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The Drawing Marathon is an intensive two week course offered at RISD by Gwen Strahl once a year, during the winter semester. The class meets five days a week for 12 hours every day, during which students are exposed to a unique, often physical mode of drawing. The first half of everyday is spent working on a large 4 foot by 8 foot piece of paper. Although these drawings are developed over the course of several hours, students are told to make spontaneous changes to their work near the end of each drawing session. A. drawing which might've taken a student 5 hours to create could be completely transformed in the last 10 minutes of the session. The rest of the day is spent drawing figures using various techniques such as charcoal, graphite, gesso, paint, ink, sandpaper, etc. Students are often encouraged to mix these techniques and push their understanding of their materials. Compared to the first half of the day, which encourages students to explore a single space within the same drawing for a prolonged period of time, the second portion of the day is fast-paced, and speaks more to the students' own instincts and trains hand-eye coordination, with poses being as short as a few seconds. Although the actual course is only two weeks long, students are given the rest of the month long winter semester to work on their individual final project which is almost entirely self-regulated. There are practically no guidelines for the final project, students can work in any medium they please.
During my time at RISD, I've had the pleasure and privilege of working under the instruction of some of the school's most talented and notorious drawing professors. However, it is safe to say that this course was by far the most memorable. I took this course during my freshman year shortly after having finished Eleanor Lazarek's foundation drawing course, which is also known to be among one of the more intensive drawing courses at RISD. This is to say that I had felt more passionate and excited about drawing that ever before and wanted to continue pushing myself while I still had it in me. With that in mind, taking Drawing Marathon was a no-brainer. If nothing else, the course taught me that the best work is not always made with a master plan in mind: the simple act of just doing it is enough. The fear of failure is somewhat shattered by Gwen, at least during the marathon. The physical output is a small part of the class, drawings are torn apart, erased, sometimes throw out entirely.