Teeming with rain this morning, and dark too as I left the house with more of the same for a while now as the winter begins to take hold. It’s the start-day of the second week of the “construction project” with another wave of nearly seventy first year students. Last week began with “paper boats”—and another paper exercise related to the body—as a way of introducing (structural, strategic, aesthetic and material) issues of contemporary sculpture, installation and documentative practices. In addition to all the individual works that the students made, the week ended with a slow, silent procession through a shopping mall—as “a protective organism” for two of the group wearing “constructions” … this organism made it two thirds of the way through before agitated (and comically serious) security guards guided us to the outside through a side door, frightened that we were a threat to the (other) predictable consumers going about there material lunchtime business.

Not sure where we’re going this week, but we started out making paper boats again, and by the end of the day a working guillotine was in development.

I’m currently teaching ‘objective painting’ to groups of about 32 first year Scottish art college students. Each week, over a three week period, I have a different group and they work in the studio with me Monday through to Wednesday and on Friday of each week … It’s the start of week three … The first group returns in two weeks time and we’ll do something with sculpture and installation practices, and I’ll go through a similar cycle. It’s intensive and fun and exhausting and there’s a lot of good energy, but it can be hot and clammy in the studio.

The Musée de La Parfumerie Fragonard (39 blvd des Capucines) is housed in a former Art Deco theatre in Paris—it’s one of my favourite museums. Last year, in Dundee, I happened upon an enjoyable lunchtime activity: I began visiting the cosmetic area at Debenhams in order to “freshen up” using the different brands of eau de parfum in the shops range of free testers. On one occasion, carried away by the heady sweetness and my love for these expensive nectars, I overdid it and became for a time an indescribable and embarrassed pall of contemporary perfumery … (a stocky ape) stinking like the perfumer’s equivalent of a muddy palette, and wishing I could go home.

I now however have occasion to pursue this activity quite purposefully whenever the fancy takes me—in the name of art and poetry, and the scholastic search for truth in performance—before taking a little ramble through the town centre. Writing this from a table in Caffé Ritazza in the bustling lounge of Exeter Airport I’m smelling pretty nice—if intensely—of the combined fragrance of ‘Alien’ and ‘A (star) Men’, courtesy of the World Duty Free shop.

The other evening after riding the trails at Wolftrax, Lindsay and I were sat at the picnic table with a cup of tea talking bikes and trails while keeping a watchful eye on two of the young lassie’s that live local play that game where you have to get from one place to another without touching the ground; using planks of wood, bits of plastic … whatever is at hand. It was a beautiful warm evening, and they’re out playing, just the two of them, imagining, contemplating—this or that move—working together to help each other over who knows what imaginary abyss or hole in the earth’s crust … importantly they’re out in the world, feeling the textures of it’s fabric, learning to breath … It’s what I think we do when we ride trails: put sections, details, lines, experience together in creative ways so that in one sense we ‘don’t touch the ground’, and so that we can in another, play—and learn about our world—as we did as children.

Later, in a supermarket in Aviemore, we marvelled at the narrative possibilities of a man whose purchase on this Saturday night amounted to a bottle of cheap vodka and a tube of antiseptic cream.

These have been accumulating for a while; snakebites … and this first drawing at the start of the new art school year.

‘The Beautiful Game’ is the title of a group exhibition that opens this evening at the Hannah Maclure Centre, University of Abertay, Dundee. It’s an exhibition that explores the relationship between the worlds of sport and art.

Exhibition continues until the 30th October, 2009.
see: www.abertay.ac.uk/exhibitions for more information.

contributing artists are:
Simon Fildes – Dundee, UK
Kevin Henderson - Perthshire, UK
Matthew Mark Roberts – London, UK
http://www.matthewmarkroberts.com/index.html
Angela Ellsworth – Phoenix, USA
http://aellsworth.com/index.html
Raechel Running – Arizona, USA
http://www.rmrunningphoto.com/
Kim Walker – Glasgow, UK
http://sites.an.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/406689