8.00 am. Emails executed. Then — to the School, with plenty of time to set up the second Art/Sound lecture for 9.00 am. Never assume that just because the equipment worked perfectly on the first occasion, it will do so on subsequent ones. Reckon upon the principle of entropy. Anything that can can fail, inevitably will. Professional preparedness is knowing what to do when it does.

10.15 am: Off to the Old College, for a day of third-year painting tutorials, through the autumnal ‘front garden’ of the School’s grounds …

… and across the promenade:

The porters had locked the upper ‘Design Studio’ (as was) of the Old College, and mislaid the key (which was later rediscovered). The first tutorial — particularly with a student who I’ve not taught before — is also a quest for a key, and sometimes for a lock, and sometimes for the door. None of these are found during the initial encounter, necessarily. And rarely does the tutor ever discover them all. (Which is how it should be.)

1.00 pm. A brief jaunt into town to buy a sandwich, past an extraordinary phenomenon: transparency and reflection in equipoise:

I returned to the echoey and sparsely furnished Quad (where overseas applicant awaited their English language proficiency test). There I ate and ruminated upon the morning’s tutorials. Several principles and observations had emerged:

• Students tend to pre-conceptualise their work far too much. As as result, the paintings that ensue merely illustrate an idea.
• One does not require a ‘big idea’ to begin painting, only an intent (which need be no more ambitious than getting the paint off the brush and onto the support, in the first instance).
• It is fatal to try and envisage a painting’s end (or outcome) even before it is begun.
• Conceptualisation should be in tandem with the act of painting, usually. (Design and making must go hand-in-hand, as Ruskin and Morris insisted.)
• Painting is a dialogue between the artist and the image that they materialise on the support. Ideas arise, and are negotiated, somewhere between the two.

2.00 pm. I completed my last few third year tutorials and gave an introductory tutorial to my second-year charge. Afterwards, I beat a path back to the School to meet the substitute external examiner of the MA show, and to discuss the background of, and marks given to, the students at the recent internal assessment.

7.30 pm. Materials related to this morning’s lectures (including their illustrations) were uploaded to Blackboard. It appears that copyright law may be sufficiently ‘soft’ and ‘woolly’ to permit the practice without legal ramifications. Unfortunately, one cannot upload or download folders (in which the illustrative videos and sound samples are stored and linked to the slides), so (I thought) it’s still not possible to represent the complete visual and sonic dimension of the lecture. Sigh! However, as I explained in an email to my students:

when I downloaded the PowerPoint, the video and sound samples were embedded with the slides. This should not happen. I suspect that the download is linking to those files stored on my computer. As such, I cannot test whether this is happening when anyone else downloads the file. Could you try, and let me know if the video and sound inserts are complete on your copy? The video pieces can be activated by placing a mouse on the image. A box with a ‘play’ arrow will open up beneath (email, 02 10 2014):

 

10.30 pm. ‘The night watch’. One of my Art/Sound students responded immediately to my plea for confirmation and, later, sent me a helpful link explaining the difference between linked and embedded PowerPoint files. I replied:

I’d assumed that I had linked the files. But perhaps they are imbedded after all. Indeed, if you can see and hear the sound and video samples, they must be. With older versions of PP, embedding samples was impossible. But it does explain, too, why the PP file takes nearly twenty minutes to upload to Blackboard (email, 02 10 2014).