out ,
I saw OS 78/5 NL walking out of the school gates. She did not turn left up the hill towards the park, no she was walking on the pavement into my direction.
Was she really heading into my direction. I hid behind my newspaper, which felt unusually thin this morning. The bloody dog was scratching on the car door and there was no way that I could shut him up. Any minute OS 78/5 NL would have reached the car and was rightly going to shout all the swear words under the open skies and smash my cover into a piece , crashing into a 1000 pieces like a broken glass vase to the ground. Paralyzed between my expectation and the scratching of the dog , I looked scared past my newspaper into the back mirror and saw a man coming up from behind and in the distance the old woman, the owner of the dog behind him . He wore a dark suit, white shirt , candy striped tie in grey and black , short salt and pepper hair, well cut, not too fashionable, black shoes, age 50 ,he looked like Arthur Brand the Indiana Jones of the art world ,
He stopped on the pavement
looking into the direction of OS 78/5 NL
they met in front of my car.
The scratching of the dogs clows, flet like scratching into my skin as the doors of hell opened and Luzifer himself shouted
Come on Alfie , naughty boy , stop biting the gentleman’s trousers, now there is a good boy. It wasn’t Luzifer calling me but
The old lady trieing to summon her dog, who had taken a dislike to Indiana Jones and was biting into the man’s pleated trousers, which made him drop his real estate brochures which to my surprise, he did not pick up again. Afraid of the dog? In love with the school teacher , focused on something else. Not on me…
The turmoil the dog had created, draw all the attention away from me. The estate agent and OS 78/5 NL quickly went arm in arm into the dark house, a light went on for the first time.
The old lady walked on, the dog followed her.
It be so close and not be seen, was that a good or a sad thing?
9 On day 9 , I faked my report of the description of OS 78/5 NL . It was the same as any day anyway. I did not see her until I saw her in the newspaper.
THE FIND OF THE CENTURY
Head mistress discovers art treasure worth millions, while checking out building to extent school.
Burglars blew up cars in various parts of Stockholm to distract police from an armed robbery at the National Museum of Fine Art in Stockholm . They took off on a speed boat with a Rembrandt self portrait , two Renoirs and serval other small paintings – but all had been found, safe and sound during a visit of knowable head mistress requiring additional premisses for her school.
“ When I saw those brown enveloped in the wintergarden of the premisses, she said, I immediately knew that these were no ordinary seed bags for gardeners question time .”
Identifying the paintings she and the estate agent, who did not want to be named secured them by bringing to the school, notifying the police immediately.
The article further mentioned that all paintings were in good condition in spite of the terrible surrounding they were found in, in a garden shed with boards missing so animals could get in, Apparently they were only covered in brown paper envelopes which saved then , according to a forensic expert from the special investigate team of the police stated , The high acid content of the brown paper stopped animals like squirrels and hedgehogs to nibble on the oil paintings.
Only one paintings was apparently still missing, according to a consulting art expert from Amsterdam, a small painting by Johannes Vermeer. titled Het concert painted around 1666 . It had been missing for 20 years.
10 Johannes Vermeer - the artist who taught the world to see ordinary beauty
Vermeer is such a quiet and introspective artist that it took hundreds of years for anyone to notice he was a genius.
Technically brilliant and mysterious in his compositions, Jan Vermeer is one of the outstanding painters of the Baroque. Around 1668 he produced a painting which makes the artist's own metier its theme
The precious room curtain is drawn aside. Behind it: the intimacy of a painter's studio. Daylight flooding in ,
reveals that there are windows, a world outside the chamber. Which does not intrude.
Nothing is noisy, nothing moves in this moment of utmost concentration – A snapshot of two people creating a work of art.
Motionless, the young woman stands there, He sits, one step away from her, in front of his canvas and paints the laurel that crowns her head. Completely devoted to art, he sees only his model. Nothing but his work seems important here.
And yet the woman is not only posing for him. She holds a stretched trumpet almost horizontally in her hand, in the most impressive way. But the picture on the easel will only show a small piece of the trumpet tube. White lines of a preparatory drawing on the canvas indicate that the woman's puffy robe will take up almost the entire width of the painting.
Nevertheless, Vermeer lets her present the trumpet - to the viewer of his painting. For the instrument is significant, a symbol. It belongs to a myth, that the artist paints into the studio. For his work is not only about the creation of a single portrait, not only about a painter and his model. It is also about painting itself, about its value and task in the world. In short, Vermeer creates a sophisticated allegory of painting itself.
At his time he was one more painter among the many who worked for money in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. He was not a star like Rembrandt or Rubens.
He obviously took himself and his art seriously – his self-referential work The Art of Painting proves that – but he worked all his life in Delft, painted only 35 known works , died in 1675 poor and unknow.
It was only 200 years later Early modernist painting in France such as Pissarao, Renoir, Manet, Degas, we are writing 1860/70 looked sensitively at ordinary people in ordinary places rediscover Jan Vermeer.
11
Getting back to the newspaper in front of me, The article further said the substantial reward money was going to go to the school as they had discovered it and it would be used for buying the building and to turn it to extra education and play aeras for the school. Three cheers for the school, even the estate agent Interhouse had generously donate its fee to the school. Hold on, I am pretty sure the estate agents name was Chesterton , at least that is the logo brochure that were lying on the pavement when I step out of the car after the two had left.
I could not help to wonder what might be hanging on Arthur Brand‘s priceless wall that evening.
12
I felt a little lost to have been part of it all and yet to have missed it at the same time as thou I needed an invitation to overcome my own politeness. I was grateful that morning to see the little dog on his usual round, he lifted his leg as usual at the blue Vauxhall, which had not been removed. He jumped up and down begging me to through a stick, which I did with great pleasure twice and then getting tired of the game I thru the stick high over the bushes next to the abandoned house, hoping that even this relentless little dog he would see how pointless it would be for him to find it there. I returned to my paper. The old lady did not turn up but the dog did , not with a stick but with a brown envelop half drenched by the rain and half munched by the dog.
I put my newspaper over it immediately , left the newspaper on the benched , walked down the road until I found another stick which I threw a long long way into the park for the dog to find. Then I quickly went back to the bench, grabbed the paper and it contents, as the No 24 had stop at the bus stop , I stepped into it . The doors closed with their usual tsch , a familiar sound and a sound of relief to glide out of this scene so smoothly.
.
My art dealer friend from Berlin texted that he could not come to collect the paintings. Too much fuss at the border these days because that Vermeer is still missing . “ Do you think my paintings are stolen” I asked him directly . “ No, no , I checked the FBI list ”. “Good to know. What shall I do with them?“ I asked “ Try to sell them where you are , it shouldn’t be too difficult, they hold a mysterious wisdom even if you don’t know what they mean. ‘Oh I know what they mean.” “Even better,” he said and you could hear between the lines that he had started to regret that he had not bought them.
I kept the paintings, my wall in my apartment became just as priceless as that of Arthur Brand’s in Amsterdam . I quit my job , forever grateful to the little dog. I picked up painting myself, a lot easier than storytelling, you should try it one day.
- Observation OS 78/5 NL ---- 589
- The dog ---- 763
- Find paintings and Arthur Brand ---- 596
- Description of paintings ----- 220
- Agnes & old spider creation myth ---- 668
- Ruhrgebiet colours - ---- 240
- Berlin - the monetary value of art ----- 270
- Day 8 ---- 478
- The news paper ---- 295
- Johannes Vermeer ---- 429
- Newspaper and suspicion ---- 125
- The last envelop, the end ---- 422
1
I recently had day job which only lasted about 10 days .
An old school friend, who was working for civil service ask me to look after somebody, as he remembered that As a child I was always staring at the world was object surveillance oso. ( outside only)
But it involved looking and gave me the most pressures thing on earth , time.
I enjoyed the first 3 days and than it became boring.
The home office had parked a parked an old blue Vauxhall in a side street as my station so I could get out of the rain
The observation on day one was :
OS 78/5 NL left the house at 8.30
Brown leather boots, beige trousers, ¾ duffel coat dark brown, a flat woollen, knitted hat, black leather shoulder bag and an orange, Sainsbury plastic bag which may contain books or shoes. OS 78/5 NL walked north in the park following the path and crossing the wide main road at the hight of the bus , to continue an another park path north which would lead to a small alley that would bring her to so and so Avenue , where she entered tat Nr 178 through gate belonging to a school. No encounters with other people. Duration 28 minutes.
In the evening : OS 78/5 NL leave the building on 178 Main Street through the front gate at 5.30 , walking in the direction of south up the hill, turning left after 500 yards into an alley leading to the park. She walk through the mark on a path lined by street lights, crossed a busy two road, stretching in a straight line form east to west, entering the south part of the park at ta bus stop ( nr 24 and Nr 168) . Continues her journey down hill to the street , turn right into an alley where she disappearance into house Nr 3. And switches the lights on. No encounters with other people. Duration of walk 32 minutes.
The observation on day 4 was :
OS 78/5 NL . ¾ black leather boots, jeans, imitation fur coat, dark brown, white knitted hat with blue ball on top, black leather shoulder bag, left the house No 3 at 8.30 to walk through the park, direction north towards her work place a school building ,arriving at 178 Main Street at 9 o’clock. No contact with anybody on the way.
I will not bore you with a very similar description on day 5,6, 7,
On day 8 everything changed, almost . But we are not there yet.
It was a quite location, there was a little park and much to my delight a bench, a road with traffic that got busy once the school started or finished. And young mother came in their Chelsea tractors to pick up the little brats, jabbering along about their multiple choice worries Thanks to their preoccupation, nobody ever noticed that man on the bench behind the newspaper. Me
I liked the neighbourhood , it was suburbia but old enough to have history and charm and tall trees. Friendly family house, except that one where the blue Vauxhall was park. That house never had any light on or a window open. I never saw anybody going in or out. It must have been locked up for years, Moss was growing everywhere, the gutters full of last winters leaves. The garden with an over grown green house.
In spite of the friendly appearance I never met anybody on the street.
2
The only person that noticed me was not a person either.
At around 10 o ‘clock a dog came strolling down the road, mostly on his own, sometimes with an elderly lady who for obvious reasons, particularly when it was raining, did not like the walk as much as her dog did. The dog made it his habit to piss on my car. Did it annoy me ? you ask Yes, of course it annoy me.
The next day,
That was the day I confronted the dog. I stepped outside the car before he could lift his leg and kicked what was lying on the pavement towards him to get him to run away. Wrong reflex
, he was back in second , wagging his tail in great excitement as he understood my action as an invitation to play. He dropped it right in front of me and I quickly kicked it away. The wrong reflex I noticed, too late. In no time he was jumping up trousers with joy and wild noises dropping the stick in front of me. I took the stick in my hand and threw as far as I could and then jumped into the car and drove off. Even a dog can blow your cover you know. I drove around the block for times until there was no sign of the dog and my previous parking spot in front of the old house was still there, hurrah . I reversed carefully and stepped out to make sure I parked with enough unsuspicious distances , when I stepped out I almost fell over the sticks the dog had left right there where he had last seen me. There was brown paper bag too , with his teeth marks. Oh my God had the silly dog nick a parcel that a UPS courier had left in front of a house. I picked up to get the half drenched item out of the rain and put it in the back of the car to let it dry. I had the best intention to find the house where it belonged to the next morning but than forgot about and as it was till raining the next morning it slipped my mind.
When the rain had stopped at around 10.30 o’ clock, I heard a scratching noise at my car door. It was the dog jumping up and down, wanting to play. He had even brought a stick. I planned do the same trick as yesterday, got out, trough the stick , this time not into the direction of the bus, but up into a front garden of abundant looking house. The dog ran, I turned the car key but the car did not start , it was simply too damp, the bloody thing had not been moved since weeks. I stepped out to open the bonnet when the dog had arrived back , wagging his tail and in his mouth , no not the stick but with another brown paper package, half drenched by the rain and half munched by the dog.
The old lady came down the road calling the dog, Alfie, Alfie, I quickly shaft the brown paper package in the car and closed the door . The dog turned round and ran towards her. She was too far away to have recognized me.
OS 78/5 NL left school earlier that day, at 4.30, took the bus to the high street and shopped for groceries, nothing suspicious. I knew it was not enough to write that, they wanted to know what groceries, what shops. Green grocer, optician, bookshop. Should I know what books she bought, that question could come up. I deleted bookshop from my observation. What the hec, if they wanted to know what was going on they could consult one of the thousands of CCTV cameras, that were on every building and bus passing by, they could use mobile phone tracking and satellites.
The odd thing about my job was that I was looking at the world carefully but I was not really seeing. It was watching with a purpose, - to entertain my bosses.
Seeing was in between of all the tensions and attractions, objects and movements. Something you know and something you can not predict. That’s when I discovered the most. Seeing is part of an intimate dialogue between the absence and the presence or the presence and absence. In one hand I held a lot of knowledge and in the other improvisation which is not controllable. Put both together and that’s when you discover.
3
I all in a sudden remembered the brown envelop that the dog had brought. Where had I put them? I looked at the bottom of the back seat. It must be somewhere here, there they were. I hastily tore off the 15 x 20 inch padded envelop, much to my surprise - it was a painting in one , and another painting in the other .The brown envelop had dried i, the part of the address that the dog had not bitten away, was that of the empty house the blue Vauxhall parked in front of. The paintings were undamaged, not teeth marks from Alfie. No sender, but addressed to a Mr. Arthur Brand.
I was going to google it but then thought that would make me suspicious, my search could be tracked , my cover could be burned. Beside that the problem with the forest of google was that it grew and grew, during the first year of the pandemic it doubled and it went on growing and growing. People lived in this, for ever growing forest of information, never saw the light as most had forgotten that information wasn’t a usable thing itself. It was not the cake but the ingrediencies in a cake. Information only became a cake if you interpreted it, but many people had lost their ability to do that. They bodged it together with opinion and feelings – but it didn’t stick . So luckily one day, Godfried Otto Denk , also known by his initials, invented the strudel.
It did the same as google but in form of story telling .
Look, if I go on STRUDEL and type in Arthur Brand up comes: Arthur Brand who had recovered that many stolen paintings that he was called the Indiana Jones of the art world.
On the night art detective Arthur Brand finally laid his hands on the long lost painting Bust of a woman, his apartment became the most expensive in Amsterdam. The piece, a favourite of Picasso’s that had hung in the artist’s own home, had gone missing 20 years earlier, pinched from a yacht off the coast of Antibes. For two decades, the canvas had zigzagged across the underworld, bouncing between terrorists, the mafia and the international jet-set — and now it was in Arthur Brand’s home.
Picasso and Brand, in conversation tells you almost everything you need to know about the world’s most successful art detective — the charming, compelling saviour of lost causes. By the time the insurance company came to remove the painting in an armoured car the next day, the empty space on his wall was priceless.
The CIA believes that the illegal art market is the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world. We’re talking big money here. But it’s not only money at stake. As soon as you start to mess with art and antiquities, you mess with our understanding of the past. You may as well be tearing pages out of a book or tell storytellers to shut up because they are going over time.
You see, the great thing about strudel is, it doesn’t even mention which “Bust of a woman” painting it was, Picasso did 100 of those. STRUDEL instead focuses clearly on what the story is about ; not the stolen painting but ARTHUR BRAND .
4 I had taken the two brown envelops with the paintings back home with me. Following my new found hero, Arthur Brand the India Jones of the Art World, I had placed them on the mantel piece and closed the curtains in case anyone was looking in. They were intriguing and speaking to me.
The way the black and the yellow stood in a contrast the blue in pink one, was fascinating. Opposite qualities but somehow they belonged together in a strange way.
Scribbles, scrawls, doodles and free-associates with light, composed with “wet-in-wet washes”, a liquid squiggle can suggest anything. Painting after all is the exploration of light as it plays on or even sets fire to structure; but here it was impossible to tell if light is being tinted and suffused with colour or colour is being dissolved in light.
At the yellow and black one I felt drawn to by the atmospheric and enigmatic light, but not as easily drawn into it. This may in part be due to the simultaneous sense of flatness and spatial opening, which is both eerie and puzzling in its ambiguity. Background and foreground are consistently interchangeable The intense colours achieve an ambiguous spatial structure.
5
My flow of thoughts got interrupted by a knock on my door . I walked on tip toes to the door to look through the spy glass but before I could get to the door I heard a key in the key whole. The door opened ……
It was Agnes, my cleaner She was the only one who had a key, it was Saturday and already 11,
“ Ohoho , did I frighten you ? Did you think it was your ancestors knocking on your asking you to join them in another other world . We laught . ‘ You should have seen your face, you frighted me. You frightened me first . Agnes had the most wonderful simile, a wide as the Grand canyon and as warm as 100 suns. She was from Nauru, one of the 1000 islands that make Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia- not the Philippians - we joked about that often. To tidy up people house was her day job , the equivaled of my day surveillance job , really she was an accomplished anthropologist writing her PH.D
Agnes had put down the HOOVER on the carpet in the living room. But before she pressed the button which would make any conversation as difficult as speaking on a run way next to Boing 747, she noticed the paintings on the mantel piece.
The hoover was brought to silence before it could even take off.
“ What do I see , what do I see, you blessed man, where did you get these : (668 words)
This is the story, the people of my islands tell, how Old Spider made the world from a clam shell, many, many years ago. You see before the sun and the moon and the land were made, there was only TEKORE - Nothingness ,
nothing but sea and a vast emptiness above, and in this vast emptiness floated Old Spider. Areop Enap
One day, looking down from her lofty position in space, Old Spider saw a giant Tridacna clam shell, drifting on the sea. She reached down and examined the curious object to see if she could open it, but she could not, so she tapped it to see what was inside, and the shell made a hollow sound. Old Spider chanted a magic charm over the shell and the two halves of the shell parted like the unfurling of a flower bud, and Old Spider slipped inside.
Inside the shell all was dark as pitch for there was no sun or moon to light it. It was cramped, too, so that Old Spider could not stand up and hat to bend herself double to fit into the small space in which she found herself. She began to explore the interior and feeling her way in the dark, she at last came upon a smooth, rounded object with a coil-like form – it was a snail.
She took the snail, and, in order that some of her magical power might pass into it, she placed it under her arm and slept with it there for three days. After this time, she set it free to wend its slimy way. Then she hunted around the interior of the clam shell once more, and this time she found another snail, even bigger than the first, and she treated it in the same way. Then she turned to the first snail, who had not gone far for, as you know, snails are very slow, and she asked it:
‘Can you make this room a little bigger so that we can stand up?’
The snail said it could, and no sooner said than done. The halves of the clam shell parted just enough to allow Old Spider to stretch her legs at last.
But it was still very dark inside the shell, so Old Spider took the first snail and set it in the upper half-shell of the clam, and made it into the moon, setting it in the place where the moon rises. Now there was a little silvery light to see by, and in this light Old Spider saw a large worm.
She asked the worm the same question she had asked the snail:
‘Can you make this room a little bigger so that we can stand up?’
The worm said it could, and no sooner commanded than begun. With all the strength of his mighty body, the worm pushed and stretched and heaved until gradually, bit by bit and with a good deal of creaking and groaning in the joints and sockets of the shell, he had prised the halves wide open. The upper half, raised high above his head, became the sky. The lower half became the land.
The effort of this work caused the worm to sweat profusely, and his salty sweat ran from his body and collected in the lower shell, where it became the saltwater sea. At last, with his task accomplished, the worm felt his strength ebbing away from him and he lay down and passed away..
Now sky and moon, sea and land were formed, there was still one thing wanting, and that was the sun. So Old Spider took the second snail, the one that was larger than the first, and placed it in the east of the sky, in the place where the dawn first comes, and it became the sun that lights the day.
Finally old spider turned to Rigi the worm and wrapped him in a cocoon of silk and hung him in the sky to become the Milky Way.
We both spend a few minutes looking at the pictures in silence.
“I wonder what the artist might have thought, painting these paintings, I said.
“I am sure she heard some voices “. I did not know how to answer that one.
6 “What is the creations story in your island ?’ Agnes asked .
I come from an industrial part of the world , a great mix of people from all over the world. If myth are like unwriten laws than A sense of duty; commitment, solidarity and reliability in work and in neighbourhood were unwritten laws of my hometown. I grew up with huge black mountains of coal and a sky that was red on many evenings of the week , not because kitsch sunsets but because of the many steel rolling plants. The Colours were indestructible, this is where the myth has its physical immortality: the colours of heavy industry are the colours of my myth. First come coal the colour is black. They called it the Black District .
Then we have the red of the hot iron and the somewhat lighter shade of the blast furnace slag. Here, the colour scale ranges from sun-bright to bright yellow . The colours of hot rolling steel is a different glowing red, to the steel material refined into sheets in the cold rolling mill. This varies from shiny metallic to matt grey metallic .Water as a vital substance too with its symbolic blue. colour forms Without water cooling, the blast furnaces would burn out from the heat of the smelting process. Colours are immortal. Through their symbolic powers, the myth of the region where I was born lives on and on.
The Dyson 747 banished all meaningful conversation. I did not tell Agnes that I had found the paintings on the street or that they might be stolen.
7 BERLIN – good observation leads to a fair price
What if they were stolen. I knew an art dealer in Berlin who I could contact. We had studied together but than our ways parted in two very different directions. I send him a snapshot of the two paintings asking how much they were worth. What do you want for them was his answer. I was not going to do him the favour of saying ‘ I don’t know’.
I looked at his web site and the size of his gallery, in which part of town it was and how many staff he employed, on how many art fairs he was represented. You see simple observations like that can tell you a lot. It is like looking at somebody shoes and being able to tell what the monthly salary, and the tax bracket of the owner is. At a location like that my dealer friend in Berlin , he would pay so and so much rent employing 3 fairly young assistants and only being present on two of the 12 international art fairs, meant he could not sell anything for less than 20 000,-. He would normally double his price or take 50% of the sale but as I was an old friend, he would want to screw me and make at least 4 times of what I would get. I texted 5000,- . He texted back: agreed. ‘ Agreed ‘ I answered knowing it would put him in the cheerful mood of having won the game effortless. “I come and pick them up myself, haven’t seen you in years, old chap. It’s has been too long. “
8 Day 8 , started as usual. OS 78/5 NL . ¾ black leather boots, jeans, red rain coat , matching hat, black leather shoulder bag, left the house at 8.30 to walk through the park, direction north towards her work place a school building ,arriving at 178 Main Street at 9 o’clock. No contact with anybody on the way.
It was 10.30 the dog scratched at the car door and looking into the distance if it was safe and quite enough for me to step out ,
I saw OS 78/5 NL walking out of the school gates. She did not turn left up the hill towards the park, no she was walking on the pavement into my direction.
Was she really heading into my direction. I hid behind my newspaper, which felt unusually thin this morning. The bloody dog was scratching on the car door and there was no way that I could shut him up. Any minute OS 78/5 NL would have reached the car and was rightly going to shout all the swear words under the open skies and smash my cover into a piece , crashing into a 1000 pieces like a broken glass vase to the ground. Paralyzed between my expectation and the scratching of the dog , I looked scared past my newspaper into the back mirror and saw a man coming up from behind and in the distance the old woman, the owner of the dog behind him . He wore a dark suit, white shirt , candy striped tie in grey and black , short salt and pepper hair, well cut, not too fashionable, black shoes, age 50 ,he looked like Arthur Brand the Indiana Jones of the art world ,
He stopped on the pavement
looking into the direction of OS 78/5 NL
they met in front of my car.
The scratching of the dogs clows, flet like scratching into my skin as the doors of hell opened and Luzifer himself shouted
Come on Alfie , naughty boy , stop biting the gentleman’s trousers, now there is a good boy. It wasn’t Luzifer calling me but
The old lady trieing to summon her dog, who had taken a dislike to Indiana Jones and was biting into the man’s pleated trousers, which made him drop his real estate brochures which to my surprise, he did not pick up again. Afraid of the dog? In love with the school teacher , focused on something else. Not on me…
The turmoil the dog had created, draw all the attention away from me. The estate agent and OS 78/5 NL quickly went arm in arm into the dark house, a light went on for the first time.
The old lady walked on, the dog followed her.
It be so close and not be seen, was that a good or a sad thing?
9 On day 9 , I faked my report of the description of OS 78/5 NL . It was the same as any day anyway. I did not see her until I saw her in the newspaper.
THE FIND OF THE CENTURY
Head mistress discovers art treasure worth millions, while checking out building to extent school.
Burglars blew up cars in various parts of Stockholm to distract police from an armed robbery at the National Museum of Fine Art in Stockholm . They took off on a speed boat with a Rembrandt self portrait , two Renoirs and serval other small paintings – but all had been found, safe and sound during a visit of knowable head mistress requiring additional premisses for her school.
“ When I saw those brown enveloped in the wintergarden of the premisses, she said, I immediately knew that these were no ordinary seed bags for gardeners question time .”
Identifying the paintings she and the estate agent, who did not want to be named secured them by bringing to the school, notifying the police immediately.
The article further mentioned that all paintings were in good condition in spite of the terrible surrounding they were found in, in a garden shed with boards missing so animals could get in, Apparently they were only covered in brown paper envelopes which saved then , according to a forensic expert from the special investigate team of the police stated , The high acid content of the brown paper stopped animals like squirrels and hedgehogs to nibble on the oil paintings.
Only one paintings was apparently still missing, according to a consulting art expert from Amsterdam, a small painting by Johannes Vermeer. titled Het concert painted around 1666 . It had been missing for 20 years.
10 Johannes Vermeer - the artist who taught the world to see ordinary beauty
Vermeer is such a quiet and introspective artist that it took hundreds of years for anyone to notice he was a genius.
Technically brilliant and mysterious in his compositions, Jan Vermeer is one of the outstanding painters of the Baroque. Around 1668 he produced a painting which makes the artist's own metier its theme
The precious room curtain is drawn aside. Behind it: the intimacy of a painter's studio. Daylight flooding in ,
reveals that there are windows, a world outside the chamber. Which does not intrude.
Nothing is noisy, nothing moves in this moment of utmost concentration – A snapshot of two people creating a work of art.
Motionless, the young woman stands there, He sits, one step away from her, in front of his canvas and paints the laurel that crowns her head. Completely devoted to art, he sees only his model. Nothing but his work seems important here.
And yet the woman is not only posing for him. She holds a stretched trumpet almost horizontally in her hand, in the most impressive way. But the picture on the easel will only show a small piece of the trumpet tube. White lines of a preparatory drawing on the canvas indicate that the woman's puffy robe will take up almost the entire width of the painting.
Nevertheless, Vermeer lets her present the trumpet - to the viewer of his painting. For the instrument is significant, a symbol. It belongs to a myth, that the artist paints into the studio. For his work is not only about the creation of a single portrait, not only about a painter and his model. It is also about painting itself, about its value and task in the world. In short, Vermeer creates a sophisticated allegory of painting itself.
At his time he was one more painter among the many who worked for money in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. He was not a star like Rembrandt or Rubens.
He obviously took himself and his art seriously – his self-referential work The Art of Painting proves that – but he worked all his life in Delft, painted only 35 known works , died in 1675 poor and unknow.
It was only 200 years later Early modernist painting in France such as Pissarao, Renoir, Manet, Degas, we are writing 1860/70 looked sensitively at ordinary people in ordinary places rediscover Jan Vermeer.
11
Getting back to the newspaper in front of me, The article further said the substantial reward money was going to go to the school as they had discovered it and it would be used for buying the building and to turn it to extra education and play aeras for the school. Three cheers for the school, even the estate agent Interhouse had generously donate its fee to the school. Hold on, I am pretty sure the estate agents name was Chesterton , at least that is the logo brochure that were lying on the pavement when I step out of the car after the two had left.
I could not help to wonder what might be hanging on Arthur Brand‘s priceless wall that evening.
12
I felt a little lost to have been part of it all and yet to have missed it at the same time as thou I needed an invitation to overcome my own politeness. I was grateful that morning to see the little dog on his usual round, he lifted his leg as usual at the blue Vauxhall, which had not been removed. He jumped up and down begging me to through a stick, which I did with great pleasure twice and then getting tired of the game I thru the stick high over the bushes next to the abandoned house, hoping that even this relentless little dog he would see how pointless it would be for him to find it there. I returned to my paper. The old lady did not turn up but the dog did , not with a stick but with a brown envelop half drenched by the rain and half munched by the dog.
I put my newspaper over it immediately , left the newspaper on the benched , walked down the road until I found another stick which I threw a long long way into the park for the dog to find. Then I quickly went back to the bench, grabbed the paper and it contents, as the No 24 had stop at the bus stop , I stepped into it . The doors closed with their usual tsch , a familiar sound and a sound of relief to glide out of this scene so smoothly.
.
My art dealer friend from Berlin texted that he could not come to collect the paintings. Too much fuss at the border these days because that Vermeer is still missing . “ Do you think my paintings are stolen” I asked him directly . “ No, no , I checked the FBI list ”. “Good to know. What shall I do with them?“ I asked “ Try to sell them where you are , it shouldn’t be too difficult, they hold a mysterious wisdom even if you don’t know what they mean. ‘Oh I know what they mean.” “Even better,” he said and you could hear between the lines that he had started to regret that he had not bought them.
I kept the paintings, my wall in my apartment became just as priceless as that of Arthur Brand’s in Amsterdam . I quit my job , forever grateful to the little dog. I picked up painting myself, a lot easier than storytelling, you should try it one day.