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 0176


Exhausted and unreal. How is it that the buses still run, the poppies still bloom, the quiet streets still stand when a life is no longer there to be a part of it? The indifference of a wedding venue reused day after day for special days. Everything everywhere is equally undifferentiated and unmoved.

Day 0175

I skipped this day. Tim and Morgan's wedding and the simultaneous news of my grandma's death.

Day 0174


Tried to draw a portrait, failed multiple times. Immense frustration. Still can't draw a likeness and it makes me feel like I'm wasting my time drawing every day when there is no discernable improvement in the one area I want to be good at.

Ready for the wedding tomorrow.

Day 0173


Slow day, reading, garden. An abundance of time, not using it productively. Less than an hour on the drawing tonight.

Day 0172


Cambridge, sunny, aimless. Shopping, lunch, wandering. Very tired. Late night pen and ink scrawl because it was quick.

Day 0171


Wedding rehearsal and ensuing chippie.

Day 0170


Achieved nothing today whatsoever, and kept falling asleep. No purpose and felt lonely and frustrated. Listened to some of David Copperfield. Summer rain, dog roses, lime trees with their arcing boughs, yellowhammer, dunnocks.

Day 0169


Eurostar to London, (rain, cold) dreadful brunch, train to Cambridge, vegetated with old friend, driven to Suffolk. Absolute overload with greenery: towering trees loaded with leaves, verges overspilling with grasses, cow parsley, daisies, elderflower. Wide skies with white, blue, grey, inky masses silently brooding overhead.

Copped out on today's drawing, far too tired to concentrate on the roses from the garden. Will try again tomorrow.

Day 0168


Inhabited a very agreeable cafe for half the day, bankrupting myself in the process. I attempted to do so nonchalantly. Got some work done to defray some of the damage.

Walked around town, visited Notre Dame and the Luxemburg gardens. Beautiful roses in full bloom.

Day 0167


Paper thin bedding wrapped in plastic, pillow-less, other travellers talking, snoring, making toilet trips, being woken by border control at 5am, stopping and starting, smells, lurching, unhabitual discomfort. Sharing a mixed compartment on the overnight train from Milan to Paris is more or less an ordeal, and yet there is still a certain magic on the new day, stepping off the train in the heart of a beautiful new city.

Worked in a cafe, paying extravagant sums for two drinks and fast internet. Got the keys to my microscopic apartment (featuring toilet in cupboard), and crashed out. Summoned energy at last to walk over to the Pompidou Centre and flit around their modern and contemporary collections. Similar to the Whitney and the MoMa in New York, though practically empty. Sense of the waning interest and relevance of art. Ever shorter half-life for artistic movements. Contemporary artists rehashing ideas that only had value when they were new.

Dreadfully tired, mechanical and meaningless self portrait.
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