Tactile drawing aesthetics and a blind woman’s drawings of sounds

This article makes four points. First, in making raised, tangible outline pictures, blind people can invent sophisticated treatments for topics they select themselves. Second, their drawings can be realistic. Third, they can also be metaphoric, in showing sounds for example. Fourth, their outline drawings use line for surface edges, and they incorporate aspects of perspective such as profiles. These points are illustrated by three drawings by EW, a blind woman. They are sketches of a couple waltzing, a guitar player, and a samba band. The account of line and profiles given here for the blind, this article argues, applies also to Palaeolithic art, as in Herzog’s ‘Cave of forgotten dreams’ and Cook’s ‘Ice age art: the arrival of the modern mind’.