February 9, 2017

8.30 am: I set out my stalls for next week’s teaching in advance of completing the week’s responsibilities in this area. 10.00 am: A day of second- and third-year painting tutorials:

BA Fine Art, tutorial notes from ‘The Black Notebook’ (February 9, 2017, 220–21)

Challenging/limiting. ‘What are you teaching yourself?’ You can make good work without understanding it. Why do my alarm bells ring when a student says that they had ‘enjoyed’ their painting? Why have I done what I’ve done, and to what end? ‘What goes through your head when you’re making a painting?’ ‘What is the difference between intuition and instinct?’ Intuition must be trained. ‘I do what I do out of choice, not because I can’t do any other.’ Pauline Boty. Women artists written out of art history. Intellectual rather than emotional. You no more need to consider expression than you do your shadow. Calligraphy of brushwork. The place of sport in art. There are slow weeks when little happens. Think of studies as rehearsals. Studies need to be pertinent to the practice. Make your own tools. Paintings determine their own intensity. Uglo turned up twice today. Conceptual space. The problem of defining a 3D space (an absence) on a 2D plane. Japanese screens. It’s easy to have ideas; far harder to imagine the means by which they can be realised. Far fewer ideas are genuinely practical possibilities. Sometimes one must follow the route of least resistance. It’s not so much what there is to see in a thing as what you extract from the plethora of incident. Simplify the proposition. Dissect the problem. Let go. Let be.

Further photographic monochromatisations of chromatic paintings. Some students confess to having difficulty in recognising the tone of a colour (its relation to the grey scale) independently of its chromatic value. Apparently dyspraxia can be a cause of this challenge: