The creative arts use primarily visual, kinesthetic, and somatic modes of teaching that depend on face-to-face communication in contrast to many other university subjects that rely more heavily on the written word. The hands-on, practice-based nature of art education makes it perhaps one of the least transferrable subjects to a fully online model. What can be learnt, then, from the forced situation of teaching and supervising studio-based learning in a higher education context under the 2019 coronavirus disease lockdown conditions? This reflective essay draws on the writer's experience as a fine arts lecturer involved in emergency remote teaching of studio-based visual arts courses during the first half of the 2020 academic year. Organized as a series of "fieldnotes," it aims to capture those fleeting, yet significant, thoughts and reflections so easily lost once things quickly reach a level of "new normal." Notes from the field include the effects of the shifted social dynamic of online communications in a teaching and learning context; the challenges of the video call as a dialogic space for the studio critique; the impact of the more structured nature of online systems with regard to documenting and recording creative work in progress; and the affordances of the dynamic, multimodal nature of the digital medium for working with contextual research material for creative practice. Developed as a pedagogical perspective combining reflection in action and reflection on action, this essay offers firsthand observations and discussion, in the context of relevant literature, as a contribution to urgent conversations on the shape of the future learning environment.