Measured dose of socialising this evening, didn't do much painting. Want very much to find my people, but they all seem to be fictional. Spend too much time reading and not enough time in reality.

Surge of exaltation after my day painting. I'm being honest to myself, I'm working hard and I'm pushing through the difficult days. It's heading in the right direction. I'm motivated by the upward-looking image of human dignity in The Fountainhead, even though I disagree with it in some sense. I want to try to be the best I can, to manifest some of the potential I always felt I had and to prove with physical proofs that I have what it takes to produce something beautiful. Be the man the boy wanted to be.

Pleasure regrettably alloyed with the knowledge that this is nothing but perfect selfishness. Perfect self mastery would be getting a steady job, getting my teeth fixed, buying a car, building bridges with my mum. But those things require growing up, responsibility, discipline, control. I have taken the easy, cosy, safe route but made it seem otherwise. The confession feels almost as good as addressing the problem, and so I glibly confess, twice, and the problems remain.

Another full day of painting, with time for a walk after the snow had stopped. Tired enough to quieten my mind, which gave me singularity of purpose for once. Moved on with the Fountainhead, and greatly enjoying it. Reflecting on it much more than I thought I would allow myself. There are subtleties that I am engrossed in today, though the melodrama, the caprice, self-mortification, the overwrought artifice of the architecture motif, the insistently pendulous, hanging hands and the cinematic atmosphere wear pretty thin.

The unrecognized genius—that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best—that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

I have gone back over the painting, obliterating my careful work to move the nose and the mouth down fractionally. It has not helped and I have achieved the mask-like grotesqueness of wooden, flat, blankness that I always perpetrate when I panic and rework the entire face. It is an infinity of anguish, a constant source of struggle, pain and hardship, and it is just beyond my abilities to get right.

I have been struggling along with the breathless romanticism of The Fountainhead, which has been irritating me by failing to explore the abyssal depths of human nature, and stopping short at the upper deep. The values of hard work, aesthetic beauty, personal integrity to a belief, unrelenting determination, are presented as indissolubly good things (though this is not actually said, of course, but it feels like that is what the author thinks), and they are never challenged in their own right. Why is an architecture where form follows function without any artifice, where materials are used for specific, individual purposes, any better than any other form? It might seem abstractly logical and rational, but who said human society is logical? It isn't, from a pure perspective. But taken on its own terms, our need for ornamentation, shallowness, posturing, group-think are all perfectly logical, given what a human is and how human societies work. Why should I be made to think that there is some kind of hierarchy of what is truly good and what is merely expedient? Actually, every style, motive, dream, conviction, caprice seems equally as arbitrary as another, the more I think about it. I side with the Russian Nihilists more than this wilfully romantic conception of man as having some kind of higher nature that can be reached for and attained by only the most committed, ardent, selfish souls. Yes, it might very well seem that way, but that is just a delicious, alluring falsity, just like the pilastered facades Roarke abjures.

Peter Keating had never felt the need to formulate abstract convictions. But he had a working substitute. "A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom" -this had always been his credo, unstated and unquestioned. This spared him any attempt to reach, reason or see; and it cast a nice reflection of scorn on those who made the attempt. So he was able to enjoy the work of Lois Cook. He felt uplifted by the knowledge of his own capacity to respond to the abstract, the profound, the ideal. Toohey had said: "That's just it, sound as sound, the poetry of words as words, style as a revolt against style. But only the finest spirit can appreciate it, Peter." Keating thought he could talk on this book to his friends, and if they did not understand he would know that he was superior to them. He would not need to explain that superiority-that's just it, "superiority as superiority"-automatically denied to those who asked for explanations. He loved the book.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

It is strange to be sacrificing my time, energy, sanity to an idea that I don't fully believe in. Art! Realist painting -- copying a photo! It has no exalted value, it is no more useful, good or true than anything else I could do with my time, so why am I doing it? Vanity, bloody-mindedness, conditioning of my youth, desire to prove people wrong, to prove to myself that I can do it, that I can master a technique and master my own laziness. But what opportunities for quietude, peace of mind, career advancement, living of life I may very well be missing by locking myself in front of my easel! I close my eyes and I see the picture in front of me. I am tired, I have worked hard, and still everything is all exactly wrong. The knowledge that to approach any level of skill will take years of hard work -- and then the result isn't guaranteed by any means -- is miserable. And what do I want from it? A career? To be a portrait artist? To express something that is important? No! No, there is no grand or passionate motivation. Just an unhealthy, backwards-looking desire to be true to some misty conception I had as a youth that being an artist was what I wanted to do. What rot! And yet here I am, casting off existential anxiety, thoughts of the future, and applying myself as hard as I can. What confusion and lack of clarity.

Burned out; couldn't get to sleep last night, couldn't focus today, didn't pick up a paintbrush. Need to allow more down time. Building in rest days and will work longer on the days that I do work.

I want to throw it all to the wind, I want to be debauched, drunk, out of control.

Finished Dead Souls whilst painting today, which took too much of a sententious turn for my complete satisfaction. The romanticism that would have made Turgenev's nihilists ill. Nice to see a specific attention to the reality of country life though, with a convincing distribution of quail, osiers, flies, sparrows, pullets, mud, stinking puddles and towering fir trees.

Exhausted myself with the liking my painting one minute then returning to it later with fresh, critical eyes and seeing how firmly I am up against my lack of skill. It is horrendous, demoralising, bizarre. The worst thing is I can stop at any time and turn my attention to any one of the numerous diversions (reading, writing, travelling, TV, socialising) that would instantaneously make me feel good and forget about it all. What a horrid thing to pursue. Five hours of work absorbed into nothingness. Consciously following the wrong dream! Pathological!

What would represent optimal conditions for working? Not splendid isolation -- I don't have the willpower to get up early and work consistently. Ideally I would follow someone else in their routine, and break for lunch or coffee for some social interaction. I could reliably do eight hours of work a day that way I think. Here, on my own, with my bed right here and a well-stocked kitchen right there, I cannot squeeze myself for much more than four hours of painting! Absurd! I want to push myself hard, but find myself idling and frittering away time quite uselessly, particularly before lunch. I need to get up earlier and jump straight in, to secure a few hours at least before I sabotage myself.

The life of idle ease, the parasitic comfort of living at my dad's is not helping me. It is too easy, it robs me of motivation.

But art is not a handicraft, but the conveying of a feeling experienced by the artist. And feeling can be born in a man only if he lives the many-sided life natural and proper for human beings. And that is why giving artists security in their material needs is the most harmful condition for artistic productivity, because it releases the artist from the condition proper to all men of struggling with nature to support his own and other people's lives, and thereby experiencing the most important feelings proper to human beings. No situation is more harmful for artistic productivity than the situation of complete security and luxury in which artists usually live in our society.
Leo Tolstoy - What is Art?

I worked hard on my painting today, which ultimately I feel good about. Went through a lot of anguish. Trying to master myself to make myself produce work. Sick of the apprehension of my own averageness and want to transmute my stubbornness, vanity, pride into works of art. This is the egoism that drives the creative endeavour, which Orwell wrote about:

I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
George Orwell

Have been listening to Dead Souls by Gogol whilst painting today. Plot and character-driven so far, less embedded grand philosophising than the other Russian giants, and unexpectedly playful.

Over-ate and didn't leave the house. Rustication is lonely after Paris.

Laboured for four hours on the painting, changing but not improving. Finished listening to Fathers and Sons. Regret doing so little art last year, and being weak enough to think that doing an hour every day was acceptable. It achieved nothing except wear me out! I want finished pieces, and that requires extended time at the easel, not just one hour here and there.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons