Hard Art is a movement of persons, known and unknown. Here are some of their faces, that part of the body so linked to personhood – Jay Griffiths

Drawn Without Looking is the catalogue to an art exhibition of the same name held at London’s Paul Stolper Gallery May – June 2024.

It contains the portraits of 100 members of Hard Art, and original writing by Jay Griffiths, Olivia Douglass, Corbin LaMont, Louis VI, Ian Bruce, Paul Ewen, Alex Lockwood and Brian Eno. Design by Clive Russell of This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll.

The first edition is limited to 500, each signed by Ian.

100 are collectable through Metalabel.

Since November 2022, an eclectic group have been gathering regularly at Brian Eno’s studio. From theatre to comedy, art to faith, economics to philanthropy, this growing cross-section of cultural participants have been collaborating around the themes of race and class inequality, climate and democracy.

The name of this group is Hard Art.

The artist and musician Ian Bruce was invited to depict the many attendees at these Hard Art sessions. He used a simple exercise of pairing people up and asking them to draw each other in pen without looking at the paper – a technique known as ‘blind contour drawing’. Using crayons, Bruce then coloured in each linear abstraction, pulling whatever likeness the meandering facial features would allow.

“Every blind contour drawing is a quandary to be worked on and worked out. There is no obvious solution. I can decide on a whim whether a line is a nose or a chin. As a portrait painter it's refreshing to escape the tyranny of naturalistic likeness.”

As with many of the ideas that have alchemised at the Hard Art sessions, this approach is truly collaborative and a playful subversion of the rules, finding form in chaos, and engaging with a child-like enthusiasm for the shape and colour of things.

The drawers and sitters include Brian Eno, Es Devlin, Jeremy Deller, Love Ssega, Cornelia Parker, Gavin Turk, Louis VI, Olivia Douglass and Fred Again.., among many others.