WFH: DAY 4. 6.45 am: I awoke from a sleep-dream into a waking-dream (which lies at the boundary of arousal), in which I stood alone surrounded by a sombre, monochrome, featureless, and peopleless landscape, suffused with sweetness and calm. I regretted having to emerge, fully, into a bland and far less reassuring world. 8.00 am: A communion.

8.30 am: A review of a fulsome day of assessment discussions and report writing. To begin, I looked through the PowerPoint portfolio submissions for my third-year Painting 5 & 6 tutees and made notes along the way. Emails arrived and were dispatched throughout the process. Concentrating on just one thing for any length of time without interruption is impossible these days. How many thousands-upon-thousand of words of feedback have I written over the years? Far more than have been read, digested, and acted upon, I vouch.

A moment of remembrance, with a colleague who once taught at the art school at Newport, where I undertook my BA (Hons.) Fine Art degree:

I loved Newport’s canteen at Clarence Place. Lunch was the main meal of my day. Do you remember Reg, the chef? Keith Arnatt took a memorable photograph of him. Reg had hands the size of dinner plates and fingers like thick pork sausages.

He was a big man all-round and cooked a pretty mean chicken supreme, on Wednesdays as I recall. For South Walians like me, that was haute cuisine.

I still have one of the School’s green wall tiles, taken from the Octogen. The smell of cooking entered into the ventilation system of the studios, somehow. So by 12.00 pm, staff and students were salivating like Pavlov’s dogs. It was cruel. The ‘ladies’ in the canteen prepared really good chips and disposed them with the greatest generosity. They were our surrogate mums.

2.00 pm: An afternoon with Dr Forster, assessing third-year painting students:

Observations are principles gleaned from tutor feedback:

• ‘This student paints as though it matters to them!’
• There is still a league to journey in terms of developing control of your medium, exploring supports and scale, and rarefying the palette.
• Look to contemporary artists who’re dealing with the same theme. The example of past artists can take you only so far.
• Each student needs to get better and better within a narrower and narrower field of action.
• The paintings proceed with a clear sense of purposefulness. Moreover, you are capable of making astute judgements about their virtues and deficits.
• Remember, from now on its less about exploration and more about resolution and greater ambition.
• I was impressed by the seriousness and conscientiousness that you brought to your studies in this module.
• They key thing, now, is to keep to this path, and look neither left nor right.
• You’ve used the module in an ideal manner – pushing the boundaries of your competence, setting-up and testing experimental parameters, and exploring what was, for you, unchartered territory.

5.00 pm: End of conversation.

7.30 pm: The evening was dedicated to writing-up the feedback for the MA painters whose work had been assessed at the close of the afternoon, and mark inputting.