November 6, 2019

He that was I

6.00 am: I woke with Henry Mancini’s and Johnny Mercer’s Moon River (1961), as sung by Andy Williams, in my head. (What had prompted that?) I’d grown up with the song. It’s about the lyricist’s childhood near the waterways of Savannah, Georgia. In that respect, the theme and its context had nothing to do with me. (The river in my valley, the Ebbw Fach, was narrow, and an uninspiring, ignorable and, often, a muddied affair.) And yet, the song transcends its locale to summon a wistful longing that is universal in its appeal.

8.20 am: Off to town to pick up lunch before a (potentially) non-stop day of presentations, tutorials, and consultations. Plas Grug Avenue looked forlorn – a far cry from its summery, Parisian-boulevardy splendour:

8.45 am: I set up my materials for the annual demonstration of how to prime board. This isn’t, in practice, as dull as it sound on paper. I learned this stuff from a Mr Alan Starkey. He was the fire officer at the Faculty of Art & Design, Gwent College of Higher of Education, Newport, where I studied for my BA (Hons.). (This was in the day when most art schools weren’t allied to universities.) Mr Starkey was also an eschuteon painter – a craft that required considerable attention to the process of priming. I and several of my third year painting peers would meet with him, clandestinely, in a room at the back of the dome to learn his trade like eager apprentices.

10.15 am: I engaged with postgraduate applications catch-up before holding a PhD Fine Art catch-up consultation with one student, in my capacity as Postgraduate Co-ordinator. Thereafter, it was back to myriad email postings. Emails beget emails beget emails.

12.30 pm: I began a sequence of 15 minute, one-to-one tutorials with member of my Abstraction module. The aim was to ensure that they were each committed to one essay question, and had (at the very least) the vaguest sense of how to structure their response. (Structure would be the focus of the second one-to-one tutorial.) Teaching a student how to write a better essay is no different, in my opinion, to teaching them to make a better artwork. My lunch was consumed in situ, of necessity. 2.30 pm: I took a walk around the School in order to stretch my legs:

A thin showing after 2.30 pm. Some students had good reason to be absent. Others didn’t. This was an ideal opportunity to begin an enabling discussion to the end of confidently commencing the essay. It was not to be frittered away. Admin was poured into the gaps.

5.40 pm: I’d not been out of doors since 8.30 am. Homeward:

7.30 pm: Uploads, admin (again), and rumination. Everything seems to take far too long to complete. I’m more conscious of the passing of time these days. It slips through my fingers like fine-grain sand.

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