My 100 Day Project
I’m a busy design manager at Atlassian, and I’ve used my commute for several years as a time to sketch, draw and express myself artistically. There’s something about having a little black Moleskin and a Micron that over the years helped me feel safe in my playing small. There were no large works in the pipeline, no “body of work” and art was something I had abandoned at a crossroads many years ago. Now I had more important things to do with my days, and honestly, the thought of going back to that crossroads was a very scary prospect.
So I breathed deep and took my first steps.
I signed up to “Beginners oil painting” at the National Art School under the very inspiring V.R Morrison.
Round about the same time, I saw Elle Luna’s interview on The Great Discontent and she talked about a 100 day project. You do the same thing every day for 100 days and you document each instance. Many people posted them on Instagram.
The great surrender is the process; showing up day after day is the goal. For the 100-Day Project, it’s not about fetishizing finished products — it’s about the process. — Elle Luna
Obviously I barely read that part, but I did decide to play. I chose to paint a landscape every day, and pick a quote to go with it.
And just like that, I started. There were some rules I set myself in terms of using watercolours, black ink…I was still playing it safe, holding onto the side of the pool, scared to get out of my depth.
The first ones took the longest. I was never happy with anything I did and I spent tonnes of time picking at things. It wasn’t an easy start, although I knew that I found some peace and joy in loose lines.
It dawned on me very suddenly that I had a few months of this to go and I was never going to make it if I was going to be that precious about it all. There were the days where I would come home late from work, walk the dog, eat something and then sit down at 11pm with a big sigh, with painting a landscape being the last thing on earth I wanted to do.
So I did it anyway.
A funny thing started to happen.
I began to not really care about the end result, and really look forward to the point where my brain would seem to switch off, and I would start to smile and relax. I looked forward to the feeling of painting, the act of pushing the paint around and the drawing of each single line. It became my escape.
Life continued to happen all around: I delivered tonnes of new designs with my team, 4 new people joined, I trained for the City to Surf, I struggled with an old injury, my puppy grew up, my niece was born, my partner left for South-Africa to care for her dad who is taking his last breaths, we set new OKRs... Life continued to happen, and in the midst of it all, I painted a landscape every day.
Some I thought were ok, and I painted some really horrifying ones. Still, I found the courage to share them and I learned something huge: other people saw things in the paintings I didn’t. They meant things to people, personal things, that I couldn’t control or predict. The ones I hated others loved. There was something puzzling about that, and also very deep. Making art isn’t about you. So, how could I know if something was good or not? And why did that matter so much to me? I wanted to be able to prepare, to brace myself for the person who would say “this is shit” or “You’re a crappy artist, why do you bother?”. I learned that I was my harshest critic, and that the ones people didn’t really like, well it wasn’t the end of the world…
So I carried on.
Then I started to hit the wall…
The watercolours annoyed me, I could never get the colour I wanted from them, I never could quite get the effect I was after, and I struggled to understand what it was I was desperately trying to express. At first, I was just painting a landscape every day, but now…now something started to stir from deep inside me, and this long forgotten feeling was flooding me. It was almost like grieving. I would sit on the bus staring into space…feeling. Feeling everything. It awakened a sensitivity in me that I had only found through practising Yoga.
So I carried on…safe in my watercolour moleskins…
Then I snapped.
I couldn’t paint another watercolour, I absolutely pined for the feeling of oil on the brush, and the exhilarating possibilities it offered. But oil painting is messy and I live in an apartment. Therefore I had always written it off as something you do when you have a proper studio or at least a garage. Or at least something you did when you were a “proper” artist. It also takes time to get right, and you need to clean the brushes afterwards — that also takes much longer than washing off watercolours.
I decided that the mess and the overhead was worth it. There was no hesitation the moment I felt the urge to paint a light house. That was for some reason more important than anything else happening that day. I was also comfortable with not really understanding it. I was ok with not knowing where this was going. In fact, being open to whatever happened made me smile. I trusted the process.
I had finally surrendered.
I started to paint furiously, and I looked forward to Saturdays when I could paint all day. I felt painting was something physical. I needed to feel the scene in myself before I could paint it, and I mixed colours with abandon. I felt energised and strangely whole. The hours melted away. I felt like myself again. I had a real purpose: to paint. Why or how, or what were really not important things. Just to endlessly paint.
And just like that it ended.
And then it didn’t. The project is finished, but it opened something in me that is flowing freely and happily. I paint every day and I’m clearer about what it is I’m trying to express, who I am really, and what’s important.
There were very few failures. That’s not to say that things didn’t go wrong sometimes, but I never felt like it hadn’t been worth it. I would never take any of it back. The journey was honest, open and raw. I’m not failproof, and I realise that I don’t want to be. There’s connection in the moments of vulnerability. There’s a gap, a livewire that exposes itself and leaves you open to others. Approachable. Human. True.
Authenticity is the real gift.
In truth we are salty, sticky, moist and smelly. We love through instinct and are connected through our humanity. We spend a lot of time and effort in curating our lives, our bodies, our lifestyles, our newsletters, our photos…every facet of ourselves. We make everything sterile, expected, outcome-focused, directed, scrubbed of the fabric of life. We’re overly keen, overly anxious, overly polite, overly selfish, overly judgemental, overly scrutinised, and under loved.
There’s honesty in muddy feet, in grazed knees, in open hands, in tears, in a touch, in breathing, in kissing, being kissed, sobbing, climbing high, running free, going under, looking into the wild, being surprised, being gentle, being soothed, being loved…being ourselves.
That is what I’m trying to say.
See the whole project here.
