Take a pencil and a piece of paper. Sit in front of a mirror and look at your face. Now draw your own portrait in one continuous line. Pencil on the paper, eyes solely on your reflection. This will give you an idea of the technique used by multi-media artist Katie Dunkle to “blindly” draw images taken from pornography.
In her series of “blind contour” line drawings titled Girls, Dunkle re-creates pornographic pictures in ink, pencil, chalk, and watercolor without looking at her canvas. The finished drawings are recognizable yet disturbing representations of erotica from which the viewer can step back and “reconsider what it means to pose nude for the visual stimulation of others.”
In her artist’s statement for Girls, Dunkle wrote:
The digital adult industry allows females to be groped in the darkness by a disconnected set of hands, transforming a real person into a two-dimensional cluster of flesh-tone pixels. In this respect the artist chooses to literally be blind to her artwork’s unfolding creation to honor these unknown women all the while asking and wondering, who are these women?
Katie draws attention to the countless women who are showcased for pleasure and then hastily discarded. Her priority as a female artist is to give these women a new pedestal for a different audience, whilst honoring the female body in all its glory. Her artwork gives these women a new soul and through the use of mixed media on paper allows the creations to radiate emergent emotional content, which takes the viewer on an intuitive journey through everything from anguish, seduction, pleasure and mystery.
Dunkle’s inspiration for Girls is “the insatiable urge of humanities demand for sexual stimulation.” Dunkle’s intention is to open debate about the nature of pornography and to “breathe life back into” these women making them more than just naked sexual objects for the viewer’s pleasure. See more Katie Dunkle’s work here.
‘Stephany.’
‘Roxanne.’
‘Hannah.’
‘Bronwyn.’
‘Jesse.’
‘Beatris.’
‘Veronica.’
‘Ramona.’
Via Nakid Magazine.