May 15, 2020

WFH: DAY 43. 6.00 am: Arise. 6.30 am: Breakfast.

7.15 am: A communion. 7.45 am: I favoured marking one further Art in Wales submission before commencing studio work. (In the background: Mike Westbrook’s Metropolis (1971).) The English Government’s and the Daily Mail‘s recent appeal to (and presumption to speak on behalf of) school teachers to ‘do the responsible thing’ and return to work on 1 June ought to give us pause for thought:

I suspect the conviction is on this wise: children must go to school again to enable parents to return to work and, thereby, begin to reinvigorate the economy. Money is the bottom line (as always). If the Government were that concerned about our children’s education, then they’d have paid teachers what they deserve and granted schools the necessary resources.

10.30 am: Back to the composition, for a review. In it are sounds that I heard when, as a young boy, I’d walk the railway lines with my paternal grandfather towards the shunting yards of Beynon’s Colliery, Blaina, in Monmouthshire, where he was the Overman. I recognised the unreverberant clank of metal wheels being tapped, the screech and clatter coal trucks as they were tugged against inertia by locomotives, emissions of steam, and strange grunts and exhalations that had no obvious origin. Noise was a very physical experience back then. Sublime in aspect. Defining space.

I inserted the sample of my audioization of a hedge being torn to pieces. It fell into place immediately. Tomorrow, I would graft it into the whole.

11.30 pm: Back to the writing project. In the background — and then in the foreground — a deluge of computer-directed problems, that were being experienced by others simultaneously, came to my attention. And, in the background to the background, a number of emergency extension requests plopped into my inbox. Clearly, there’d been a slight tremor in the fabric of the universe.

1.30 pm: I’d resigned myself to further disruptions to come, and adopted a policy of bouncing from one thing to another and one room to another. A little hands-on manipulation was in order:

3.00 pm: Back to Art in Wales marking:

Don’t press images to say more than is possible. Visual art is notoriously unable to say anything explicit. Pictures aren’t texts; they deal, rather, in impressions, generalities, and feelings in relation to the subject. 

Your expression is hampered by your grasp of punctuation and sentence structure. Work on that. It’s a skill that will serve you well for the remainder of your life. 

4.30 pm: The daily breakout into the ‘garden’ of poignancy, sorrow, fading memories, and palindromes:

7.30 pm: Smalls sorted, I returned to marking. My final (in the profoundest sense) Art in Wales assessment.

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