About 100 Days
Since this May 22, I have been participating in an intensive summer project that I designed three years ago. The project challenges me to make work everyday for 100 consecutive days. You can see my work from this summer on my blog here, as well in the drop tabs above.
The history of 100 Days:
In the summer of 2008, I decided I wanted to be highly productive in the studio and then realized that I had just about exactly 100 days off from my full-time teaching position. I gave myself the challenge of making a new painting-a-day for 100 days: http://cmoutside.wordpress.com/ (Or see “100 Days 2008 in the drop tabs above). An additional challenge for myself was that each of these works were to be created outside, in a natural environment. No matter what the weather. I have embraced this setting for all three summers so far.
After setting these guidelines for myself, and knowing how easy it was to get distracted during the summer, I decided to make a blog for the project and spread the word about it in the hopes that friends and family would hold me accountable if I skipped a day and that going public with my project would be great motivation. Several days into the project, my colleague Steve Ersinghaus decided he wanted to crank out some new work as well and gave himself the challenge of following each of my daily paintings with a daily poem. We both made it through the summer and published a collection of the products. That book is available here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/356800 through Blurb.
Last summer, more artists were hungry to join in. Steve started each day with a short story and many of us responded with a painting, poem, photograph, audio piece, hypertext etc. Because Steve had responded to a painting of mine each day the previous summer, I decided to take a word, phrase or sentence from his story and use that as a title for my daily painting. My work wasn’t an illustration of the story, but an image built on some concept or vocabulary found in the text. The words were simply a place to look for a starting point for paint. There were about 15 participants altogether, most of them connecting back to the group in some way. You can see work from the 2009 project here: http://www.netvibes.com/sersinghaus#100_Days_%3A%3A_Summer_2009 . (Or see “100 Days 2009 in the drop tabs above).
This year we have even more participants on the roster. John Timmons has been posting a video piece each morning and many of us are responding to his work in an effort to keep a collaborative spirit. I look at his films either before or after I paint each day, and find a way to connect through something like the title, color or texture in the digital piece. All participants daily posts will be streamed into Netvibes, like last year: http://www.netvibes.com/100days2010/#The_100_Days_Projects
We also have created a webpage to compile information about the project: http://onehundreddays.net/
