A quiet mind (‘Collect for the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity’, Book of Common Prayer (1662)).
8.30 am. T-minus 5 days and counting. The majority of the wall works are stacked and bubble wrapped, awaiting delivery to the School this evening. Today is set aside for completing the 54 units that make up for ‘The Floating Bible’, which will be exhibited horizontally and a few inches off the floor — as though miraculously suspended. The frame and mount for the ‘phantom painting’ has been prepared. All I need is for the cedar wood veneer to be delivered, and then I can make a start:
9.00 am. There’s a potential problem with respect to the cutting a large window mount for ‘Preaching = Painting’. But, I have a backup plan if my first option fails. (One must always have a plan B.) Part of my attention is turning, now, to the sound version of ‘The Floating Bible’, and to the necessity of acoustically isolating the active speakers from their plinths. I must ensure that there’s no loss of bass frequencies through the plinths and into the gallery floor. Otherwise, ‘muddying’ may result. I love this type of problem.
11.00 am. I cut and prepared the bible paper for printing:
12.30 pm. Trial mount of the first ‘Floating Bible’ verse. Not as straightforward as I’d expected. 1.30 pm. After lunch, I hurtled in the School to see whether Mr Holland can work his magic on an outsizes window mount.
2.00 pm. The veneer has arrived; looking for all the world like a wax cylinder. It’s amazing how thinly wood can be sliced. (But, then again, consider what scientists did to carbon in order to produce Graphene.) It’s like a thick paper skin. The odiferous cedar of Lebanon: ‘As smelt by Abraham, Moses, Solomon et al‘:
2.30 pm. Having glued one piece of veneer on top of another, I set it to dry and put ‘The Floating Bible’ into industrial manufacture mode. Always tidy as you go. Otherwise your studio will more and more resemble a hamster’s cage. Change your scalpel blades regularly, too. To break the routine, I returned to my cedar piece (entitled ‘Painted with Vermilion’; which it will be). 3.45 pm. I bubble-wrapped the final painting. Oddly, the veneer, on being soap cleaned to remove grease, does not take to masking tape or, rather vice versa. Absolutely no tack.
5.15 pm. All works were taken to the School. The studio breathed a sigh of relief. 6.20 pm. Practise session 1. A review of body/guitar posture. 7.30 pm. I scrapped the support for ‘Painted with Vermilion’ and made a new one, which I did not clean. (No compromises are acceptable where compromises aren’t necessary.) The masking tape has sufficient adhesion now. Sennelier egg tempera vermilion: the reddest of reds:
The painting is now underway. I returned to ‘The Floating Bible’. I’m nearly a quarter of the way through the set. As such, completion of both works is entirely feasible by the deadline, and with time to spare. Nevertheless, by my estimation, two days’ work has been lost to mishaps, errors of judgement, incompetence, and failures of outcome. So it’s wise to build in a significant buffer time into one’s schedule.
9.45 pm. Practise session 2. 10.40 pm. ‘The night watch’. I explored QR coding: a means for the audience to access background information on the exhibition’s images via a smart phone or other IOS device. I’ve avoided putting texts on the walls. They not only crowd the visual field but also turn the artworks into illustrations of the text.