Learning to Draw Again, After 40 Years

I was blinded at sixteen.

I have been blind for forty years, but I can still see pictures in my mind's eye. I remember colours, faces, buildings, clothes and landscapes. I can imagine pictures that I cannot look at.

I want to learn how to put those pictures into the world.

Beethoven continued composing music after losing his hearing. He had musical notation, years of musical experience and performers who could turn his compositions into sound.

I am not Beethoven, and I wasn't a professional artist before I was blinded.

But the principle interests me. Can a person create something for a sense they can no longer use?

I think I can learn to draw with code.

My pencil will be a programming language. My paper will be a digital canvas. Artificial intelligence can help me learn the techniques, execute my instructions and examine the results.

I am doing this for sighted people because the world is full of sighted people.

I don't need to see the finished drawing myself. I want to make pictures that other people can see.

That doesn't mean I don't care about quality. Quite the opposite. I want to learn what makes a good drawing, develop my own style and eventually produce work that meets my standards.

But first, I am entitled to be a beginner.

I am entitled to draw a dreadful cat.

Why a school?

There is a serious question underneath the fiction.

If I can learn to draw in this way, can someone else?

What would a conventional drawing lesson look like if its explanations, exercises and feedback were designed for someone who couldn't see the paper?

What should an AI drawing tutor do? How can a student retain artistic control? How can we distinguish between constructing the intended geometry and producing a visually successful picture?

And what changes for someone who has never had sight, whose understanding of visual representation may be very different from mine?

Rather than answering these questions in an abstract research paper, Blind Ant is imagining an institution that has to answer them in practice.

We can build the teaching tools, attempt the exercises, produce the drawings and discover what works.

The fictional school gives the experiment a structure without obliging us to establish a real educational organisation.

It is inspired by existing drawing education, but it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Royal Drawing School.

Painting by numbers

Drawing is only the beginning.

Once we can construct lines, shapes and pictures, we can explore colour, shading, texture and painting.

A colouring book for blind people is an entirely reasonable proposition. So is a painting course.

The tools may be unusual. The artistic ambitions needn't be.

And there is another possible title lurking in all of this: Painting with Numbers.

Perhaps that will be the name of my autobiography.

For now, Blind Drawing School exists as a question, a proposed curriculum and a collection of experiments waiting to happen.

We might never build the school.

We might not even finish the course.

But after forty years, I would quite like to learn to draw again.

And I think I'll start with a line.