9.00 am. An MA Fine Art tutorial, before an unscheduled race home to ready myself for the School’s graduation ceremony in the Great Hall at 11.00 am. It’s a mercy that the weather isn’t what it was yesterday. On my arrival:

This diary began on Graduation Day, 2014. This is the 500th post. Off to the suitors where I was kitted out with my fancy dress costume. Note to self: this mortarboard was too large:

10.30 am. The gang began to assemble. It’s curious to think that, years ago, both teachers and students wore this attire on a daily basis. Not exactly serviceable in a studio unless, that is, you use the gown as a readily available rag for cleaning brushes and the mortarboard as a palette:

The School of Art was twinned with the School of Management and Business Studies. (Which was rather like pairing the Earth with Jupiter):

It was heartening to see so many of this year’s BA, and last year’s MA, students together under one roof for the last time. Having eased them through their labour pains and been present at the birth, I was, today, attending their Christening (as it were).

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

• An artwork is, at one and the same time, a container and a content. The two are inseparable. However, it’s helpful to consider them independently:
  • Think of a Cornish pasty. It’s a container (a pastry filled with meat and vegetables (the content)). However, both the container and the content can be consumed. (The container is the content.)
  • Cornish pasties look remarkably alike, externally. And, yet, they can have a variety of fillings. (Do all blank, white canvases taste the same? No, they don’t!)
• This is an ideal: a body of works that are all alike and yet all different. (Rather like graduation ceremonies.)
• One work, one body of work, one lifetime’s work, cannot contain all that it’s possible for us to conceive or do. Our ideas and facilities exceed the time and opportunity there is to develop them all. So, we must make choices.
• Thus, the criteria we evolve in order to choose from the plethora of options is of tantamount importance.

In the evening, we hosted a good friend from my undergraduate days. She and her family have been celebrating the graduation of their youngest daughter. What a good day this has been!