Students taking Painting I at Emporia State during the fall 2025 semester teamed up with students from Emporia High School taking Intro to Drawing and Painting to paint and draw portraits of one another.
The portraits, which were featured at Emporia First Friday earlier this month, are displayed on the second floor of the Memorial Union, where they will remain until the end of the week on Feb. 27.
In years past, Painting I students would go to an assisted living center to interview, take a picture and later paint portraits of facility residents for their final project. This year, Professor Derek Wilkinson wanted to make the project more collaborative.
“It feels like they’re doing som
ething different and new,” said Wilkinson. “Some of them went to Emporia High School, so it’s exciting for them to kind of return there and with a different perspective. Now, they’re a college student, and we also have a really big art education program, and so many of my students are planning on being high school or middle school art teachers in the future. So, you know, it was good for them to be in that kind of setting as well.”
The high school students drew their portraits with a contour line style while the ESU students were able to choose between the various painting styles they learned over the semester.
Professional development was also a major focus for Wilkinson. He used the exhibition as a learning experience for his students and a source of pressure to put out their best work — a pressure that students like Amelia Chace would feel in the last week before the fall semester came to a close.
“We actually had a really limited time frame,” said Chace. “The painting that we were working on just before that didn’t wrap up until, like, Thanksgiving break. It took a lot of extended studio hours outside of class. That was kind of rough, but I was glad it got done within the time frame.”
Junior art education major Kaytlynn Hansel said the experience opened her eyes as to what grades she would want to teach. It also impacted how she views the process of making art.
“In art, there’s a lot of trial and error, and there’s a big learning curve,” said Hansel. “So as someone who’s kind of new to the art world, it was a big ‘trust the process’ to do a portrait, because I’ve only sculpted one face, and it was my own.”
It was “daunting” and uncomfortable to paint someone else’s face, said Hansel, but it also serves as an example to her future students to show them “look where I started and look where I am now.”
“All it takes is constant effort and trying, you’re not gonna become a Picasso in a day. You’re really not, and that’s something that this class has been like, Derek has just been amazing,” she said. “He’s just like, look you’re making progress. You’re doing a lot better. He’s like, look at the growth that you have done in just a matter of a few weeks.”
