February 8, 2017

Yesterday. 9.00 am. Old College:


MA and BA Fine Art, tutorial notes from ‘The Black Notebook’ (February 7, 2017, 216–17)

Maturation. Precision. Deliberateness. Transition. Flexibility. Explorative. Moment-by-moment. Autodidacticism. The gentle pressure. Conflict. Motif. Mount Fuji. Mont St Victoire. Intrigue, A mirroring, Social history. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’. A loner. ‘Why did you start painting?’ Revisitation. Relief. Restoration. Recuperation. Everything has a time. Validation. ‘It was like it was trying to find you’. Earnestness. Sobriety. Melancholy. Indulgence. To find yourself when you lose yourself in the subject. A recognition. Layering-up. Lost. Discursive. Normative practice [?]. Driving home, ‘It was dark!’ ‘You are describing a landscape’. A bigger space. Convergence of a discussion and the work. ‘You in your body, your body in a car, the car in the landscape’. Excavation. Clifford Still was a farmer. Aberfan. Cautionary prohibitions. ‘This is a view, not a judgement.’ Formidable but frail. Painters who were farmers. Millet. Sheep and motorbikes. Paint what you know best. Science student undertaking sound and visualisation. Find the source. Let it fail. Don’t be afraid to entertain doubt. If you see a path ahead, remember — someone has made and walked it before you. Head for the long grass — the untrodden ways. Teachers don’t know it all. Your heart, intuition, and instinct are fallible. Seek advice.

Today. 9.15 am. Old College:


MA Fine Art, tutorial notes from ‘The Black Notebook’ (February 8, 2017, 218–19)

Tues. R. A colour that is vivid  and the key until the resolution; then, paint it out. Undoing. Begin with paint and then find the subject. Weather conditions. The burden of the landscape genre. Changeable. Extremes. Alive. Sitting contemplatively in the landscape. Stillness. Aesthetic emotion is quite distinct from other human feelings. ‘Confident joy’. Nature as consolation. Write about yourself to yourself. Feeling knowledge; mind knowledge. Think of how many disparate ideas enter your head at a given moment; a painting my exhibit the same multiplicity. Seeing and feeling. What streams flow into the river? Contradictions. Thoughts overwhelming. How do we prepare — emotionally, mentally – for painting? By what are we lead? Synchronicity. Painting may determine its own destiny. People don’t buy art for its meaning. Accept absolution and believe it. Locking out thoughts. ‘Are you sitting comfortably … ?’ Expose the fatuous. Forgiving yourself is far harder than forgiving others. Live up to your own expectations and not those of others. The facts of the past are unchangeable; your understanding of those facts is always under revision. Be wise in who you listen to. Negative people are often those who are most disappointed with themselves. Fear and anger are bedfellows.

2.00 pm: Homebase:

biblical reference: ‘blind’, ‘blindness’. Narratives centred on individual cases. blindness as spiritual metaphor. An initial determination of five pieces: ‘Blind Leading the Blind Leading’; ‘Men as Trees, Walking’; ‘Bartimaeus, Son of Timaeus’; ‘Clay and Spittle’, ‘Mist and Darkness’. Keep everything open. Begin with one narrative only. Play, play, play … without determination or expectation. Deal with corresponding gospel narratives: e.g. Mark 10.46–52 & Luke 18.35–43 (blind Bartimaeus). Use two discs/turntables, one for each text, in parallel. I’m continually drawn to historical themes.

 7.30 pm: Studiology:

Electrical test. Cable test. Table test. Monitor test. Self test.

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