📖 The Quote
‘Los dibujos de memoria son los mejores’ (‘The best drawings are those done from memory’) - Paula Bonet, ‘Los Diarios de La Anguila’
✏️ The Sketch
Step 1. Go for a walk around your neighbourhood :)
Avoid taking any photographs and instead, pay attention to things. Observe with all your senses: look, smell, hear, touch. Experience the place. Record everything with intensity in your memory.
Step 2. Sketch what you experienced and felt during your walk once you are back at home.
This second step doesn’t need to be done immediately after returning from your little adventure. Indeed, the more time it passes, the more interesting the process will be because the more your memory will have a play at it.
Start by constraining your practice: focus on a specific scene you remember and use only three colours - we will explore different iterations in future assignments on this theme of drawing from memory.
Step 3. Sketch again!
Don’t just do one sketch, but instead, re-sketch the scene several times, perhaps trying different styles, as you can see in my example below.
I went for a walk around an area close to Epping Forest called Leyton Flats. I actually went for a cycle, stopping at specific points to pause and enjoy the view. It was a hot day. What I recall was the massive presence of yellow (it’s a dry Summer in London) together with the horizontality and silence of the vast landscape, vertically framed by scattered trees and tall grass. It was a landscape defined by very few elements (materials) with very distinctive colours and demarcated lines.
💡 Some Thoughts
When drawing from memory, unlike in urban sketching, we are not directly observing the subject we are drawing - we are only seeing it in our minds.
In the exercise above, we don’t have a direct visual image of the scene we are about to draw, we need to tap into the memory of our experience. And memory is always tricky - it tends to be rooted in emotions, more than in factual reality.
Much of the process of drawing is based on the very first step: observing the subject. The more you observe the subject with all your senses (see it, smell it, hear it, touch it, look harder…), the closer you’ll get to truthfully drawing your experience later on.
In the best cases, the reality of what we draw will not coincide (only) with what we saw - but instead, with what we felt. And those, my friends, are definitely the best drawings.
This is a very interesting exercise to practice a more mindful observation and improve your visualisation skills.
Because we focused on what we felt, and not only on what we saw, this exercise of drawing from memory tends to lead to more conceptual and abstract drawings.
As designers, we exercise this muscle all the time. When designing, our memory travels unconsciously to past visual references and exemplar projects, from which we draw conclusions and extract ideas.
🖼 The Artist
In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, inspired by the visit of his friend and artist Paul Gaugain, painted a woman reading a book from memory.
Van Gogh writes in the letters 720 and 719 to his brother, respectively, that Gaugin inspired him to work ‘purely from the imagination’ and that ‘the things of the imagination do indeed take on a more mysterious character’.
Not coincidently, the woman in his painting executed from memory resembled his beloved little sister Willemien, to whom Vincent recommended novels regularly. This picture also contains several features explored by Van Gogh: the complementary colour palette, the heavy presence of yellow, and the stylistic demarcation of the contours. It is a more expressive, bold figure in an abstracted background.
💫✏️
Happy sketching!
Ana
Have you been sketching? It would be great to hear about it! Please, leave a comment and share your thoughts down below :)
I did this! I walked to see the goats in a neighbor's backyard. (We live in a city. It is crazy they have goats; it is likely illegal!!!) I posted my resulting drawings to Instagram (@modemolew). Drawing from my memory, I did not worry about placement or perspective logic. I just wanted to get in all the details I recalled. In regard to your words above, I don't have any conscious feelings / emotions about the goats. I just think it is cool they are here in my neighborhood and that is why I chose them as a subject. The first time we saw them, we couldn't believe it: "Did we just see goats?" So, I'm doing "documentary-type recording." Maybe if I draw this again and again, as you suggested, an emotional tone will emerge. By drawing more juxtapositions (goat pen next to cars in alley, etc.,) an odd feeling could be incured.