8.30 am: To the School, then, to the Old College for the first half of the morning, to work with the MA Fine Art painters. Tutorials, when at their best, are always a collaboration between the tutee and tutor towards the common end of understanding, discerning, improving, enabling, and humbling:

11.30 am: Second-year painting. Light is beginning to break-in at both postgraduate and undergraduate level among the painters. It’s visible on their faces: the mild shock of realising something that now seems to them to be so startling obvious that they wonder why they’d not noticed it before. Of course, the ‘revelation’ (as one student referred to it, today) was always there, on offer, but they weren’t yet ready to receive it.

Lunchtime: I caught up on emails and a little module admin before settling down for two hours on the conference paper. The paper’s aims and the underlying questions required my attention. Get these wrong and the whole enterprise drifts like a stricken space craft. The revised proofs of the CD content had arrived. I’d need review these in the evening.

4.10 pm: I returned to School to conduct a final MA tutorial, with a student with whom I was at Newport art college, back in the late 1970s. We share a common sensibility derived from ethos and values of that period. 5.20 pm: Homeward:

6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: The record company requires more images with which to illustrate the CD booklet. I searched and prepared files while reviewing the revision of ‘Image and Inscription’. The project is within site of port.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

• Spend much time looking at the works of great artists. Because that’s what they did.
• Discipline the problem: attempt to define it in the simplest and most straightforward terms … to yourself. Divide the problem into manageable parts. Discipline the process: explore each of the parts independently. Discipline the product: discern the relevant parts and combine them artfully.
• Potentially, you may be a more interesting and idiosyncratic artist than the one that you imagine you’ll become.
• Periodically, you should review work made earlier in your training. We find ourselves in our past.
• Distrust your taste, your predilections for certain colour combinations, and what you enjoy doing. They may prove to be false friends.
• The problems of art are, in part, the problems of the heart; attend to one and you’ll attend to both.
• Just once, try and paint like you’d never picked up a brush before.
• The important things always return to the centre of our attention.

All Saints’ Day:

The martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer (1487–1586)

8.30 am: I began an initial rumination on the nature of blogging (and my activities in this regard) in preparation for a short talk on the theme that Mr Iliff and I will present to the Research and Process in Practice students on Friday. ‘Why do I do it?’, I ask myself. (‘It’ being the blog.) It’s a worthwhile question; one that needs to be asked periodically, and one for which the answer changes over time. 9.10 am: Off to the School and the beginning of a day of MA teaching, principally.

9.30 am: MA fine art tutorial #1. Another followed, before the Vocational Practice session began. This week we dealt with Part 2 of ‘Delivering Lectures’. 12.30 pm: An undergraduate dissertation tutorial. It was Hell. (That was the student’s chosen subject.) 1.00 pm: Lunch on the hoof, as I made my way to the Old College for a further MA fine art tutorial at 1.30 pm. Thereafter, it was back to base camp; I had a little time to catch up with my emails before resuming PhD Fine Art tutorials with one student who has returned from temporary withdrawal. 3.50 pm: A micro-tutorial with one of my second year painting tutees: how to use masking tape on canvas, superbly well. 4.00 pm: My weekly Personal Tutorial drop-in hour. But would anyone turn up?

The martyrdom of William Tyndale (c.1494–1536)

6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: I returned to the morning’s opening project: notes towards, and a PowerPoint presentation illustrating, a discussion on blogging.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

• Some of us paint what’s unnameable. And then we go and title the work. Strange. Rothko’s paintings deal with transcendence. But he often gave them only the names of the works’ dominant colours. That’s to say, their titles stress the paintings’ materiality and objectness, rather than their spiritual ambience.
• No one artwork can tell the whole story about your interests. At best, it can relate only a page from the book.
• The quality of the answer is proportional to the quality of the question.
• In art, there’s no shallow-end; the pool is 12-feet deep throughout.
• When teaching students is equated with pleasing students, the game is up.
• Those aspects of our character that irritate us most are often invisible to others. Likewise, those aspects of our character that irritate others most are often invisible to us.

Gayle Williams: martyr (1973–2008)