I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I started this 1000-day project to give myself room to breathe, time to try things out, space to explore. I knew one year wasn’t long enough to reinvent myself after leaving my technology career because I already tried that.
Reaching 25% done feels a little scary. I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. I’ve started and discarded so many projects.
What if I get to day 1000 and I still haven’t landed anywhere?
I keep reminding myself it’s okay to be reckless in this reinvention. In fact, recklessness could be the key to my success here — letting go of prediction, control, and optimization. Instead pursuing presence, flexibility, and openness to the unfolding of the unknown future.
New paintings
I added photos of some new paintings in my Motion Memory series to the gallery. I was planning to put some of these in a new series called “Mechanism” but when I looked at them all together, they seemed like they were all variations on Motion Memory. The one I share here was inspired by the idea of mining, something I’ve been thinking about a lot, both because I’ve been adding positions in miners, precious metals, and base metals to my portfolio and because my boyfriend, Ray, knows a lot about it (he has worked in the field, as did his father).
I do feel that I’ve made progress in my paintings. The paintings I do now have a sense of three dimensionality, a style that is recognizably mine, and color palettes that harmonize with one another. I’m thinking I might work on my Saatchi Art storefront and then see how I might promote them better. When I post newsletters on my Substack, I usually get a little spike of visitors here. While I don’t have a huge audience, I do have a tiny one, and I might be able to grow it, and find within it people who resonate with my artistic style, people who might welcome an original art piece in their home.
It could be that where this reinvention gets me is where I hoped for all along: to be an art monster. As I wrote on April 12, 2024, at the very start of my reinvention project:
The kind of insatiability I intend to indulge over the next year, and I hope for the rest of my life, is insatiability in creating. I want to be an art monster. Money is ultimately mundane. Art—writing, painting, even producing elegant and useful software—is transcendent.
I think I have achieved that. I added eight — eight!!! — new paintings to the Motion Memory gallery yesterday, and I have two more photos of paintings that I didn’t include because it just felt like too much. I have this blog and two active Substack newsletters where I regularly publish my writing. I’ve started working with Claude Code, Gemini, and Codex in experimenting with building personal software for investment portfolio management.
Perhaps I am already an art monster?