Day 0392

Got back to work and painted for the whole day, listening to a dreadful narrator reading Atlas Shrugged. Every character is so clearly a shard of her own personality, much less differentiated than other authors. Slightly too transparent an insight into her own predilections, biases and fantasies for my complete satisfaction. It is practically identical to The Fountainhead, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't like that my art consists of me essentially copying a photo; it reveals the gap between my pretensions and my ability. If I were a true artist I feel like I would have a vision clearly before me in my mind that I could put straight to the canvas. I feel like I would have some clear and bold style of my own, not the lifeless, forgettable blandness that I have unconsciously made my own. I toil with plodding incompetence to badly render an inaccurate copy of a poor photo, revealing a masochistic desire to foreclose possibilities of my own repose, happiness, contentment whilst I instead push myself through an arbitrarily arduous task for the punishment of the process and the craven desire -- in fact the expectation and the right -- for adulation at the end. I hold my suffering (insofar as forcing myself to pick up some paintbrushes can be regarded as suffering -- it is more accurately just wearisome and draining) as my secret right to feel better than those who lead pleasant-by-default lives, even though I am wracked by envy of the unselfconsciously unselfish ease with which they bob through life without having to make themselves do things they don't want to do.

Too proud and stubborn to do things that I know would be good for me. Getting a middling job, moving to a modest apartment, finding an adequately pleasant girlfriend, doing moderate amounts of art and reading now and then would almost certainly give me more moments of joy than the self-imposed monotony I've settled on. But that would offend my image of myself as a tortured soul, the unrecognized talent. A more honest reading would be a constant need to be a victim, a passive and undignified moan for attention and support, and pathetically blatant at that. What exhausting garbage!