The ‘persistence of vision. I like that’ (DR, Messenger, 8.43 am, 07 03 17).

9.00 am: Postgraduate day. For the first hour, I engaged two MA Fine Art tutees at the Old College. Curiously, a number of the students whom I taught today were each, in very different ways, either experiencing a crisis, or working their way out of one. The recognition of one’s inability in the face of what’s required will persist throughout their careers (believe me).

Avoid spending too long one a single work. Be editorial; cull the body of the work, constantly. Creative works aren’t like your children;  you don’t have to love them even when they’re bad. What’s enough? Understand the concept of sufficiency in relation to your work. We all need to learn from our betters and predecessors. Other artists will always be your best teachers. Sometimes the gift seems to desert us. But it merely hides, waiting for us to rediscover it. Creativity is less about expression and more about decision making. A bad work is rarely without some virtue. Discern the good, therefore. Our metal is tested best when things go woefully wrong. ‘The ball is not the wall’. Learn not to worry about your work; it’s liberating and enabling. Anxiety paralyses. When you hit a wall, paint yourself through it. Solutions can be painfully long in coming. (This is normative.) Slow the pace of painting; be more considered. If art was easy, you’d smell a rat. If a title does not present itself to you, leave the work untitled. Don’t force the issue (MA Fine Art, tutorial notes from ‘The Black Notebook’ (March 7, 2017) 228–29).

11.00 am: Back at basecamp, I held two further tutorials before lunch and another two afterwards.

It may seem uneventful, but there’s always something happening with the work. Don’t even think about it … try it; there’s no recipe for success. It’s not by chance if, afterward, you direct it to a determinate end. A lack of confidence and a lack of assurance aren’t the same psychological experience. The work may be elegant, well-wrought, and exacting but, at the same time, not you. ‘The time, and what you do with it’. Different circumstances draw from us different virtues. The older you get, the more everything you’ve done seems to consolidate. When we were younger, and everything seemed possible, our ideas were (paradoxically) rather thin on the ground. Now, much older, not only do we realise that only a few things are necessary, but also how deep and rich is the well of ideas from which we draw. Diving/happiness (MA Fine Art, tutorial notes from ‘The Black Notebook’ (March 7, 2017) 229).

1.50 pm: After lunch. It made me think about a little green frog:

Brigitte’s table-top abstraction:

T S Eliot illuminated the discussion at my 2.30 pm appointment:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
(from: ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1941–42))

3.40 pm: Back to the Old College for the final MA Fine Art tutorial of the afternoon. Rachel’s chromatic soft-sculpture (with textual additions). This is clearly a breakthrough in the student’s work:

6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: Studiology. I added two regulated power supply tracks to my portable rack (the one I use in a live context), so that, now, all the equipment will be fuelled from a common source. This ensures greater safety and less chance of an earth-loop hum developing, like that heard at the performance in the Drwm on Friday. Electrocution and extraneous noise are the sound artist’s worst enemies. One must take responsibility for avoiding both.