8.15 am. On with the last five of The Floating Bible verses. I completed Matt. 20.20 by 9.30 am. Today, we assess the MA Fine Art (FT) Portfolio module. The assessment schedule threw up the name of a student who had honourably passed out of the School several years ago. Clearly, my registers are haunted by the ghosts of students past. Hacked away at the administrative undergrowth in before the meat of the day. 10.30 am. The first of three assessments. A rich morning: three distinct personalities, approaches, types of professionalism, and exciting possibilities for the future:

2.00 pm. Other artists’ work seems so much less problematic than one’s own. An illusion, of course. I work with the acute consciousness that something must come to an end, because an end has been reached. It is an end of the nature of a conclusion rather than of an impasse. With it comes a sense of release and unknowing. When you stop doing something, a space opens up. The temptation (one that must be assiduously avoided) is to fill it immediately:

3.45 pm. I’m ‘experimenting’ with a process of painting that reverses the accepted wisdom of fat over lean, by thinning success layers of paint with turpentine. The impact on the integrity of matt paint (which has very little medium in any case) may be negligible. In so doing, I’m endeavouring to replicate the viscosity of the water-based emulsion and equalise the surface tension across each layer:

6.20 pm. Practise session 1.  7.20 pm. The thinned paint has dried (more or less), and the surface is reasonably even. Short of airbrushing the paint on, this is about as good as you get with turgid, commercial, opaque paint and a decorator’s brush. Back to writing the catalogue.

9.45 pm. Practise session 2. I’m putting Pedalboard I through its paces. The board is chiefly a collection of distortion, and a few modulation, pedals: