February 21, 2017

8.50 am: The Promenade (for Caspar):

Aberystwyth enjoyed one its ‘Bermuda Triangle’ mornings. This is what meteorologists call a haar — a sea fog. When it arrives in the Summertime, it feels unnaturally cold. The fog can be at a standstill for days. There’s a peculiar melancholy and quieting associated with it; people, cars, and, indeed, the whole landscape seem to move more slowly:

9.00 am: A morning of MA fine art tutorials at the Old College:

Landscape and time. A scene in slow motion. Optimum viewing distance. A disciplined palette. A landscape based upon the colours of a single rock found within it. Complexity masking as simplicity. Remain sane. A change of scene may help. Many tributaries converge on an artist’s practice. Art: variously an anchor, and a way of coming to terms with ourselves, with the world, and with ourselves in the world. We must suffer, and lose all direction, determination, and desire, if we are to find anything of value. Pity the happy painter. There must be times of reckoning with ourselves, the work, and ourselves in the work. (MA Fine Art tutorials, ‘The Black Notebook’ (February 21, 2017), 228–29).

For Claire: Landscape with Distant Rainfall (2017):

12.10 pm: A brisk walk through the drizzle and the town to the School of Art for a second-supervisor PhD fine art tutorial.

2.00 pm: After lunch, I caught up on the day’s incoming emails (and their implications), phoned a PhD Fine Art student who’s preparing for their e-viva voce next week, reviewed a proposal with an intending PhD Fine Art applicant (I have four of these on the go at present), and Skyped one of our PhD Fine art students, who’s currently on maternity leave:

5.20 pm: Homeward. The mist persists.

6.15 pm: Practise session 1. 7.15 pm: Adminology, before I returned to concordance work on the words ‘blind’, ‘blinded’, and ‘blindness’ in the Old and New Testaments (King James Version). I examined their location, distribution, clusters, and recurrence. It struck me that the principal themes of my work, for over a quarter of a century, across fine art, sound art, and their histories, have been invisibility and the unseeable: visions, apparitions, the Calvinist prohibition of images, images as sound, and, now, the inability to see. What draws me to the antithesis of visuality?

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