November 10, 2015

6.00 am. An opportunity for an extended reflection, before and after breakfast. 8.45 pm. To the School and my weekly hour of Personal Tutorials — a drop-in shop for those who need either a quick fix or else the promise of a fix, quickly. In between consultations, I chased up absentees. Students are rarely wilfully miscreant; their failure to turn up for classes consistently is more often symptomatic of a larger problem in their lives, with which they’re doing battle.

A battle of a very different kind: our students ‘womaned’ a cake stand in support of Breast Cancer Care. Clearly, their talents extend beyond the visual into the culinary. A delicious fayre, made with a great deal of love, effort, and commitment to the cause of health awareness:

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10.00 am. The first of the morning’s two MA Fine Art tutorials. Before the next, I’d time to rifle through Mr Garrett’s off-cuts shelves in search of materials for tomorrow’s ‘guest appearance’ at June’s Painting Workshop — where I’d would be demonstrating the joys of priming boards. (Great honour!):

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10.30 am. The second MA Fine Art tutorial. Melissa’s forest floor salad:

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11.10 pm. At the MA Vocational Practice class, I introduced the three assessment elements: the presentation on personal work, the website design project, and the small-group workshop. 12.30 pm. A Personal Tutor engagement.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

  • When we learn how to paint, we’re always teaching ourselves. Little of what we need to know, little of what is really important, is understood from words alone. Knowledge worthy of the name comes through the exercise thereof.
  • The best that a tutor can hope to do is articulate their own experience of the same, in the belief that this might spark a glimmer of recognition in the student.
  • When we mix a colour we also combine perception and recognition with insight and illumination.
  • One cannot overestimate the importance of persistence.
  • We do not need to understand what we do in order to do it. Although it’s incumbent upon us to understand what we’ve done after we’ve done it.
  • You don’t have to enjoy painting in order to be good at it. By the same token, You can be a poor painter, and still enjoy it.

1.40 pm. Back at homebase, and after a little tutorial admin, I edged my way into the book proposal once more. Now to put some solid flesh onto the bones. 7.10 pm. I pressed on in the same vein. The plot was thickening.

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