Paper Dragons

Every would-be-artist who ever spent a moment listening in art class can tell you what blind contour is. While staring at your subject and simultaneously moving your hand, you forge a sort of deranged polygraph line describing what was before you. It becomes your immediate searching interpretation of reality. As you lay the line, you don't look down, hence the 'blindness'. You draw what you see, its implied edge, the best you can sloping in and out of the form as you go. Your eye and pen are the same, and by separating things, you describe them. These scribbley drawings record the folds and cracks of everyday life more acurately than anyone could staring straight down at a sketch pad. It is not the distortion we admire so much as the accuracy. The drawings record what is seen objectively, with less impact from memory and its unpredictability. Otherwise complex spaces and foreshortening are made effortlessly, and they have a natural fluidity and consistancy that is missed in many other drawing techniques. This type of drawing is also often called continuous line, or pure contour, if you look you can find it everywhere. From cavemen drawing lions to Kimon Nicolaides, and Bran cereal commercials. If you look at these line drawings you can find what we have come to affectionately call Blind Contour Drawing.
David Macri

Self Portrait from Mirror

James at the Label

Fresh Flowers at the Paragon

The Paragon

Ryan Hallett

Label Summit 05

Moth

Dragonfly 

Spider Cat

James and Carlos

Lorne with Beard