The Drawing Project

The Drawing Project came about as a response to a summer class at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. In particular, I was moved by a presentation of individual and cooperative artwork by children in the Reggio Emilia programs of italy. This work, by children free of constructs of what art is supposed to be, was emotionally affective and aesthetically complex and most impressively, very innovative in the forms it took. This got me thinking about how to give my students more opportunities to develop creativity along side technical skills and techniques. I encouraged students to see representational drawing only as a skill, and to seperate it from their idea of art. Art is something that can be made with representational drawing, but not every drawing need be seen as art, and art can be made using damn near anything, in any form. Without going too much into an Arthur Danto-esque philisophical tail spin, I decided to take a page from Reggio Emilia and assign weekly homework outside of class that had a different "liberating constraint" each week. Each week, instruction was often vague and always minimal by design. Nobody really know how to teach creativity, so best to start by getting students used to assignments that were very wide open but always had restrictions to help provide a starting point and to then encourage them to experiment wildly and fail often. My students sometimes had material restrictions but often not. I decided it would be good  to go ahead and do all the assignments myself but I also restricted myself to using charcoal only. Each week my students and I do four drawings each, mine are always 10"x10". Each week I come up with the new "liberating constraint" and then what happens, happens. After a few weeks, I noticed all of our drawings were abstract, at which point I stopped showing them my work to remove the anxiety of influence, and decided It made sense to shift between abstract, representational and stylized forms as best suited my mood and the relationship between the constraint and possibility. When I have about 100 drawings, which will all be charcoal and all the same square format, all matted in black frames, I will show them at "The Hive" in Keene New Hampshire and do a short talk to accompany the show at the opening. I would then like to publish them in a book with each group of four placed next to the constraint that spawned it so others can use the same prompt or contraint themselves. I would like to include student examples in the back of the book, also clearly labelled with which assignment they are inspired by.  Much like Keene artist Craig Stockwell, I hope to show how much variety, how much creativity, can be achieved by means of contraint.

Some sample projects:

Go outside and find a nice rock. Do four drawings with charcoal and the rock. The only thing you can't do, is draw the rock itself. 

Do four drawings using only charcoal and vegetables.

Do four drawings made exclusively by dropping things.

Do four drawings, each with 4,000 straight, 3/4 to 1 inch strokes for a total of 12,000 strokes in one week.

Do four drawings with no lines, only values. Edges between values are ok.