1000 days

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 0026

Feeling keenly the dislocation between the semi-sacred spaces of the museums and the miserable, ugly reality of my bed, desk, lamp life at home. I spend all day reflecting in front of the finest works of art that humanity has the power to produce then I jump on a grotty subway to go back to the incandescent gloom of my little box. Contrast the self-righteous beatitude I get from gazing at art with the despair of the mundane and the guilt of not having done the work I should have done when I'm confronted with it all back here. Only relieved by tuning completely into a book or focusing properly on drawing. Surfacing back to reality is dreadful and it takes me time to adjust to it.

Went to the Cloisters today to look at some medieval art and architecture. Enraptured by the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. I've never seen anything like them. Gorgeous textures, colours, intricate and diverse flora and lovely little birds and animals everywhere. Enchanting, other-worldly.

The cloisters themselves, and the various chapels, windows, arches, doorways, sculptures, are imported from Europe and re-erected together with modern stone made to look old in a new syncretic structure that left me feeling unsettled. Having spent a lot of time in the real ancient churches of Italy and England I feel like a huge part of their aura is lost when they are ripped from their original place. The location of a building is integral to it; the kind of air you breathe when you're there, the sounds you hear, the way the light falls at different times of day. The first thing I noticed when I entered the museum was how warm it was, despite it being freezing outside. Never have I been in a temperature-controlled medieval church, and it felt all wrong. Part of the essence of an old church is its coolness, its smell. All that is lost, and it makes me think how much is lost from all works of art when they are moved from an environment they were made to be in. I'm thinking of the temples on their lone and level sands, the altarpieces, the predelle and the stele that I've been looking at recently. I understand why they have been moved, but it is important to remember how much context is left behind.

Started work on copying a Rembrandt etching, Landscape with Three Gabled Cottages Beside a Road. Gave up on the portrait, will have another go. For now I want to try my hand at some landscapes.

Day 0025

Can't do this infernal self-portrait. Everything is exactly wrong. I'll probably end up doing loads of attempts as getting a portrait to look like who it is supposed to be is one of my perennial challenges and one of my goals, and at present I'm the only model I've got (to use the term charitably).

Went back to the Met to wonder at the Egyptians. Wonderful sense of line-quality, symmetry, rhythm.

Day 0024

I have faltered somewhat today, having burnt myself out rather with a long and sleepless night of racing thoughts. I've been in a bit of a fugue state.

I just about mustered energy to go downtown to the Salmagundi Club to see the newly opened exhibition of the Art Renewal Center's 2015/16 salon and to pep myself up with a couple of coffees en-route.

The work there was encouragingly not as good as I thought it would be. There were some nice enough pieces, but nothing significantly better than I've seen by some of my peers at art school. Most of it was fairly mediocre attempts at wringing some meaning out of a boring concept, and often without the technical virtuosity necessary to allow me to overlook its lack of substance. This was good because it makes me feel like there's hope yet for me.

I'm running out of steam today and had to pause Ulysses because it was making my head ache. I switched over to Paradise Lost for a bit (because Joyce kept on dishing out Miltonic allusions and I wanted it from the horse's mouth), but that was still a bit much so I have ended the day in the best of hands, with Wodehouse, Bertie and Jeeves. Here's the balm for the ailing soul:

It has been well said of Bertram Wooster by those who enjoy his close acquaintance that if there is one quality more than another that distinguishes him, it is his ability to keep the lip stiff and upper and make the best of things. Though crushed to earth, as the expression is, he rises again - not absolutely in mid-season form, perhaps, but perkier than you would expect and with an eye alert for silver linings. P. G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning

Day 0023

Learning, learning, learning! Started a self-portrait today, working slowly and as carefully as I can with charcoal. Lots and lots wrong, can't wait to get back to it tomorrow and start correcting where I can. Enjoyable though. Great being in a city where you can nip to a 24-hour pharmacy to buy a mirror in the middle of the night because you fancy doing a self-portrait. It feels good to be working from life, not copying someone else's work.

Also went across to Queens to visit a friend studying at Grand Central Atelier. Very inspirational to see such a density of artistic talent. Some real technical excellence on display, and it's motivational to see work in various states of progression. Made me want to be better and to apply myself more -- there were students there working away on a Sunday; a reminder that some of these guys work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years on end. It's no wonder I'm so far behind. Must get to it!

I stayed up very late yesterday (this morning) reading Tolstoy's biography. It's jaw-dropping. I had no idea how much of a celebrity he was in his own time, and how many good works he did. He had a tremendous concern for the proper education of the peasantry -- he took immense pains over writing an ABC to improve literacy; he was hugely charitable, setting-up and running soup kitchens during a bad harvest, at his own expense (both monetarily and physically); he was an outspoken political activist; he raised substantial sums of money for the relief of the starving peasants; he gave away his possessions; he laboured in the fields alongside the serfs. Powerful, memorable, useful acts.

It's very interesting to reflect how much people value deeds, above and beyond all else ('actions speak louder than words' -- it's true). You can be the most sagacious, clever, compassionate person, but unless you evidence your qualities through recognizable, tangible channels, people won't know or care. If you have the integrity to follow through with whatever grand or generous schemes you can conceive, that's when people truly respect and understand you. The same is true with a work of art. It's all very well to have the innate potentiality to create something, but no-one cares about that. No one will know of the qualities you always knew were within you until you put pen to paper and give them something they can see and touch. So get to work!

Day 0022

I went back to the Met to soak up some Greek and Roman sculpture and pottery. I drew a sketch of a 2,400 year-old Greek lion. I had the room to myself for most of the time.

For me, most of the magic of these sculptures come from their immense age. They are solid, tangible manifestations of the same artistic impulse we have today, unchanged over millennia.

And so the art collapses the gap between the past and the present for me. Look at how modern this 6,000 year old marble figurine is. It could be something from the Picasso sculpture exhibition I saw at the MoMa the other week.

I get a depressing feeling about the legibility of art across the ages. Are we doomed to repeat ourselves, with nothing but small variations here and there? Is there progress, can there be? There certainly seem to be unconscious and conscious repetitions across cultures and across times, both in terms of the content and the styles. It feels oppressive to think that art has all been done before; is there anything new to say or represent? I'm not convinced. And here I am making endless copies of the masters...

A wider question is, can new thoughts be thought at all? Is everything I have thought or felt merely an iteration of what someone else somewhere has already experienced? Everything is more or less a variant on a theme. Being around the stuff from the Greeks makes me think that back then you could genuinely push an intellectual or experiential boundary, whereas now -- billions of people's lives and thoughts and experiences later -- I'm not sure how much is left for us.

Day 0021

Three weeks in. Need some discipline with these drawings; I'm not accurate enough and they look completely different from the original. This is a problem when it comes to drawing portraits of people, I can never make it look like them. Slow down! Measure! Don't jump in to shading too soon! Be critical!

Today has been walking, cafes, working, cooking, drawing, listening. It's hard to keep focused on the art when so many other things divide my attention.

I read an article about beauty and it had a quotation from Van Gogh that resonates with how I'm feeling:

I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heartVincent Van Gogh

After a bit of googling I've found an even more apposite quotation from him:

Not a day without a line. By writing, reading, working and practicing daily, perseverance will lead me to a good end.Vincent Van Gogh

Exactly.

Day 0020

I have listened to Hamlet and started James Joyce's Ulysses since my last update. I still don't understand Shakespeare properly, and have never been able to enjoy it as much as I should. Perhaps you need to see it performed, I just don't know. Ulysses is like being given a live-feed directly into someone's brain, and its fairly disorienting as a result. It feels like a second consciousness chattering away.

I must try and remember in the future that arguing / debating big topics (religion, politics, the future) is a waste of time. I don't think I've ever changed anyone's mind who didn't already want to have their mind changed, and it's just a fundamentally disheartening experience to see how difficult it is to communicate, to talk on the same point and not at cross-purposes, to understand what each person is thinking and trying to say. Half the time I don't even say things that I believe, but I say words to fill the air anyhow and find myself taking a position that on reflection I could just as easily have opposed. That's the problem with conversation, it's supposed to be in real-time so you don't have any chance to consider what on earth you are saying.

I didn't leave long to do my art today. I erased the right eye and repositioned it to make it truer to the original. Still evidently too rushed and sloppy. Might have another go at it tomorrow or I'll move on to something new.

Day 0019

Went to the Whitney Museum of American Art today. The art was totally incomprehensible to me. I felt slight bemusement, confusion, disdain. But I didn't even feel that strongly, which is the real pity. I remember once going around the Saatchi gallery and seeing work so poor that I felt angry, disgusted. When I left the gallery I suddenly felt positively about the art I had so loathed, simply because it had been able to make me feel something strongly. The work I saw today failed to touch me whatsoever. I think the fact that I didn't have to pay helped. When you pay for something you make yourself try to like it, or you stir yourself up into a rage at being robbed and thereby recoup your entry fee by the catharsis of complaining about it to anyone who will listen.

I laboured on my charcoal drawing some more tonight, but will probably abandon it tomorrow as my drawing is so miserably inaccurate.

Day 0018

I have started a copy of Leonardo's three-quarters view of the Virgin.

I finished In Search of Lost Time tonight. It is the greatest book I have ever read, and one that will surely stay with me for my whole life. I feel an artistic and sensory overload; I have been immersed in the impressionists at the Met today, I have been learning from Leonardo all night, and I have just come to the end of the best book I have ever read.

So that I should ask neither their praise nor their blame but only that they should tell me if it was right or not, whether the words they were reading within themselves were those I wrote

Yes, the words I read within myself were the ones he wrote. All of the most profound insights I have ever glimpsed about myself, art and other people are here eclipsed by countless others of even greater profundity. It is so dense with insight, real, penetrating insight, that I feel it will take a lifetime to absorb. The same with the art I have been looking at.

I am more resolved than ever to devote myself to art, fully and earnestly.

Day 0017

I was too tired today to do a meticulous drawing, so I turned again to Degas to have some fun with my oil pastels and learn from his modelling of light and shade. I worked from his pastel Dancer on Stage with a Bouquet.

I am nearing the end of my Proust odyssey. He is currently dealing with old age, the sudden apprehension that you are a being within time and that when you see signs of ageing in those around you, you begin to understand that you yourself have been transformed without you being aware of it. It is tremendously moving.

He has anticipated my feelings, my criticism, my analysis by placing this show-piece after a lucid exploration of what literature is, what it is to write and to think and to read and to live. So when I read his work and interpolate my own experiences and memories with his, he has already told me he knows I am doing so, and has indeed invited me to do so. I have never read a book so wonderfully self-aware and so carefully wrought.

What a precious thing it is to be young and alive and aware of it.