I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies. – Le Corbusier
I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies. – Le Corbusier
Creativity Prompt #13: Blind Contour Drawing | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Femme au cep de vigne, troisiéme variante (1904) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Friends, I’m excited about today’s creativity prompt, even though I know it might feel off putting or even scary for some of you, because it involves … drawing. But it’s not that kind of drawing. I promise. Bear with me, and you’ll see.
I remember once while I was teaching a retreat at a beautiful center on the bluffs above Lake Superior’s north shore, and, while the writers were on break, I set up a variety of art supplies on the round table in the center of our writing circle: pastels, paints, charcoal pencils, paper, glue, scissors, etc. When the writers returned to their places, I asked them a simple question, and I encouraged them to answer honestly. “I see you’ve noticed the art supplies on the table,” I said. “How do those art supplies make you feel—as in, what emotions automatically arose in you when you first saw them?” And, as I had predicted based on many years of teaching and facilitating, the answers ranged from stress to dread to horror to “please God no.”
What is it that we’ve endured that makes us so afraid of art?
Well, failure and judgment, for starters—two of the same obstacles that stand between us and all creativity, including our wildest, freest, and most original writing. Our truest writing. And that’s why today’s exercise is so empowering and so healing.
We’re going to try a technique called “blind contour drawing.” Here’s what Sam Anderson, in his NYT Letter of Recommendation on blind drawing, said about the practice:
Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is.
And that’s because blind drawing is, essentially, a practice not a product. It’s a training, not an outcome. It’s an experience, not a result. Again, in the words of Sam Anderson:
Part of the magic of blind drawing is the impossibility of doing it wrong. This makes it the perfect antidote to perfectionism, because its first and only step is to abandon any hope of perfection. But inevitably, almost by accident, your hand will produce little slivers of excellence — a nose that looks exactly right, an inscrutable expression on someone’s face, the dip and curve of a dog’s back — but then these will be obliterated, immediately, by the subsequent maelstrom of lines. I have learned to enjoy the feeling of swimming in sensory ignorance, to appreciate the vast distance between my hand and the reality it tries to trace.
It turns out that the world, on close examination, is gloriously strange. Things are lumpier and hairier than we have been led to believe. Planes are never flat; colors are never solid. Matthew McConaughey’s hairline is not the Platonic ideal you might imagine: It is jagged and wandering, like a map of the coastline of a distant mysterious continent. Your father-in-law’s head is squatter than you ever knew. Sleeve wrinkles can be as beautiful as the most exotic flower. Every object (book, pencil, glove, banana) is in fact a bewildering universe of lines. Blind drawing allows us to explore those universes, to lose ourselves in them for long stretches of time, to feel their essential strangeness. It is joyful and meditative, one of the fastest escape routes from the prison of consciousness that I have ever found. You can do it anywhere, anytime, with any subject. It will flip you, like a switch, from absence to presence. I am going to do one now.
Below the paywall, you’ll find a step by step method for getting the most out of your experience with blind contour drawing, especially if your aim is to feel more free, less critical, and, as a result, more creative (while also learning to see the world more closely, as this entire 30-Day Challenge is geared toward helping us to do, which you can read more about here if you’ve just joined the Challenge).
And all you need for this creativity prompt is 5 minutes and a pencil or pen and a piece of paper, any paper. If you want to get fancy, grab a drawing pad—but it’s not necessary. Any old spiral notebook will do. Here are some concrete tips and caveats from other practitioners to get you off to a good start.