The end of the 100 day project!
The 100 Day Project is officially over, and I’m very glad I did it. I’m also pretty happy to not have to think, “sh*t, I still have to make today’s thing” at 9:30 at night. Haha. oops!
I started the project because I wanted a reason to get back into my own work regularly. Teaching has a way of expanding to fill every available corner of the day, and once you add email, errands, laundry, dishes, course prep, grading, and all the other glamorous parts of adulthood, studio time can disappear surprisingly fast. I wanted something small enough that I could keep returning to it without turning the whole thing into another giant obligation.
The 5"x5" format helped with that a lot. It was financially manageable, didn’t require me to figure out where the hell I was going to store a hundred giant paintings, and gave me a clear little space to work inside every day. It also drove me slightly nuts by the end because I LOVE working big, and apparently five inches starts feeling very cramped after you’ve stared at it for a hundred days.
Looking back at everything now, I can pretty easily tell which pieces happened on days when I had more time and which ones were wedged into the edge of an evening after everything else was done. Some of them I still really like, some feel more like notes for something I might come back to, and a handful can probably enjoy a peaceful retirement in a box somewhere. I’m okay with that.
That was probably one of the better things about doing so much work in a relatively short period of time. I couldn’t treat every single piece like it needed to become Important Art. There simply wasn’t enough time for that, which was actually kind of freeing. I had to make the thing, respond to what was happening, and eventually move on to the next one.
It also made some of my habits very obvious. Certain shapes kept coming back, along with the same kinds of color relationships, marks, and compositional choices. There were things I kept reaching for because I genuinely liked what they were doing, and a few things I was clearly doing because they were familiar and easy. Seeing all hundred pieces together makes that stuff a LOT harder to ignore.
And of course I spent plenty of time telling myself I should push something further, which is always fun because I say that exact same thing to students constantly. Apparently I need to enroll in my own classes every few years.
By the end of the project, though, the biggest thing I noticed was how badly I wanted more room. I missed making work where I could actually move around. When I work larger, there’s a physical part of the process that I really enjoy: stepping back, moving across the surface, reaching, making bigger marks, getting my whole body involved instead of spending all my time working from my hand and wrist. After a hundred tiny paintings, I was VERY ready for some of that again. So now I’m in the mildly awkward part where the project is done and I haven’t completely figured out what comes next.
I’ve been cleaning the studio, moving things around, sorting materials, photographing work, finding supplies I forgot I owned, and making piles that currently make sense only to me. I’m trying to clear enough physical and mental space to see what I actually want to work on next rather than immediately inventing another project because there happens to be an empty spot on the calendar.
I’ve also been thinking about working outside for part of the summer. I keep imagining some kind of big table or workbench where I can spread out, paint larger, make a mess, and not worry quite so much about containing everything. I have not actually built this magical outdoor studio situation yet, of course. I’m currently in the phase where I have mentally designed approximately seventeen versions of it and purchased none of the lumber. We’ll see where that goes.
What I do know is that the 100 Day Project got me making regularly again, and it gave me a pretty good pile of information about where my brain seems to be heading. I can see what I kept returning to, what I got bored with, what still feels interesting, and what I am very ready to move away from. I don’t think I need a bigger conclusion than that.
I made a hundred things. Some worked, some didn’t, and somewhere along the way I started wanting bigger surfaces, more room, and a little more mess again. That seems like a pretty decent place to start whatever comes next.