8.45 am. WHI⊥ƎᖉᗄᗷᗷI⊥ (my alter ego) has emerged from his hole. But more from him on another occasion, perhaps:

Morning. I made final corrections to the booklet pages before finalising their PDFs. These will need to be combined by this evening. I decided to include the first and alternative version of the track ‘The Second Commandment‘ on the ‘bonus material’ album for The Bible in Translation. It was recorded live at the Department of Fine Art, University of Calgary, Canada on September 23, 2009. The performance was given at the close of a fifty minute lecture on The Pictorial Bible series. This was my first outing as a sound artist and one of the most nerve-racking enterprises I’ve ever engaged. The challenge was to move immediately from one mode of discourse (speaking) to another (playing), without any preparation for the latter. The other challenge in delivering the performance was that of transporting, mule-like, all my equipment across the Atlantic:

‘A time to cast away’. From mid morning and through the afternoon, my elder son and I made an assault on a set of ante-chamber rooms leading to the domestic cellar, in a bid to rid the home of superfluities and redundancies and to reorganise my picture store.

Storying the physical residue of one’s work presents many problems. Few artists live in an archival environment or in accommodation with a storage room set apart for the purpose. I’ve used box frames for my paintings, often. They add up to a good deal of furniture. Would that I could repent of them:

I’ve collected and catalogued my visual practice since I began my Foundation Studies in 1977. This is not because I’m either precious about my work or hold it in high regard. Rather, the works mark the phases of a gradual transition over time; they are like pages in a diary or the accumulated incidents in a life which together point and giving meaning to the present. It’s what I associate with the pieces as much as the things in themselves that make them valuable to me still:

View from the Front Room Window (1978), pencil, 31 × 19 cm

Inevitably, ‘moth and rust doth corrupt’. Or, in this case, damp air and mould didst find their way into folios and even tight bubble-wrapped works. Some of the early pieces have deteriorated alarmingly. Mercifully, I’d had the presence of mind to photograph everything years ago. If the damage was significant; the work was destroyed. In the end, it’ll all dissolve. It’s all straw, cast into the wind.

Evening. I compiled the booklet and launched it on Academia: