Thy precious time misspent, redeem,
Each present day thy last esteem,
Improve thy talent with due care;
For the great day thyself prepare.
(Thomas Ken (1637-1711))

9.00 am. However diligent we’ve been in the pursuit of a vocation, inevitably some of our energies get misdirected, priorities become jumbled, and duties, neglected. Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed in the possibility of not only regaining lost ground but also of an attitudinal reform that would counter the tendency and enhance a sense of accountability.

The term ‘found’ — in the context of visual, audible, or textual media — is used to describe acts of recognition and retrieval in relation to phenomena that present themselves as aesthetically complete and yet without intent:

Found drawing, noticeboard, Aberystwyth Castle (July 3, 2016)

Finding is also an act of redemption, in one particular sense: that is, of gaining possession; seizing upon that which would be otherwise overlooked, ‘underheard’, and unread, and isolating it from among the plethora of ignorable and non-insistent sights and sounds.

My aim, today, was to complete the text for the booklet that would accompany The Bible in Translation project. Only the text for ‘Image and Inscription’ needed to be added, and the conventions for writing’s corpus, made consistent.

12.30 pm. A lunchtime, informal advisory meeting with one of our alumni, who’s undertaking sterling work setting up art and friendship provisions for the 50+ generation. All power to her! 2.00 pm. At the School, I held a pre-registration ‘tutorial’ with one of our successful PhD Fine Art applicants. Returning to education as a postgraduate after a period of absence can be even more unnerving than beginning as an undergraduate. Some principles and observations of a general nature in this respect:

• We often underestimate our ability to adapt to, and thrive in, an unfamiliar context.
• To begin a PhD Fine Art, you do not need an OS map. It’s better to orientate with only an intuitive sense of the general direction in which you’re heading. (The compass of instinct will suffice at this stage.)
• Be reckless with your expectations.
• Don’t force change. Instead, resist inertia.

Back at homebase, I cleared-up a little admin arising from the postgraduate monitoring exercise before carrying on with the text to The Bible In Translation booklet (which now exceeds 10,000 words in length). This activity was maintained during the evening: