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 0426


After morning walk in the springtime sun I have unstopped my ears and untethered myself from the mast of worldly abstinence and booked a month in Paris. The thrice seductive siren song of pretty girls, the impulse of the moment and fiscal impropriety too great to resist. Reading Balzac and now Turgenev has weakened my resolve and I hunger for a spot of degraded sensualism.

Started Turgenev's Torrents of Spring, which started at such a glorious depth of oh-so Russian ennui and bleakest gloom but now soars to the heights of a French romance. Delicious combination!

Day 0425


Being busy is life's fast-forward button. No time to reflect or worry or feel. Hours of painting, work, cooking.

Finished that saucy little book Cousin Bette.

Day 0424


Waking up and painting as if it were a 9-5 job is exhausting, particularly when the results are so indiscernible. Palette knife and blotting paper to remove hours of error.

Enjoying Cousin Bette tremendously. Started work on my collection of public domain artwork, openaccessart.com.

Day 0423


A lot of time and back-ache to make the opposite of progress. Why do I repaint the whole fucking fave every day?! The same process repeated throughout my whole life: constantly tearing everything down only to rebuild it all anew and worse each day.

Day 0422


Cursory mooch in the market town, painting with daylight, half-arsed coding -- mainly configuration misery.

Day 0421

Spent the entire day scraping creative commons art images from the web. No painting, a lot of sitting and a lot of bad copy-and-pasted code.

Day 0420


Painting and coding. Much better painting with daylight than my inadequate artificial lighting arrangements.

Day 0419

Not what can be regarded as a triumph of a day. Woke up early to post a Tolstoy book to a friend, then languished for the rest of the day. Started rewriting some code, quite purposelessly, failed to complete it.

Rejected for the BP Award exhibition at the first hurdle. No motivation, no energy whatsoever to carry on.

Day 0418

Day of work in Cambridge; human beings making me feel lonely with their petty-mindedness and unwillingness to accede to my imagined superiority. Digital humanities Fellow who couldn't work out how to scroll a webpage.

Day 0417


Pontificated about my theory of life, lacking the necessary humility to make a point persuasively. Erroneously refer to it as an absolute and not as a theory. Cambridge as an unnoticed backdrop, to be trod through and plundered from, not to be experienced in its own right.
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