A jet-lagged middle of the night drawing.

Another drawing on a transatlantic flight. Much smoother ride, so had a go at Michelangelo's study for the Libyan Sybil.

Been thinking about potential criticisms to my project.

• Too rigid, inflexible
• Too much copying
• Myopic focus on Western art
• Not creative, false sense of progression
• Too fragmentary, bias towards sketches that can be finished in a day and put online
• Misses the point of life: too cloistered, too stuck to museums, mainstream
• Self-indulgent
• Not doing anything new

Last full day in New York. My month here has come to an end. Looked at the Hudson River School and wandered through most of the European Paintings section again at the Met for one last time. Felt very emotional. I will move on, the paintings will stay, shining out silently for as long as the museum exists. I'll perhaps come back and see them some day, or bump into them in an exhibition, with who knows what gulf between who I am today and who I will be then. All the atoms in my body will change, theirs will stay the same until the end of Western civilization.

Very amateur copy this one. Lost the expressiveness of the gesture, which is the entire point of the drawing. His shoulders are too small, his head not tilted up correctly, his clasped hands dimunitive. During the drawing these errors never occur to me, only after stepping back and 'finishing'. How to be disciplined? Need less cognitive load, need to not be tired or doing this at night. Here is the lovely original by Rubens, at the Morgan library in New York.

Haven't been able to get these three girls out of my head since I saw them whilst researching Parmigianino a few days ago. I've been looking at some sculptures of the three graces at the Met today, and I'm bewitched by the artistic, sensual possibilities of the three intertwined girls. They're just incredibly hot naked women carved out of marble. A good deal of art is just taking a fundamentally erotic subject and executing it in some noble material, then boom, you've got some art, and you're allowed to enjoy it with a clean conscience because it's made out of marble and old or painted on canvas and old, or it's drawn by a master and he's old. And that's why I love the beauties in Botticelli's Primavera, because they're hot and beautifully painted.

Went to the Morgan Library and Museum today. An extremely opulent environment, full of fine art, first-edition books, marble, wood panelling and all the trimmings. First reaction: despair that I will never be able to surround myself by such precious works of art. Envy, jealousy of so many beautiful possessions and such a stimulating place to live and think and study and learn.

But on reflection, must remember Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. John Milton, Paradise Lost

You can carry all of that beauty, learning and repose within you, wherever you go. Must remember, Marcus Aurelius said it too:

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, by the seashore, in the mountains; and you too are wont to desire such things very much. But this is a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you choose to retire within yourself. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Started another self-portrait.

Another very late night. Today's drawing is after Guido Reni's Study of Forearms with Hands Crossed.

Went to the Met and looked at bronze, marble, ivory, wooden, terracotta sculpture. Figurines made of real earthy things -- marble, ivory, wood, terracotta, this stuff literally had a vital essence and that gives the sculptures a special quality. There is something very beguiling about making a figure from a material that used to have its own part in the web of life, its own life story. Fossilized, calcified sea creatures, a mighty tree, the living earth. A dimension closed to painting and drawing.

Those figures were made to be touched, it's hard seeing them in a museum where you can't run your hands over them. I'm itching to get my hands dirty again and do some 3D work of my own; it's all about the process, the tactile pleasure.

Same story as yesterday. Procrastinated and worked and left art until the last minute. Didn't do any reading today.

Today's late-night sketch is after a charcoal study by Tintoretto because I've done too many donne and bambini of late.

The blizzard made me forget completely about my reading and art. It's remarkable how easy it is for non-essential tasks to get eclipsed by circumstances that seem to demand your attention. Just before bed I remembered and forced myself to work for an hour and a half on this drawing. I'm glad I did. The original is a study of a head by Parmigianino.

Left hardly any time for drawing or thinking today, stayed in and worked as much as I could manage.

Been looking at the American presidential elections. What use is knowledge, data, science, facts, when you can activate people's irrationality and win their trust without the need for any appeals to logic or reason? It's worth remembering that we are fundamentally irrational beings and that arguments based on rationality alone will never work as effectively as those appeals that touch our primeval nature as well. We are composite beings, semi-rational animals, and it is useful to remember that.

So when you are surprised or angry or vexed by someone else's behaviour you really should just be annoyed at yourself for failing to expect people to act in the vexing manner: you know what you are dealing with and you should model your expectations accordingly. There is no reason to expect people to act in rationally optimal ways, or even come close to it. And you can't make them act in rationally optimal ways by explaining in a rational way why they should. Given our irrational natures, the rational way to treat us is to mix in a good dose of irrationality. Leverage emotions, group-think, herd-mentality, in-group favouritism, out-group derogation, but do so in a way that nudges people towards a rationally justifiable end state. The trouble is when people exploit our irrational biases to push us toward goals that are themselves chosen by the same irrational system and don't stand up to any reasonable scrutiny.

I indulged myself with some more Egyptian stuff at the Met today. I can't get over the paintings on the inside of the coffins. Such careful decoration, such labour over the colour and the lines and the symmetry, and all of it to be placed inside another coffin, locked up in a tomb where no mortal eye was ever to see it again. And yet they worked so attentively, with such skill and care. The purpose was apparently to ensure the transformation of the dead into a deity, but I love the idea that there was art made with such care and attention that was explicitly not meant to be seen by anyone. It is accident that we can see it today in our museums. And that carries with it a special charm, the enjoyment of a precious beauty that may never have been seen.

And guess what? Proust knew the rarity of that beauty, and the rapture with which we can drink it in. Here he is, on seeing an exquisite detail in some clothing ordinarily concealed and only revealed by chance:

And I learned that these canons according to which she dressed, it was for her own satisfaction that she obeyed them, as though yielding to a Superior Wisdom of which she herself was High Priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep button up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unperceived, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer had devoted infinite labor albeit they may never reach the ears of the public: or in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, I would drink in slowly, for my own pleasure of from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strip, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as deliciously fashioned as the outer parts, like those gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as are the bas-reliefs over the main porch, yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, sweeping the whole town with a comprehensive gaze, between the soaring towers.Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

And that reminds me of the Museo dell'Opera del Doumo in Florence, where you can see all of the original sculpted reliefs from Giotto's Campanile up close at eye-level. In-situ, on the tower itself, most of them are too high to see properly, let alone appreciate. And Proust has nailed it. There is a special kind of wonder at beauty that could easily never have been seen.

I like to think about how many hidden wonders of art there are out there that will never be seen again. More sculptures like those heart-stopping Riace bronzes that lay at the bottom of the ocean for thousands of years, or more cave paintings from 17,300 years ago that could quite easily have remained forever in darkness.