8.15 am. I set out for the School of Art at exactly the same time as I left home to catch a bus to my secondary school. ‘A pattern for life’, as they say. 9.00 am. The second Art/Sound lecture of the week. I feel as though we’ve covered a great deal of ground, and yet there is much more to come:

10.15 am. My weekly walk to the Old College. On this occasion, it was via the charity shops; I went in search of an old analogue radio and cheap children’s toys that go ‘beep’ and ‘mmmm’, etc. — cadavers for my circuit-bending practice.  11.00 am, and the beginning of my third-year painting tutorial schedule. Some lessons, observations, and opinions:

• Students need to develop a sober estimation of their own work. Some either right-off their achievements in a too cavalier manner or else laud them to the heavens, unjustifiably.
• There’s a great deal of difference between an intent and an idea. An intent may get you no further than the next step in the process of creative endeavour; whereas an idea encompasses and directs the totality of the endeavour.
• I expect only three things of students and their work: integrity, quality, and authenticity. This is the baseline of my personal expectation too.
• Some students are very concerned about what friends will think about their work — the subject matter, especially. (That thought never occurred to me when I was an art student.) The uncertainty fosters a restrictive conservatism and a desire to please. Why to they crave acceptance?
• Heed the work! It wants to tell you something.
• Students need to drill deep in one spot. Only then are the likely to strike oil.
• ‘Experimentation’ (and the term is rarely used in its proper scientific sense) in relation to either paint, technique, or subject matter, can degenerate into a time-filling activism. One doesn’t need to know, or to acquire dexterity in, so many things at once; one needs only enough to make a single painting, in the first instance.

One student discovered a rather poorly-rendered, desultory, and discarded painting made by another student, and whitewashed over it. In so doing, they transformed it into an acceptable picture. Who, now, is the work’s ‘author’: the one who began or the one who completed it?:

Likewise, who deserves the acclaim: the person who conceived of an idea but did little with it, or the person who acquired that idea and ran with it? (I’m thinking of Hoffman’s invention of the drip-painting technique and Pollock’s deployment of the same.)

4.00 pm. A group tutorial with second year painters in which the topics of discussion were working methodology, peer criticism, and a work ethic. They’re a sensible lot, although some appear bemused by my approach.

6.15 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. The morning’s podcast didn’t record successfully. I’ll need to give the lecture once again, and probably to an empty lecture theatre. I went back in the studio to prepare circuit-bendable devices for action: