Onalee Rivera with charcoal and models. Photograph: Frank Curran

Early on a November Friday evening, 19 comparative strangers sat in a fourth-floor Devlin art studio studying a scrawny young man clad only in a plastic winged Viking helmet. He stood on an elevated platform in the center of the room next to a young nude woman with a silk scarf draped about her waist; beyond her, a hefty gray-haired man with a corkscrew ponytail stood frozen in feathered angel wings, a caveman’s club made of plastic clenched above his head. It was 6:00, on November 17, an hour into the Boston College Art Club’s annual drawing marathon, and the studio’s 40-odd paint-splattered stools were quickly filling up. For the next seven hours, BC students, professors, staff, and visitors from the surrounding community had an open invitation to drop by for an informal evening of art-making and camaraderie. Charcoal sticks, sketch paper, music, pizza, and three shifts of live figure models would be provided.

This was the third marathon the student-run group had organized in as many years. Since the Art Club’s founding in 2004, it has become known also for arranging field trips to local professional art studios and curating exhibitions in Bapst Library’s student art gallery. “The idea behind our events is to get more creative souls—art majors or not—to find time to create,” says the club’s president, Jon Harding ’07, a political science major. Harding scanned the faces around the room, each bobbing back and forth between the models and the drawings. “There aren’t many here who I recognize,” he said, “and that, I suppose, is the goal.”

The marathon was conceived in 2003 by fine arts department faculty hoping to coax closet artists into the studio. The inaugural event, held that year, was an all-night affair lasting from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., but after predawn artists wound up conked out on studio couches or slumped beside their creations at the table, “we knew we had to reel it in,” said Onalee Rivera ’07, club treasurer and a studio art major. The Art Club took on the marathon the next year, cobbling together funds with the help of the fine arts department; last year, the group was recognized as an official Boston College organization and received its first University budget.

Dressed in a gray t-shirt splattered with multicolored acrylic paint—a casualty, she said, of high school mural painting—Rivera was on hand for the marathon’s 5 p.m. start and intended, she said, to stay until the 1 a.m. finish. “One of my favorite pieces ever was a crayon drawing I did at the first, all-night marathon,” she said, placing her latest charcoal sketch on top of a pile of five or six of her others. “It looked a little like a three-year-old did it” and it hung in the BC Arts Festival with the title Three A.M.

Many artists left the 2006 marathon with their sketches rolled up in tubes under their arms. A few brave souls hung their work with thumbtacks on the bulletin board outside the studio—a makeshift exhibition of the evening’s professional-looking renderings, stick-figure approximations, and studies of lone body parts. Many drawings ended up ripped or wrinkled in the studio’s overflowing trash cans; some were crumpled up and slam-dunked as their makers headed out the door.

“I was just passing by, so I thought I’d stop in,” said John J. Michalczyk ’08, a sociology and philosophy major sitting at one of the studio’s tables. His father, John Michalczyk, is the chair of the fine arts department, but that wasn’t the reason he had come, he said. He hadn’t sat down to draw seriously since high school, and he had a few hours to kill before the Celtics game started. “Onalee has been giving me tips,” he said, pointing to the black charcoal ovals he’d drawn to suggest the heavy male model’s physique. Rivera, sitting next to him, smiled, moving her arm from her paper to reveal a shaded and contoured study of the man from the neck down. “Hers looks like an actual person,” said Michalczyk. “Mine is more . . . abstract.”

Farther down the table, Rob Culliton, a clean-cut freshman in a blue T-shirt, was engaged in conversation with the female model, who had struck a pose looking over her shoulder in his direction. “Your drawing reminds me of that TV show Lost,” said the model, extolling the virtues of the island-castaway drama. Before him on the table, Culliton displayed an island scene with a lone figure on a beach, a palm tree, and a setting sun. In a corner of the paper, he’d scrawled a stylized cursive signature. He and the model bantered for a few moments before Culliton explained the image. “This seems to be the first thing I want to draw when I see a blank piece of paper,” he said. “It’s the place where I picture myself happiest.”

Over the next two hours, the crowd of artists grew and shrank, rising to as many as 35, with groups of friends glancing and giggling at one another’s work at 7:00, and dropping down to 10 people spread out around the room at 9:00. Women usually outnumbered men, but a few times over the course of the night the numbers were nearly balanced. Every five minutes, a stopwatch would beep, and the models would shift poses and change props, rifling through the collection of objects they’d brought for the occasion and strewn about the platform. The heavy man cycled through a fake lion-skin cloak, a mock-up of a bishop’s mitre, and a bouquet of plastic daffodils. The young woman donned a pink brassiere and fishnets; the slender man cradled a white plush bunny and held aloft a gray plastic goblet.

Although there was the occasional comment and conversation, most of the artists drew silently, listening to the live guitar music emanating from a dark corner where Brendan Dailey, a red-bearded sophomore pre-med student, strummed popular songs and classic hits. When the music stopped, the artists put down their charcoal to applaud.

At 7:00, the peak crowd hour, the artists were invited to overflow into an adjoining studio. Stacey Boughrum ’01, a part-time BC painting instructor, asked the portly model if he wouldn’t mind striking longer-term poses next door, and he followed her through the doorway and took a seat on a ratty floral armchair in the middle of the room. In a corner behind him, a plaster model of a finely muscled man sat in a similar position, though both his arms were broken off. “Can I draw that one?” one student whispered to her friend, as they walked into the room.

Boughrum directed them to stools in front of the live model. “I came tonight because I wanted to see the marathon in action,” she said, and nodded a thank you to the model, now frozen in a 10-minute seated pose with a knee drawn up to his chest. “Other professors from the art department and academic disciplines around campus have come and gone tonight,” she said, “but we’re here as guests, not chaperones.”

By 11:00, viewed outside from O’Neill Plaza, only two small attic windows in Devlin’s pitched slate roof glowed yellow in the darkened building. Inside, the mood had grown meditative. In place of the guitarist, an amplified ipod spilled out spacey electronic melodies with murmured lyrics and head-pounding beats. Eight women and one young man sat drawing a lone male model wearing a cross around his neck and a wristwatch.

Finance major Shautae Thompson ’07 and Desiree Douglas ’07, a psychology major, sat at the far side of the room; both had just ended shifts working at a local mall, and they had come for the extra credit their “Foundations of Drawing” instructor had offered for attending the marathon. Douglas felt at home using charcoal: “No line is permanent,” she said, “and blending makes the picture look more professional.” Thompson disagreed, holding up the worn nub she’d been working with. “I can’t stand the noise when it rubs up against the paper,” she said.

The two women stayed until just after 12:30 a.m., waving good-bye to Rivera as they walked out to the corridor. Now on her 53rd drawing, Rivera had left the room only for food and bathroom breaks, sketching nearly continuously for going on eight hours. She had warmly greeted the artists she knew and welcomed those she didn’t, even running down the hall after first-timers who seemed to have had second thoughts at the door. Both Thompson and Douglas had suffered initially from “nude-model shock,” she said. They walked into the room, then walked right out again. “I chased them down and told them artists have been figure-drawing since the beginning of time,” said Rivera. “I told them they’d be in excellent company.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg