April 5, 2017

9.00 am: A day for second and third year painters. To begin, I vacuumed my inbox and reduced the unanswered letters to 1. 9.30 am: The first of the day’s tutorials. 10.00 am: Back to PhD training module marking, before a review of a bucket load of MA Fine Art applications. Often, a trawl of late applications comes our way at this time of the year. It would appear to herald a bumper harvest (again).

An idea may be simple to state without, at the same time, being easy to execute. Alkyd paint: neither fish nor foul. ‘I’ve little visual imagination’. Consider the materiality of each object in the composition, through paint. In other words, learn to ‘think’ in the ‘language’ that you ‘speak’ — visually. Your health is of greater importance than your work. Something understood, seen, known, and felt. ‘Do as little as possible and as much as necessary’. There’s an energy that comes with the idea that will permit only a finite number of outcomes. When you arrive at the work that doesn’t work, you’ll know the energy has been all used up (BA Fine Art tutorials, from ‘The Black Notebook’ (April 5, 2017) 245).

For the finalists, these next few weeks will be the most crucial in their art education to date. That which ensues over the Easter vacation, in terms of works begun and completed, will have a significant impact on the outcome of their Exhibition module. The stakes are high. The extent of their capacity for hard work, intelligently undertaken, will be the making or breaking of their endeavours. Only those that persevere to the end will finally wear the crown, as it were.

Throughout the morning, I discussed the finalisation of the catalogue statements with my charge. It’s important to get this right.

1.40 pm: Ever onwards. Second-year painting tutorials continued:

Something must be present at a tutorial – other than the tutee and tutor – for it to rise above the perfunctory. Try out ideas like items in a clothes shop, and see which fits. ‘Today, I can’t help you’. Is creativity our natural state?  You can either conceive of an idea and then formulate it in a sentence, or formulate a sentence in order to conceive an idea. The same is true with painting. If you’ve no idea what you’re going to do to …  just start painting. Ideas will catch up, eventually. Hans Hoffman was a painter-teacher. His works were, for me, too much a compendium, rather than a resolution, of possibilities. You can redeem the banal by looking at it with interest (BA Fine Art tutorials, from ‘The Black Notebook’ (April 5, 2017) 246).

Some absenteeism today. But, then again, I’d changed the day of the tutorials and it’s the last week of term. No excuse, mind you! 5.20 pm: Mission accomplished.

6.30 pm: Off to Holy Trinity Church, where I lead a service for Lent and of compline. An extract from the homily:

I want to return to the context of Christ’s burial, and a verse that can be easily overlooked in the narrative: ‘Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden’ (John 19.41). Let’s pause for a moment and consider this astonishing incongruity. Set amid this dismal landscape of undignified, slow, and excruciating mass execution, and rank and rotting cadavers, was an oasis of natural beauty and solace, where the well-to-do departed were laid to rest and remembered. We see a rather twee and sanitised representation of this conjunction in the tradition of the Easter Garden. There was a garden in the vicinity of another notorious state sponsored killing machine, much later in Jewish history. On the outskirts and at the centre of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the prisoners planted and tended formal flower gardens. Through them, they were marched en route to the gas chambers. A paradise in hell, as it were.

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