Keene State’s Drawing 2 class recently took part in its annual 100 Drawings Project.
According to art Professor Emily Lambert, the project is assigned over two weeks, and tasks students with doing 100 drawings in the time span.
“I’ve done this project with students for over a decade, and I’ve seen so many different solutions and ways of handling problem-solving through this project, and it’s always really exciting,” Lambert said.
Lambert said she had been given this project by her old professor, Professor Drew Beattie when she was a student.
Following the project, the work is displayed on the third floor of the Redfern Arts Center, and the students participate in a critique.
“It becomes a self portrait of the student, where you begin to see what their interests are, where their strengths are, how they handle challenges that come up, how they handle the boredom, [and] how they handle the material,” Lambert said.
“It’s usually pretty exciting to see the ways in which all of the pieces can become a deposit or a source of ideas that hopefully will fuel them throughout the semester,” Lambert later said. “Sometimes it’s a project students will come back to again and again.”
Senior Quinn Velasco said this was their second time doing the project for class, and they felt inspired to do it again outside of school.
“It was really fun, seeing how I changed, what I didn’t change,” Velasco said. “And I’ve made it a result to do this project every year. I’m making it a goal to try and do 100 drawings every year.”
Velasco said that the project was a little daunting for them.
“This opportunity to just make whatever you want out of 100 sheets of paper and a Sharpie and do whatever you want with no guidelines, it’s a little overwhelming in comparison to projects that we’re used to,” Velasco said. “It’s a little bit of a departure from what I’m used to or what people might be used to as an art student.”
Non-traditional student Merrilee Frable said that she’s also done this assignment before in this class.
“There’s no endeavor to put in a finished product,” Frable said. “There’s no end goal. It’s really just to go paper to paper and just see what manifests.”
This year, Frable focused her project around vellum paper and layered work, which she said connected to her textile independent study. She started using Procreate to layer marks, but soon realized its limitations.
“Procreate’s really limiting because it doesn’t allow for spontaneity,” she said. “So I thought ‘Let me just do 100 random marks and stripes and patterns and motifs. And then from that stack, I can pull out two or three or four and then layer them on top of each other and get a pretty cool idea for a new pattern.”
Frable said that she enjoyed doing the assignment for a second year.
“I appreciate it as a growing opportunity,” she said. “If you put yourself into the assignment, like just really take it on and just do it as it’s intended, I find it’s a really wonderful opportunity to grow. Especially if you also set an intention, like something you want to work on, or it might be the intention not to work on anything at all.”
Emily Sloane can be contacted at
esloane@kscequinox.com
