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 0446


Sprung out of bed and scurried to the boulangerie, painted, fell asleep in the park in the lovely spring sun; a pleasing scene marred not a little by the youth with their music, clouds of cigarette smoke, humanity in general.

Finished Turgenev's A Nest of the Gentry, which was small, economical, polished.

Day 0445


Painted, feet tired from standing all day. Didn't leave the apartment, stayed in with Dumas and Turgenev. Soft, warm, idle loafer-life.

Day 0444


Breaking the habit of a lifetime, I have been consistently getting up early of my own volition. Was painting by 8am. It has become unavoidably evident that I am at the limits of my powers with it. Each day I start out afresh thinking I will correct the errors of before and bring it to a new level; invariably all that happens is that I change but do not improve it. Going around in circles.

Listened to more Monte Cristo, and some radio programmes about Alexander the Great.

Visited the market, the supermarket and the English bookshop. Bought another Turgenev. Blossom and spring colour in the squares.

I very much like to indulge myself by identifying with Turgenev's egoists, and in turn with him.

However he begun a conversation, he usually finished it by talking about himself, and did so somehow in a pleasant, mild, heartfelt way, as if he were doing so involuntarily.
"He understands everything and can do almost anything himself." "Yes, anything second-rate, lightweight, rushed. People like that, and they like him, and he's pleased with that." Ivan Turgenev, A Nest of the Gentry

Day 0443


Woke early to urgent work emails, the bane of my life. Pushed them out of the way and got on with painting before meeting my portrait model for luncheon. What a glaring difference between my ragged daubs and the real thing! Have now to completely change the colours again, I just can't get it right. Much warmer, softer in real life.

Excellent Chinese dumplings, a delightful change, and then idling the afternoon in a café instead of painting. I'm far too easily pulled from my work, I'll never get anything done because I give in to the first distraction. Well, at least it was pleasant. Paris, food, girl, very few cares.

Watched a documentary about Rodin, the old cad. I knew just by looking at his art that he was a lascivious old rogue! Good chap, I'm glad to see that the art is nothing more than some kind of secretion, some kind of sublimation of his lust for women. An excuse! Wonderful, true!

"Mes dernières années sont couronnées de roses ; les femmes, ces dispensatrices, m'entourent ; et rien n'est si doux" "My last years are crowned with roses. I'm surrounded with beautiful women, those dispensers, and nothing is so sweet" Auguste Rodin, quoted in Rodin a l'Hotel de Biron et a Meudon, Gustave Coquiot
"Quel éblouissement : une femme qui se déshabille! C’est l’effet du soleil perçant les nuages." "A woman undressing, what a glorious sight. It's like the sun breaking through the clouds" Auguste Rodin
"In love all that counts is the act, everything else is detail. No doubt charming, but just detail" "Some people say I think too about women. But after all what is there more important to think about" BBC Fine Art Collection, Rodin

Day 0442


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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.

Day 0441


Worked on my painting, not improving it and instead making it look like a mask. At least I was listening to The Count of Monte Cristo, which is transporting me away from my own grotty non-existence very effectually. I'm particularly intoxicated by the continual thread of Orientalism, which I've never really been interested in before. Seeing the North Africans in the market here (one bloke in particular, dark crinkle-creased skin, blue eyes) has continually cast my mind beyond the confines of Europe and I can see myself falling prey to romantic exoticising tendencies.

Walked aimlessly around the city because it was sunny. Watched documentaries on the art of Egypt, intoxicated by it. Have half a mind to go and have a look, but I want to have someone to share it with.

City pullulating with people, allegedly all thinking, feeling creatures with separate lives that are going on as fully, completely, richly as anything I have ever experienced, every single one of them. No way to imagine even one other mind completely, all that can be done is to model a wretchedly incomplete representation, to guess, to group, to stereotype and to merge. And still there is a never-ending torrent of people! Incomprehensible! What a dread surge of humanity sluices around on all sides, unknown and unknowable! And how horrid a deep we the living float on, an abyss of the numberless dead, forgotten souls beneath us and all about, inseparably close, just one eddy or swirl of chance away from darkest obscurity and profound oblivion. It is too miserably vast, too horribly undifferentiated, gloomy and run-together to leave anything to hold on to.

Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water -- John Keats

Day 0440


Painting, Monte Cristo, the market.

Day 0439


Pleasant day painting where things seemed to go as I intended for once. Very much enjoying listening to The Count of Monte Cristo, a ripping yarn, a second Victor Hugo.

Nice Italian dinner out. They gave us paper bibs.

Day 0438


Painting, working, walking. Zombie mode, no thought nor plan nor feeling.

Sometimes life can seem burdensomely long, so much already behind and perhaps so much more blandness stretching on into the distance. What if I've felt everything I will feel and the rest is just to be variations on a theme?

There was a cyclist unconscious in the road. Jim Morrison is buried in the cemetery ten minutes away.

Day 0437


I forced myself to get up and paint this morning without giving myself time to think about it. I rewarded myself by listening to the rest of Dangerous Liaisons: I had cunningly refused myself the joys of the audiobook if I wasn't at the easel. I have so far failed to live up to its exemplar of the non plus ultra of debauchery, although I suspect I may very well have the required moral fibre and physical stamina to pursue it. The book did of course have some kind of moral or other at the end but it all sounded like too much fun to ring true. All in all a commendably tidy plot, sumptuously rich in convents, grief-stricken families and deranged women and all told by expertly differentiated characters whom I shall miss. I particularly liked the idea of the octogenarian aunt greedily devouring the scandalous letters luridly recounting her nephew's wicked adventures (admittedly that is my interpretation of the saintly old crone based on approximately zero textual evidence).

Walked across town to have a coffee and to dose myself with a measure of human interaction. She, horrified by the killing of a rhino, describes herself as indifferent to humans but very sensitive to animal suffering. Later tucks into a pork baguette. Keeps cat trapped in her Parisian apartment. After dating a girl of similar inconsistency I am now trained to deal with such behaviour and do so by ignoring it rather than by challenging it.

What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?
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