9.00 am. On with my final mark-up review of a submitting Fine Art PhD student’s thesis element. I’m merely polishing at this stage. But one should make a commitment to exactitude, when necessary. And in scholarly writing (at which artists, too, can be accomplished), this is the case:

11.00 am. Off to School to conduct an extended PhD Fine Art tutorial with one of our distance students, a discussion which (both of necessity and desire) spilled over into the lunchtime. At 2.00 pm, Mr Croft and I interviewed a PhD Fine Art applicant from China (via Glasgow). Talking with artists from other countries and cultures is a rich experience. Exciting things are happening in the East. The western hegemony of contemporary art practice is collapsing, along with much else. In the next decades, the best in art is as likely to come from China, Africa, and places that, presently, have no association with it:

Afterwards, I held a tutorial with one of our finalising MA Fine Art students. The latter part of the afternoon was dedicated to postgraduate admin. Applications are still coming in.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

• As a deplorably flawed individual, I’ve no problem accepting the conspicuous mistakes, bad calls, weaknesses, prejudices, and stupidities of others. They have my fullest sympathy and understanding. In this sense, my inadequacies are one of my greatest assets.
• When distracted, what, then, am I attending too? Why was the distraction of more pressing interest than that upon which my attention was originally fixed? Does the weakness lie in the power of the object to maintain my attention or my capacity to remain attentive?
• An abundance of ideas and plans will be our undoing.
• The requirements of the work are paramount; your needs come a poor second.
• It’s possible to solve a problem without recognising the solution.

I closed the working day as I’d begun it, reviewing the PhD Fine Art thesis submission.

A new addition for Pedalboard III. This will permit me to the pitch of the guitar input and blend higher and lower tones of the note (the ‘wet’ signal) with the input note (the ‘dry’ signal):

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!

8.15 am. An assault on my inbox. First, a personal response to an email from an old friend from my Cardiff days, who’s a mover and shaker on the South Wales public-library scene:

Nigel Farage (who has the most European-sounding name of anyone associated with the Referendum) is as far from my politics as the edge of the known universe is from the Sun. ‘By schism rent asunder’. The fracture lines are evident in every sphere of social and political exchange. It’s like living in a country that’s having a collective nervous breakdown. I’m all for a revival of a Lib-Lab Pact. (Or was that ‘pack’?) Inevitably, Labour will divide, and the the anti-Corbynites will gravitate towards what’s left of the Lib Dems. 

Ceredigion, as you’ll be aware, voted to remain … unlike that lot down south who clearly had had their fill of the EU’s financial support. No doubt when folk around here find out that I’m a South Walian, repatriation will ensue. But you, too, shouldn’t be complacent. Often I hear on the wind, the distant shouts of ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the librarians’. 

Abertillery now has a contemporary art gallery. Has Merthyr? I think not. 

Yesterday, I incorporated the new JHS Muffeletta fuzz pedal onto Pedalboard I and took the occasion to look under the hood and make several cosmetic adjustments:

10.30 am. The focus of the day: pouring the text and images into the booklet’s template, while editing and proofing the text, resizing the illustrations, and organising the components to read as a whole. The template is common to all three booklets in The Pictorial Bible trilogy. The first was printed on paper; the second, made available as a CD, and this one, accessible as a site download. One benefit of digital reproduction is that the booklet can be as long as you want it to be; or, rather, as long as it should be. Hardcopy, on the other hand, is delimited by costs. However, the current booklet is no longer than was the first.

Evening. Following practise session 1, I reviewed the day’s output. The first few pages are always the slowest to realise. They establish the conventions, style, and pace of what is to come. I hazard that a further 30-text pages will be required to accommodate the main body of the text and its notes.

The dramatic developments in the Conservative party leadership elections (and dramatic is entirely normal these days) has almost wholly eclipsed Eagle’s contribution to Labour’s own internal power play. (Now, was that a good game plan on the Conservative’s part?) Whether this eagle can land or not, the Labour party will, of necessity, either change, split, unwind, dissolve, or resolve. (Combinations of two or more outcomes are also possible.):

Coughy! Coughy! Keck! Keck! The pollen count is high this morning. 8.30 am. A review of yesterday’s mixes and uploads. On my return, I’m aware that two tracks are a little louder than the others. (Resting one’s ears, sharpens them again.) An easy fix. I extremized the stereo file on several tracks, in order to test whether I’d achieved maximum resolution. I had (more or less).

My thoughts gravitated towards the design of a new art history module: Art/Spirit: The Visualisation of Immaterial Culture in Europe and North America Since the Sixteenth century. I’ve avoided using terms like ‘religious’ and ‘biblical’, which would likely put students off registering for the module and, also, suggest a too narrow field of inquiry. The module sits comfortably between Abstraction, on the one hand, and Art/Sound, on the other.

An inquiry from the National Library of Wales regarding the following print:

The Gospel Ship, designed by ‘Hy P’, chromolithograph (early 1900s)

I responded:

If it’s the one that I’m thinking of, the chromolithographic print was sold by M’Lay & Co., Cardiff, probably in the early 1900s. A postcard version, similar but certainly not identical, was also available at the time. I don’t know where it originated, but copies of print have turned up in Patagonia, Newfoundland, India, and Australia. The text is always in English bearing the same biblical references. 

I suspect that it was designed in the UK, and capitalises on our island and seafaring culture. In biblical iconography, the ship is a visual symbol for the church. Indeed, the print exploits the principle of metaphor and correspondence between the mundane and spiritual in all the texts. In short, it’s a piece of visual evangelism produced for the tub-thumbing arm of Protestantism.

Afternoon. The cover design for the CD and Bonus Material beckoned. I’d taken several photographs of Bibles in pews at the Old Whalers Church, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts in 2009:

This will provide the motif and principal image for the covers. Out of the logic of this image will emerge the rules for the design of the whole CD. The design must also relate to that of the first CD, since they belong to the same series. The Pictorial Bible series booklets held to this  principle:

Evening. Practise session 1. On, then, to the CD booklet’s back cover and to generating artwork that may be used by the graphic designer when the CD package is put together. I’m unsure how many sides there’ll be that require some form of graphic. Best to over prepare — to generate options.

8.15 am. I continued mastering tracks for upload onto the bonus materials album. Having been made aware of the 2dB imbalance between the sound files’ left hand and right hand channels, it’s now painfully obvious to my ears. My hearing has been tutored. By 10.30 am, the tracks I’d prepared were migrated to their new home. Once the task was completed, the tracks’ trial versions were deleted from the Sound website, which now features only unpublished works:

As TATA Steel put the sale of the Port Talbot plant on hold — in response to rising steel prices globally and government initiatives — I began a series of focal reflections on the forthcoming SteelWorks project. What makes this next project the logical successor to the last (‘Image and Inscription’, that is)? What connects them? Visually, sonically, and viscerally, Mount Sinai (at the time the commandments were given) and the Port Talbot Steelworks are, alike, places of light, heat, deafening noise, dark clouds, and foreboding. When early nineteenth-century topographic artists first attempted to render a visual conception of industry in the age of iron, they were struck by the utter otherness of the new landscape: the theatre of blazing furnaces, billowing plumes of acrid smoke, and the gargantuan machinery of extraction and manufacture:

Thomas Horner, Rolling Mills Near Dowlais (c.1816)

12.15 pm. Off to School to attend a meeting with Professor Meyrick about the new work-allocation model:

All academic staff are working in excess of their allocated hours for teaching. (My commitment is almost double what it should be.) No surprises there. The model will also point-up some significant disparities between departments in this respect. On one level, most monitoring of this nature is entirely fatuous; it either bears little resemblance to the reality that it seeks to depict or else, worse, twists reality to fit its parameters.

2.00 pm. Back at homebase, I decided that one further track should be added to the bonus material: ‘Le Petit Excorcisme’. The website text was then copied to the booklet’s text. I’m anticipating that the record company will be able to install a pdf of the booklet on one of the audio CDs. This will be accessible when the CD is read by a computer.

Evening. Practise session 1.  Back at my sound desk, I ran through the bonus materials website time after time after time in order to assure myself that all the tracks were equally loud, balanced within the stereo field, and without glitch, blip, boop, or sizz. I will continue to experiment with some of the tracks — pushing them towards an extreme, forcing them to collapse in on themselves, and then pulling back towards resolution — tomorrow.

9.30 pm. Practise session 2.

8.15 am. I continued importing text and images into the bonus materials website, and began to prepare the tracks for uploading. The most challenging task at this stage is to equalise the so-called ‘apparent loudness’ of the sound files. Loudness is not synonymous with volume. For example, one could increase the objective volume of a track by, say, +3dB without noticing, subjectively, any corresponding amelioration in loudness. Indeed, one would have to increase the volume by +6dB to register a noticeably difference. This is because the scale of decibels (dB) (a unit of measure for sound intensity or level) is arranged logarithmically rather than a linearly:

In short, the best means to measure loudness is by hearing. After the process of equalisation was complete, I imported the tracks into iTunes for a test run. I still needed to confirm the running their order. (Although, I suspected, that they were as they should be, presently.) Most importantly, the compositions needed to be trialled within the context of the website on which they’ll be available as streamable and downloadable data. The point of access is the most crucial context in which to assure the sonic integrity of the content.

After noon, I made ready for a jaunt to the campus to attend a information meeting on the new personal tutorial system, which will be implemented in the next academic year. An appropriately bland, unfocused, and off-colour photograph:

On my return to the School, I had an informal conversation with one of our PhD alumni about book publishing, and how to convert a thesis into something palatable to broader audience. (The task is almost as difficult as writing-up the research in the first place.) Afterwards, I held a tutorial with one of our PhD fine art students who’s negotiating a difficult terrain between art and politics. I suspect that art and culture have more answers to, and offer greater hope for resolving, the intractable problems of our day than politics does at present.

Some observations and principles discerned from today’s engagements:

• Pattern and texture are not interchangeable terms.
• Exasperation cannot always be articulated either elegantly or persuasively. Which is why we need punch balls.
• Don’t try to be funny. Either you are or you aren’t.
• Interrogate your failures.
• The perspective of another pair of eyes is not merely desirable, it’s crucial. We each have our blind spots. And we cannot identify them ourselves. That’s why they’re called blind spots.

I responded to queries related to the first phase remix of The Bible in Translation tracks, which is currently being undertaken by the record company. The left-hand channel on a number of my masters required a +2dB boost to equalise the stereo field. I suspected as much, but needed someone else’s ear to confirm my instinct. It’s a small tweak, one to which untrained ears may be oblivious. But to the ears of a seasoned sound editor … .

In the evening, I practised the guitar over headphones while the Wales v Portugal match played out in the background. An honourable defeat. During the early night, now playing catch up myself, I began final mastering of tracks for the bonus materials album:

9.00 am. I examined my new JHS Muffaletta Fuzz pedal. Boutique pedals are one of my great pleasures. Little boxes with knobs. This one captures the ‘voices’ of several versions of the classic Big Muff fuzz pedal, which was first manufactured around 1969. I’ll put it through its paces during the evening’s practice session.

On, then, with research correspondence. Thereafter, the audio track masters were posted to the record company; the booklet and track text, sent to the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales for translation into Wales; and the high resolution digitised image of one Port Talbot Steelwork glass-plate photograph, dispatched to Professor Zwigglaar at Computer Science. We can now begin to the process of forensic visual analysis with a view to extracting a bitstream for sound conversion.

Back to the CD. I’ve decided to create an on-line access site of bonus material. The tracks aren’t qualitatively different from those included on the album proper. They were omitted from the ‘core product’ for two reasons: 1. Because there were already sufficient tracks of the same type on the CD; and 2. In order to preserve the balance between the overall length of the two discs that comprise the release. An album is no different to an exhibition in these respects. Sufficiency and totality are the watch words. An exhibition is not an opportunity to show off everything that one has produced within a given period. Instead, it should present the best, most coherent, and representative work. And, smaller exhibitions can often have more clout than large ones. Always err on the side of less, rather than of more.

The website’s logo awaits a design. The descriptor ‘no art’, together a neutral mid grey square, summons ideas that extend far beyond their denotative function:

Throughout the day, I worked on the text for this website. There will be eight tracks on the album. For most of the afternoon, I looked up (as far as it was possible), medical terms that corresponded to, sometimes, ill-pronounced descriptions of heart and circulatory diseases, which form the basis of the ‘found lyric’ for one of the sound works:

In the evening, I began importing text and track images into the website. Ensuring consistency across all the sites, the albums, and the booklet is a formidable task.

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:

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.

5.30 am. A waking dream: Vienna, under a warm and consoling sunlight. Out of sight, one man said to another: ‘I was here in ’48’. ‘You were here in ’98’, the second remonstrated. Then, a slow moving tram wound towards, and passed straight through, me. In that moment, I was transported to a polling station that I’d visited at St Ives on June 23:

8.30 am. Real world. Today’s primary task was to complete the album details (track listing, equipment and source manifests, and acknowledgements). While not heady work, it does require a fair degree of concentration. The devil is in the detail, and demons of omission, inconsistency, and disorder live there with him.

Twenty-nine years ago today, my mother passed away. I’ve now lost her for longer than I knew her. She was entirely remarkable, in that quiet way characteristic of many South Walian working-class women of her generation. Mam was resourceful, hard working, highly organised, efficient, a clear communicator, clever, shrewd, uncannily wise, loyal, caring beyond measure, and a good team player.  As a consequence, she was much sought after as an administrator, secretary, friend, and confidant. She also had a wicked sense of fun, to which my Dad and I succumbed, often. The best in me owes the most to her:

But she had no ‘eye’ whatsoever. Mam couldn’t draw for toffee, and her capacity to decapitate, or otherwise obscure, the subject of her photographs was legendary in our family:

After lunch, I continued to assemble varieties of source references (of which there are many) for the album, while playing ping-pong with emails sent to and from the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, initiating the Welsh translation of the text, and endeavouring to determine who was responsible for generating the album’s catalogue number: the Archive or record company. (Oh hum!) I wrote the company a letter containing queries-a-plenty and my proposed diary of interim deadlines.

Evening. The Peoples’ Collection of Wales had kindly given me a high-resolution copy of one of the over 2,000 slides of the Port Talbot Steel Works. The process of analysing the digital image using mammographic scanning techniques, developed by Professor Reyer Zwiggelaar, can now begin:

Detail: Port Talbot Steel Works, glass slide (c.1906) digital rendering, pcw003_00001 (courtesy of the Peoples’ Collection of wales)

Having moved from the amber to the green light on this project, I prepared for the initial tests and discussions with the folk in Computer Science.