The female nude has been valued subject matter throughout the History of Art.

In the Renaissance and beyond, men more often than not, painted the female form as an object of desire. Beautiful but not powerful.

Throughout Feminist history, woman generally painted females as angered and somehow without.

Today I see and want to depict woman differently. I want to talk about what it feels like to be a woman. To me, we can be proud, beautiful, powerful, alluring and most importantly we can express our own feelings, which are not always negative.

Not just objects of desire. As we too can desire.

I employ the technique of blind drawing to draw my partner and muse. When you are drawing it is easy to be blinded by what you see. By trusting my hand over my mind, I allow myself to express how I feel.

The art historian Richard Shiff argues that de Kooning’s closed-eye technique:
… allow[ed] de Kooning to circumvent what was for him the more intellectual and regulative organ, the eye, lest it inhibit the more physical organ, the hand.  

                “’With Closed Eyes’: De Kooning’s Twist” (published in Master Drawings, vol. 40, no. 1, Spring 2002),
KATIE BLUNDELL ARTIST

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Blind Love – Exhibition 2017