There was a small Bellini in a museum near Annecy, part of a loan show, and I drove 140 km each way to stand in front of it. Eleven minutes. Then I left. It was enough and it was not enough at the same time.

What got me was not the face or the composition. It was the shoulder of the Madonna, the transition where the neck goes into it. There is no edge. You look for the line and there isn't one, it is just flesh becoming cloth becoming shadow, and you cannot find where he did it. I have been painting twenty years and I still cannot do that. I can fake it. Faking it is different. You can see the seam when someone fakes it, even if a photograph hides it.

Drove home with the radio off. Bof. I don't know what I am supposed to do with that feeling. It doesn't make me want to work harder exactly. It makes me want to work slower and accept that I may never get there.

The museum cafe was closed, so I ate a sandwich in the car in the rain like an idiot. Worth it.