Day 0442

I roused myself rather early and went up to Monmartre to do a couple of hours of life drawing. It's bally difficult and took a lot of concentration, which very pleasantly abstracted myself from myself, though to be honest I couldn't help thinking more or less constantly about whether I was going to attempt to flirt with any of the girls in the class. I didn't and remained mute and hostile, my default pose. I have now drawn naked women in four countries.

Sat in the Tuileries in the gentle heat of the spring sun with my lifelong friend and her University pals, a galaxy of beauty. Art is a very much inferior second-place to the real deal, the pretty girl, the bursting bud of youth, the smiling symmetry of all that is good and true. I would be content to bask in the radiance of attractive girls all day every day but I finally bowed to repeated calls to move on, and off we went to the Musée Rodin.

Another situation to drown in; this time not in the profusion of people but in the tidal wave of work. Such a prolific artist, such a vast breadth of stuff produced, the man must have been obsessed. He tried everything, ceaselessly. He was a passable, second-rate realist painter and sculptor but he broke away from that and instead churned out a staggering quantity of work in his own slap-dash style -- so much of it in fact that some of it is actually rather powerful. The main enjoyment for me was the glorious textures, patinas, colours of the materials he used: delicious deep murky gloopy chocolatey bronze, sickly gone-off green blue copper oxide, crystalline white soft marble, bashed about rock, gemlike onyx, work-in-progress plaster, cooked earth scooped and scratched and pushed and smeared.

The lesson: keep working, chuck stuff out continuously. Just churn it out and confuse people into thinking that breadth and quantity is as good as quality. It might very well be.