Visual Memory

Twice in the last week I’ve heard of a practice that at one time would have seemed wildly strange, but now makes perfect sense. Here it is: Draw something accurately that you are not looking at. (It is not blind contour drawing.)

An example of this would be students in a life drawing class that have their model up a flight of stairs in another studio away from where they are working. They were encouraged to put to memory as much information as possible and then return to the easel downstairs and draw.

Crazy? Not really. As artists, we train ourselves to look for visual information. It is as concrete as math. It’s just not left brain.

My folks had an artistic friend in high school that later became a teacher at Art Center in Los Angeles. His name was Reynold Brown. (Reynold was mentor of CCP artist Craig Nelson, and many others.) As a kid in high school, Reynold would go on sketching trips with my folks and never take a sketch book. He would just sit and look around. To the amazement of his friends, when he returned to class he’d paint a complete painting with details others had missed. Later in life he could construct complicated scenes combining the information he’d gleaned over the years, without the need to step outdoors. He had a library of visual information stored in his brain.

Reynold may have been extraordinary with his early ability to do this but it is a skill that can be learned.

I am continually amazed by artists. We can only imagine what is possible given time and focus.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers