October 1, 2019

“There’s a whole other world out there, Joe!”

8.40 am: There’d been at least two flash-floods in the early hours of the morning. I made my way towards the Old College in the respite following the last to hold the first MA fine art tutorials of the new academic year. A month ago, the seafront teemed with holidaymakers looking skyward. Today, those, like me, who walked the Promenade, looked down at their feet to avoid the shale that’d been dragged off the beach by the storms:

Two of my three appointees turned up. 10.30 am: I took refuge at a local watering hole and caught up on admin, emails, and the implications of both. 11.00 am: Back at homebase, I dealt with more weighty matters.

2.00 pm: Dr Forster and I held a group tutorial for those students undertaking the MA Portfolio module through painting. They’re a diverse bunch in some respects, but with commonalities. I anticipate that this will be a productive year. Naturally, there’s a great deal of anxiety beneath the surface of expectation. Each has to take their own journey. As tutors, we can show them maps, teach them to climb, and explain the gear, but we can’t tell them why they should essay the mountain, which path to take, where they’re heading, and what they’ll discover when they get there. These are questions that they alone can answer.

3.00 pm: I held my first dissertation tutorial with a third year art and art history student on the topic of conservation theory. ‘Why have we never stuck prosthetic limbs on the Venus de Milo?’:

3.30 pm: I returned to what can seem like an unending quest of settling students and preparing to teaching. I tested my kit. ALWAYS REPLACE THE BATTERIES AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH SEMESTER:

7.15 pm: There’re times when you’d really like not to do admin. So much of it is impersonal, artless, perfunctory, and requires no response. Year by year it seems to increase without discernible reason or purpose. There were several ‘thank you’ letters to compose. These alone redeemed the evening’s torpor.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

  • The works may develop other, parallel, manifestations of the same idea: the work extends rather than mutates.
  • Remember, you aren’t so much representing this world as constructing another based upon it.
  • In the source subject, you recognised a formality or sensibility of seeing. It is this, rather than the source subject, that you should continue to paint.
  • You were attracted to a particular type of formality, because you’d been prepared for it by a lifetime of intelligent observation.
  • Why are the paintings so small? Their size is significant.
  • Small = private and intimate; large = public and performative.
  • When something is broken, it undergoes a change of state; the broken thing may assume qualities and characteristic that weren’t evident when it was whole.
  • It seems to me that that many commencing undergraduate students in UK Higher Education lack two things: resourcefulness and self-reliance. These are intrinsic virtues of character and, as such, can’t be taught.
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September 30, 2019
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October 2, 2019

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