Another effort with the silver point, this time after a Raphael study. It's a work in progress. I love working with the metal-point. Beside from being so delicate, soft and responsive, it's also incredibly practical -- the wire doesn't ever need sharpening, it doesn't smudge, there is no lead to break or ink to run out. Very portable, neat and convenient for an itinerant lifestyle. All you need is to prepare some sheets of paper and you're ready to go.

Spent some time in the Fitzwilliam Museum today, enjoyed looking at the collection which is surprisingly comprehensive, with a fairly representative sample of second-rate works of many big-name artists. This is what I love about regional galleries. You get to appreciate just how good the great artists really are by virtue of contrast with the next best, or their own non-masterpiece quality work. I particularly enjoyed the Rembrandt etchings and the current 1816 print exhibition. It's great to be attuned to look at line quality and to think about the challenges of working with materials that you can't erase or lighten.

Saw a very mediocre play in London tonight, which was nevertheless worthwhile in that it served to heighten my appreciation for good work even more. It's good to be reminded of just how dreadful mediocrity is. It sharpens the appetite for genius, reminds you of how rare and precious it is to see something truly special. Just as good art needs to be offset against a background of bad art to really shine.

Had a delivery of art materials, including some ready-made ground for metalpoint drawings. I prepared a sheet of watercolour paper and got to work on a copy of a Leonardo study, also in silverpoint. Such beautiful lines! Incredibly thin and delicate. Fun to work with a new material.

Another day devoid of thought, but admirably filled with the grind of commuting, working, socializing. Scraped enough energy together to do a quick cloud study. Being exhausted from the petty demands of the day is the best fast-forward through life there is. No time to stop nor think, no time to worry about anything other than immediate things. It's good in a way, but there is always the threat that it will eventually wear you down, extinguish the spark within.

Feeling ill, exhausted, lugubrious. A big challenge to my resolve to do something productive every day. Struggled through and did an extremely lazy painting. I couldn't be bothered to clean my brushes or refill the palette when I ran out of colours I needed, so it really is a fairly substandard effort. Still, it's a monument for my future self to look at: see what can be done in an hour when you're tired, ill, lazy. Just begin! Force yourself, it's never that bad when you actually get into it.

Another painting based on my rambles around the countryside. This is the view over the fields of Poslingford, which I have been impressed with since childhood.

Guilty pleasure in painting blue sky, moving the brush and seeing colour spread, no thinking required. Therapeutic, but there is the huge inertia of 'can't be bothered' to overcome to get to the point of putting paint to canvas. Frittered away the entire day, could have spent hours painting but left it until the night again.

When I paint I think "if I keep at this maybe I'll one day be great". I can't help it. Pride is a distressingly large part of myself, my thoughts always turn inwards. Part of the reason for the inertia is knowing that once I actually commit marks to paper I have to confront the evidence before my eyes that I am not great, and won't be. How do you reconcile the inflated self-image with the reality of what is staring you in the face? Plough on, abandon, dream on.

There's a beautiful churchyard at Little St Mary's in Cambridge. Pathway paved with headstones, budding magnolia, daffodils and snowdrops. Reflective with rain. Took an hour to do a late night daub from a photo I took there earlier today.

I'm not sure I agree with what I said yesterday about the impossibility of tracing causal chains. Obviously there are many situations where the cause and effect are evident. What is impossible is to trace cause and effect over an extended period of time with any degree of certainty.

What I do know is that today was sunny, I went out exploring Suffolk on my bike, and as a consequence I felt good. Exercise, sun, novelty, purpose. It worked. I was on the lookout for some landscapes to paint, with my mind full of Corot. I took some photos (I didn't bring my paints with me this time), and worked up a little sketch back home. Very happy to be using colour again, even though the result is embarrassingly amateur. But I am on a journey, this is the beginning, and I will improve. I just have to keep at it, keep churning work out. Being busy is the key.

Labour is the law; he who rejects it will find ennui his tormentVictor Hugo, Les Misérables

Lost and without a plan, it is meet to remember that we all are, really. In the face of the great immensity of the universe how can we ever be anything but lost? We cannot know how one action will impact another, we cannot determine how best to bring about what we want, even if we knew what it was we wanted in the first place. It is okay to be lost; it is right to be humble at how impossibly little we know. Chaos theory, the butterfly effect, small actions having large consequences. We can only orient ourselves with the tiny scraps of information available to us and hope for the best. It is impossible to trace causal chains. Perhaps an action that appears catastrophic to one generation was necessary to emancipate all subsequent generations. Perhaps having an odious politician in office one term is critical for positive change in the future. There is no way to know anything for sure.

Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac.Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I'm feeling very untethered from life at the moment. I don't have a favourable way to measure my progress, my growth as a person, my worth as a citizen. At the moment, all of the socially normative indicators of success I have aren't looking terribly positive. Usually you can turn to your bank balance, your performance at work or your exam results at school to get some kind of sense of self-worth. Whilst these metrics might not actually mean anything (nor tell you anything about your moral self), they can at least give you a comforting illusion of growth, which in itself is worthwhile if it makes you feel better about yourself.

When I look back at this project, which is itself an attempt to inject some meaning into my idleness, I see how lazy I have been, and how often I have left the drawing to the last minute so nothing is learned and nothing is improved. Likewise with reading and reflecting. The one thing I have at the moment is time, and yet I spend the entire day in aimless reverie, not in thinking concertedly or creating or achieving anything.

Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure. To replace thought by reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

My thoughts are directionless, nebulous, unproductive. I sometimes wonder whether I used my free time better when I had a day job to strain against. When free time is no longer a precious commodity it is too easy to squander it.

Today's drawing is after Leonardo's study for the head of St Philip in the Last Supper.

After tube, train, bus, taxi I am back in Suffolk, worn fairly thin. I have chosen to do a drawing after Annibale Carracci's study of a reclining figure screaming in pain which more or less captures the mood. Rushing around the world is tiring, and I'm glad to be back in my own bed for a while. Need time and space to collect my thoughts and analyse my conscience.