8.30 am: For all the cut and thrust of the past and next few days, this may yet be the easiest week in the semester to negotiate. Those to come will be characterised by a three-consecutive day, 9.00 am – 5.30 pm, teaching fest across the BA, MA, and PhD provision in Fine Art and Art History. It’s never just a question of the time expended; the energy required to sustain an integrity and consistency of delivery can be a colossal drain. For the first hour and a half of the morning, I processed decisions agreed with the MA students yesterday, endeavoured to devise a workable timetable for MA tutorials in the coming weeks, and reviewed and subdivided the sound recordings that I’d made at the School yesterday.

10.15 am: Off to School to, first, test the audiovisual equipment in the lecture theatre in preparation for tomorrow’s first Art/Sound session and, secondly, to hold a PhD fine art tutorial, in my capacity as second supervisor on this occasion. 12.00 pm: Then … a dash – in the brittle light of a glorious autumnal day – to the Old College for another PhD fine art tutorial, with one of my primary charge:

After a brief, late lunch, I pressed on with the CD website. I’m now fully in control of it:

Once the design elements and functionality have been determined, the remainder of the task is merely one of pouring in images and text. In tandem, I completed remixes of the Sound website tracks and conducted correspondence.

Evening. I’d not watched Simon Schama’s series The Power of Art (2006) when it was first broadcast. He’s a consummate historian. For him, art history is the history of art, the art of history, art as history, history as art, art in history, and history in art. 7.30 pm: Back to it! The CD website grinds on to the strains of Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980).

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

• Often, those who solve other people’s problems are conspicuously unable to solve there own. ‘Physician, heal thyself’.
• ‘Figurative Minimalism’. A thought to conjure with.
• Who you are — your experiences (good and bad), history, character, values, outlooks, and broader vision of life and the world — contribute to the artwork’s conception and execution as much as do your technical skills, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility. Thus, you must attend to, nurture, mature, and better comprehend your personhood as you would any other dimension of your creativity.
• Beware of those who think they know something.
• Your work is not ‘just’ anything. In that ‘just’ — in it’s apparent straightforwardness, ordinariness, or lack of sophistication and ‘deeper meaning’  —  a vast significance and import (that you’ve yet to comprehend) may yet be either buried or compressed.
• If you’ve no confidence … fake it, until you develop some. If you can convince yourself, you’ll convince others too.
• Polemic: the greatest painting deals with the least.