1000 days project

"We are what we repeatedly do"

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926)

The 1000 day project is my attempt to steer myself consciously towards the things that are most important to me.

Every day for 1000 days I will work towards my goals in a structured way. I will be posting daily updates on this website.

The 1000 day project runs from 26th December 2015 to the 21st September 2018, which is my 30th birthday.

In the past I have successfully completed two 100 day projects (100 portraits in 2010 and 100 blogs in 2011). In 2012 I spent 1000 hours drawing and painting.

Day 0216


No motivation whatsoever, tired and burnt out. Gave away all of my English Literature books. Threw out more artwork.

Day 0215


Donated more of my stuff to charity, and binned even more. Imagining that I have died and going though my own possessions with a fresh eye, discarding everything that is not part of who I am today. Keeping my art materials and a few books, a few clothes. Overcoming mawkish sentimentality to get rid of the artifacts of my past, remembering that the things themselves have no intrinsic value to me, the importance is all in my head. If I forget it when I no longer have it, it wasn't important.

Set up my easels to do my drawing because I'm aching from leaning over the table to work.

Less is more. So used to living out of a small bag when traveling that all of these possessions at home seem like extravagant encumbrances. Throwing out my old artwork too from when I was young because it is odious and has long ago served its purpose. I carry within me the skills to do even my best work again, and would not mourn its loss. The process of making the art is the end in itself.

Day 0214


Continued throwing out my childhood possessions. Took a hammer to some old hard drives. Felt strange to physically destroy data, irretrievably. So used to everything digital existing in the ether, untouchable and everlasting.

Started reading Catch-22.

Day 0213


First driving lesson in a year was mercifully endurable. After the encouragement I so badly need I don't dread the next lesson so much. I really want to conquer this, as I have put it off for so many years.

Day 0212


I wish I had been better socialized in my youth, and wasn't fretting about learning to drive aged 27. Filled my day with dread about tomorrow's lesson, even though I know it will be fine.

Day 0211


London with girls I have known for a lifetime. Portrait awards exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Can spot the artists trained at ateliers. Not necessarily a good thing: they unthinkingly follow the same style, though everything else follows equally unthinking but less technically demanding styles too.

Super cars parking obnoxiously, showing wealth. Such disparities in London. Always reminds me how incomprehensibly far down the scale I am, no matter how well I do relative to the bubble of friends I hang out with. Same with art galleries: there's always someone better, if not at the exhibition then next door in the National Gallery.

Day 0210


Read Nineteen Eighty Four again, which has combined with Brave New World to leave me feeling empty and malleable, reminding me that all of my hopes and dreams and loves and beliefs are conditioned, evolutionary, culturally, environmentally.

The end is contained in the beginning. To have a child is to simultaneously bring a life into the world and to consign someone to death.

Day 0209


Finished Brave New World, which was fun and easily digestible. The tragedy is the brave new world isn't as odious as all that, and drug-mediated, confined and artificial lives could very well be a way to bring happiness to the greatest number of people.

Booked a driving lesson.

Booked flights to Prague, to do a quick dash to Budapest via Vienna.

Day 0208


Finished Lolita this morning. It will stay with me for some time. Finely crafted, closely observed bestial reality.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear", never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances will Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.Vladimir Nabokov

Realised how vanishingly few of my friends read books, which pains me. So much insight, so much to be learned and so many lives to be lived through literature.

Started Brave New World.

Day 0207


Day trip to the Suffolk coast to enjoy the sun and sea breeze. Pebble shore, turbid brown soupy sea, pale bodies and clear skies. Wanted to paint a watercolour but wasn't touched by anything.

Tremendous rain storm on way home, sheets of water stopping motorway traffic. Petrichor, vegetable smells. Cleared up and enjoyed the evening in Bury St Edmunds.

Huge sunset lit huge edible-looking cumulus in the east.

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