9.00 am. An opening. Before settling to work, I reviewed William Eggleston’s (b. 1939) colour photography. He’s as good a photographer as Edward Hopper was a painter. The beginning of a new month brings with it a heightening of pressure. (Tempus fugit.) The needs of the hours are for clarity of vision, an unwavering sense of priority, and the determination to breakaway from the gravity of things that are either completed or drawing to a conclusion, in order to engage with new projects. What is and is to come are, to me, of greater interest than that which has been.

I returned to the text of The Bible in Translation catalogue. This covers both the images and sound work in last year’s exhibition, as well as the tracks on the new album. I paired-down the text considerably the last time I looked at it. It’d contained material that was too like the content of the previous publications in the trilogy: Settings of the Psalms and Seal Up the Vision and Prophecy. I needed to create a context for my recent work. However, this is the same as that which informed the first two parts. A difficult circle to square.

One of the memorable sites seen on my recent trip to Cornwall was the Jubilee Pool, Penzance. It’s an astonishingly clean-cut and resonant example of 1930s Art Deco, which Cornwall Council has recently scrubbed-up:

Richard Diebenkorn would have had a field day. The pool is seaside of the promenade that features in the Newlyn School artist Norman Garstin’s painting It Raineth Every Day:

Norman Garstin, It Raineth Every Day (1889) (Acknowledgement to Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance)

Even I — who knows snuff about, and has little interest, in football — watched the Wales v Portugal game with his family in the evening. And even a sports oik like me could appreciate the spectacle of cohesive cool-headed thinking, calculation and coordination, emotional commitment (on the part of both the team and their supporters), and the sub-summation of the individual ego into the collective enterprise. The event has much to say about not only the conditions and necessary preparedness for success but also the triumph of effort over expectation.