February 14, 2017

9.00 am: A day of MA fine art tutorials, for the most part, at the Old College and the School of Art:


MA Fine Art, tutorial notes from ‘The Black Notebook’ (February 14, 2017, 224–25)

B+W – felt like a low-saturated painting. Reckon upon inconsistency in the work. We feel more ourselves when we make. Some paintings inspire an antipathetical response at first sight. But they get under our skin. Grisaille. Stepped development of painting. Baroque. Intuition: you know where you’re going before you get there. Exhibition 1 define your ambition; Exhibition 2 refines it. Don’t trust either your best or worst opinions about your work. Follow your obsessions. Modesty. Working in the face of public indifference — that takes courage and commitment. Discipline. Constraint. ‘Quiet confidence’. Nuance, delicacy, subtlety – how are these terms relevant to your work? Restrict your means. ‘I have a sense, but not a plan’. One painting may be the training ground for another. Restrain. ‘Quiet, whispering painting’. A painting can contain too many good things for its own good. Why do I feel so old this week? Imagine your home town as though it were a place you were visiting. ‘Where are you going, John?’ Reintroduce old elements. The fullness of allness’. The sober balance between excesses. ‘So many things to say at the same time’. The fizzing of atoms. What, for you, is drawing? Excavation as a metaphor for drawing: bringing to the surface that which is buried beneath. Reading an image from left to right is easier than from top to bottom. What is the significance of the paper?

11.30 am: Having completed two MA tutorials at the Old College, I returned (via a coffee shop) to the mothership for another tutorial, followed by a PhD fine art consultation over lunch:

2.00 pm: Back on the MA trail. 3.00 pm: I held a commissioned tutorial with a third year student from Computer Science. He’s designing a computer software for converting images in sound, and vice versa. 4.00 pm: Off, again, to the Old College for the final MA tutorial of the day. 5.20 pm: I returned home bearing Valentine cacti for my wife.

6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: My iPhone had vibrated in my pocket like a recurrent thigh muscle spasm all afternoon. Today, I’d received a merciless hail of incoming emails. Few could be deleted with indifference; many required a lengthy and considered response. This would be my evening’s task. Keep on top of your correspondence, and keep sane!

10.00 am chair:

10.30 am chair:

2.00 pm chair:

4.30 pm chair:

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