8.30 am. In my Dropbox this morning there were three sound files from my pal Dafydd. I’ll set about re-orientating one of them in the next few weeks as part of our exchange project (November 3, 2014). The first piece sounds like the skyscape above Hatton Cross. Back to The Floating Bible artwork. The procedure for assembling and resizing the page images is resolved. I must now apply it to each verse:
An impromptu, on-line tutorial on brush cleaning for an eager painting student:
I remade the page pieces for The Floating Bible, which I’d completed last week, deploying the new improved process — for the sake of consistency and accuracy. Very rarely do I get things absolutely (or, sometimes, even remotely) right the first time. (This principle extends to almost every other facet of my life.) Undoing and redoing has been a salutary education, always.
The eager painting student resurfaced, asking whether I used either a conventional camera or a phone camera to capture images for the dairy pages. (It’s a question others, too, have asked.) In response:
Over lunch, I began upgrading my Mac OS software on all computers. Having done so, I’ll no doubt discover that some crucial software programme is rendered incompatible as a consequence.
2.00 pm. A different eager painting student emailed with a query, while acknowledging the singular difficulty of painting glass objects. My advice (which is easier to give than it is to act upon; teaching is far easier than being taught): ‘Treat glass objects not as transparencies but as objects comprising complex tonal areas. (Paint what your eyes see, rather than what your mind knows.)’
6.00 pm. Practise session 1:
7.10 pm. I wanted to finish one more verse from The Floating Bible artwork. That done, I began to orientate myself to the La Mont Young’s Composition 1960 #7 (which I’ll be discussing in Art/Sound on Tuesday), examining the relationship between the piece’s two sustained notes: B and F# (a perfect fifth). It’s tempting to think that I know what this will sound like. But I don’t. How could I? I’ve never played or heard that harmony held ‘for a long time’ (which was Young’s only rubric for the piece.)