9.00 am. My first day of teaching in Semester 2, and the first lecture of the last run of Chapels in Wales. The class size was as small as those that I experienced when I first began teaching when the, then, Department of Art was a fraction of its present capacity:

10.00 am. Dispatched emails and second-marked the History of Photography papers, while battling with the office printer (which cannot make up its mind which tray to draw paper from). 11.10 pm. Vocational Practice recommences:

A hearty and mature discussion ensued. The group has a very solid sense of its own identity and the capacity to negotiate the dynamics of debate and dissention maturely. They teach me a great deal.

2.00 pm. An afternoon of MA fine art tutorials. I was impressed with the earnestness, evidence of solid work, self-awareness, and honesty that characterised both the students’ paintings and our discussions. Growth as an artist is a perpetual and unnerving rite of passage. The notoriously disorderly arena of painting in one studio space gets joyously worse by the week. To make art one often has to first make a mess. (The earth was from chaos formed):

6.20 pm. Practise session 1. An exploration of different types of plectra.  7.30 pm. I completed the approval form for a new art history module on abstraction. 9.45 pm. Practise session 2. More fun with plectra. My present bedtime book is Brandon LaBelle’s Acoustic Territories (2010).