State of the Series

Last week we had a long discussion about the many ideas that were being considered for the semester-long series project. The ideas were, for the most part, the result of thinking, "What am I going to draw for my series?" Perhaps a better approach would be to start drawing, anything, from anywhere...from observation, from imagination, from experimentation. Also beneficial would be defining the problem in your own vernacular, "What is a series?" Perhaps a collection of related images created in succession. Maybe they relate conceptually, maybe by process, maybe by subject. Look at the examples that were distributed at the beginning of the semester, look at the examples from our blog, research artists who work in series (that's probably going to be almost all of the ones you find).

The summer classes that responded to the same project, albeit compressed, generally had 3-6 drawings by the end of the summer session. Six weeks as opposed to sixteen weeks. Makes me curious to see what a ten week difference makes to the evolution of such an ambitious project.

As each series begins to develop, there will likely be changes made, media explored, ideas adjusted. You may end up with ten drawings, with four of them constituting a resolved series. Be open to that possibility. In the end, it will be far better to show and discuss the four that are related in succession, than the ten that jump from one idea to another, or one media to another. Not that the entire exploration of ten drawings couldn't be included in final portfolios, but for the presentation of the final series, the four may be the cream of the crop and worthy of saying "this is the culmination of my creative investigations."