For the past week, I’ve been making a blind contour self-portrait — drawing without looking at the page — each morning to warm up my diary.
If you look at the images in order, it looks like my face is re-arranging itself. I love that.
My friend Wendy MacNaughton assigns these drawings in her workshops. My friend Jason Polan used to do a lot of his Every Person in New York drawings this way.
Sam Anderson, one of my favorite writers, wrote a wonderful Letter of Recommendation for blind contour drawing five years ago in the New York Times. (How in the hell did I miss that?)
He wrote of his frustrations with trying to draw in his adult life: “The problem, fundamentally, was one of control — I had too much of it, over too tiny a territory, and I wasn’t willing to surrender it. You can’t control your way out of control.”