Three Kinds of Memory (part 1)

There are three kinds of memory you must develop to evolve as an artist.  Two of these are closely interrelated and we will discuss them in this Section.  The third area will be covered under the broad umbrella of Technique in the next section.  . 

1.       Mental Constructs of things --A constant upgrading of your understanding of what things look like; not just the surface detail but the structural identity as well. 

2.      Muscle memory—the constant translation of visual data, through the hand to the page, that, over time, trains the hand to better, more concise and descriptive marks.  

We just spent a whole section devising ways to keep our memory from distorting our drawings, but that doesn’t mean that memory doesn’t play a part in the drawing process.  Before we can properly understand the essential role of memory in drawing realistically, we need, to understand how currently held  memories, if not regulated, can take over the drawing process.  The act of drawing is a balancing act between what you are seeing and what you have stored in your memory about the subject of your drawing.  When you begin to learn to draw, you don’t have very good memories of what things look like and rely mostly on symbolic or generic conceptualizations of those things, and if you couple that with the tendency of the left side of your brain to take over the drawing task, your results will most likely end up as a version of reality that has been influenced by your symbol memory and is thus does not look much like the scene.  It is at this initial stage of the learning process that your capacity to see correctly will pay big dividends because it is at this stage--when you do not have a very good handle on your subjects--that you must try to expend extra effort to be accurate, that is you must use the techniques of Chapter two to insure you are being accurate and not succumbing to the tendency to allow the left brain to substitute symbolic information for what is really in front of you.  When you take this extra care you improve upon your existing memory of that scene, and this upgraded or better memory will, in turn, improve any subsequent drawings you may make.

 

If you always make a conscious effort to strive for accuracy when you draw, the knowledge that you gain in the form of better mental constructs will help you to make an even better drawing of any new subject.   

These better memories of things (everything!) come from drawing, lots and lots of drawing and concentrating on accuracy.  Let me make an important distinction here.  The drawings that you make of things (especially things you are unfamiliar with) are really to analyze those things, and this analysis only works effectively if you have learned to “see” correctly and actually do a careful drawing of the object in question.  I’m not talking here about an hour and a half of shaded and embellished rendering – although you can do that if you wish - I just mean about five or ten minutes of solid structural analysis in which you look at major (prominent?) details of form and include them in the overall sketch.  This careful analysis is what builds substance into your memories of the stuff around you.  If a student doesn’t realize the importance of taking this extra care, no matter how zealous his or her efforts, a lot of the time will be wasted.  Slow down, and build your artistic abilities on a solid foundation of knowledge especially if you are an “applied arts” artist who really needs to be able to utilize and manipulate real world visual data. 

Drawing and Sketching

As a beginning artist you should be drawing all of the time, drawing everything, utilizing your newly acquired visual skills to analyze the world around you.   When you are drawing and sketching, you are usually on location and working at a moderate size, say, 6 x8” and 11 x 14”. If you are in the beginning stages of learning to draw, I recommend that you use pencils of medium grade (F, HB, B – primarily because they hold a point longer, and are more forgiving for the artist who has not yet developed control over pencil pressure [touch]).   You should also carry an eraser.  When you are drawing, you should not let mistakes you notice when comparing your drawing to the scene you are working from  to pass; fix them, because you are trying to train the right side of your brain to function properly, that is, to add to and improve the visual data you have already stored, and, by allowing mistakes to go uncorrected you diminish the effectiveness of that process.

Some Practical tips: most drawing books suggest that you do a simplified drawing of the object you are going to sketch and then add the details.  So, to draw a fire hydrant for example, you would start with a vertical cylinder, and so on….  This is a valid suggestion as far as it goes but, what never was made clear to me (and which took some time to realize) was that that first cylinder should be drawn very, very lightly and loosely so that you can  visually  compare your drawing to the object to check that you have the overall proportions correct  (see example 25 

 This will allow you to make adjustments to your drawing (also very lightly) before proceeding to the bolder, finish lines.   This way, you haven’t committed to a bunch of dark, unfixable lines that are in error.  Using especially soft pencils for this work is also not advised since they are crumbly, messy and become dull very quickly.  Mistakes when erased tend to smear, adding to the mess.   Until your hand skills and touch have improved, I advise you to use a selection of several mid-grade pencils (B, HB, F) with 2 or 3  of each grade, all sharpened, to improve results. 

 

Everything you draw with careful observation will become a memory that will aid in subsequent efforts-- not only in subsequent live drawings of other things, but in building your capacity to draw things from memory. 

Sketchbooks and Visual Diaries

You should keep a Personal Visual Diary if you are serious about becoming a visual artist of any consequence.  It should be a personal record of your artistic journey.  It can contain your thoughts, ideas, things you want never to forget, drawings, descriptions of techniques, coffee cup stains, a visual record of the places you have been and the ideas you have considered.  In short, it should be a reference book about you and for you.  Even if you do not plan on becoming a pro, a sketch/diary will still be important, not only as a reference to previous insights but as an historical record of your artistic journey. 

Sketch book diaries should probably be hard bound books or the newer hard bound book with a spiral binder which lies flat for drawing and should be regarded as an important personal document and treated that way.

 

Copying and Close Scrutiny: Why and how to copy and how it worked for me

 

“The masters must be copied over and over again and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature”.                                                                            Degas

 

Once you are convinced that having better (more accurate) memories of the way things look will help you to draw them better, the next step is the building up your store of memorized information.  If, for example, we wish to become more skillful at depicting the human form we can copy great drawings from the past, not only to train our eye-hand skills but to increase our knowledge.  Later, when we work from the live model we can utilize knowledge we have acquired from close observational study (copying) to help us produce better results.  This does not happen all at once, so we must be persistent, and approach each “copy” as a valuable learning experience.  Analyzing and deconstructing the work of a great artist, if approached properly, can be like “channeling”  their knowledge from the distant past.   At the end of this chapter there are several copying exercises with a detailed description of the approach to use.

The best way to copy

Assuming we want to develop our knowledge (mental constructs) of things, then it makes sense to copy versions of those things we want to know more about.  There are three main ways we could undertake this process. 

1.       We could set up the object (s) on our desk and draw from life, or

2.      We could take a picture of the object (s), print it out, and then use that “flattened’ version to do our drawing.  This would simplify our task as it would make space and size relationships more readily apparent.  Lumped into this flattened out versions category would be magazine pictures, paintings, comic book illustrations, and so on; just about anything we can get some sort of picture of.  But, let’s say we want to maximize the amount of knowledge we get from a copy. How about…

3.      Copying a competent existing drawing of the object or objects we wish to develop knowledge of.  Not only can you learn shape proportion and detail but also the kind of marks used (technique) to develop the drawing

There is no correct answer to “the best way to copy”.  It, of course, depends on the draughtsman’s knowledge and skill level.  But for beginning and intermediate level artists who are intent on improving their skills and knowledge, then I recommend copying existing work in the same or a similar medium.

 

              

I have a term I use called Close Scrutiny which I define as the careful copying of works that are pertinent to your area of interest.   Most serious books on developing drawing skills advocate copying.  It is not enough to simply look longingly at work we admire.  We must “get into it.”   If you force yourself to struggle to approximate the sorts of marks that are embodied in highly skilled work you will, inevitably, absorb portions of that dearly acquired knowledge. I feel the best way you can do this by trying to reproduce it in your own hand.  If you wish to learn to play the guitar you wouldn’t just study chord diagrams in a manual; you would actually try to imitate and test these diagrams by working with the instrument, over, and over, and over again.  And if the first few times you couldn’t get the fingering correct, you would persist until your fingers and hands, “did what you wanted them to.”  You could probably learn to play the guitar without the manual and study of previous music, but it would be a much longer process, and if you tried to learn the guitar without practicing fingering, you would fail.  In a like manner, you must train your hands and enhance your memories if you wish to improve drawing abilities.

When I was a student, in my rendering classes and mechanical drawing I was fine and did well because I could focus in (remember the 6 degree cone of focus?), but in the figure drawing classes there was that annoying 3D space and all that unfamiliar complex detail that I had no memorized conventions for to contend with; I was lost.  My drawings were never finished and the parts that were, always seemed distorted and incorrectly positioned.   My first semester instructor was sympathetic but not that helpful, and I remember his rather unspecific suggestions that I “be looser” “draw faster” and “let it flow,” I was particularly distressed when he suggested I just “draw loose like Rembrandt,”.  He didn’t know how to tell me what my problems were and although I improved, mainly because I was looking at other student’s drawings, my progress was frustratingly slow. 

 

The next semester I started in the same funk though my new instructor was more helpful with his suggestions “Look at negative spaces” (if he had used the term gaps I would have caught on a lot faster), “Get your proportions correct” and “look for the gesture”.  Beyond that, my hand was beginning to make better marks.  He suggested that I make some copies of some Master drawings and start looking at anatomy (At the time there was no specific course in human anatomy).  Well, I was so balled up in my classroom inadequacies and with other courses that I didn’t pay much attention at the time.  But, I determined that I would stay in Providence that second summer and really work on my drawing.  I recalled his suggestion that I copy some Master drawings, and I asked him what artists he suggested. He said, “Pontormo as a good place to start”,  he also added that starting to build a personal art library and getting an anatomy book would be a good idea.  

 

I found an old copy of an anatomy book by Jeno Barcsey in a used book store.  The models in the book were strange looking, but the pencil renderings were spectacular.  I wanted to be able to draw like that!  Not knowing where else to start, I began to copy the illustrations in the anatomy book; at first the individual bones and later the muscles and muscle groups - copying them to learn about the shapes but also to learn his rendering style.  It was one of those epiphanies I mentioned in the introduction when I realized that if I used my rendering capabilities to copy drawings I admired that I could really learn technique and anatomy at the same time!  So I’m copying anatomy and I’m copying master drawings and I’m attending the open summer session figure drawing classes, and no one is telling me to draw faster or like Rembrandt!  And this led to a couple of other discoveries.  First of all, the way anatomical details in the Master drawings were drawn, were conventions for drawing those same body parts when I got to the live figure sessions. Now It Was Beginning To Make Sense!  Second, this stuff I was making copies of was beginning to be embedded in my memory – I was replacing my earlier inadequate memories with much more serviceable ones.  To be sure, when I drew, these memories could dominate if I let them, but by regulating or balancing the use of the good memories with honest right-brain analysis of the current subject, I was on my way to competency.  It was only years later, when I began teaching drawing myself, that I realized the richness of content one could acquire in just one copy, if it were undertaken with the correct approach.

In one seriously undertaken copy of a master drawing a student would be:

·        learning anatomy along with

·        conventions for anatomical parts (a knee from the front for example), or a method for suggesting foliage.

·        The Masters shading technique and edge handling and line quality.  Copying these subtleties of drawing are invaluable to building your own muscle memory and understanding of technique.

·        The nuance of the Masters compositional structure, See the El Greco example.

·        While improving the ability to use right side measuring technique and seeing of relationships; You are comparing copy and original side by side, and mistakes are easier to pick out than trying to compare a drawing to a live, 3D situation.

·        Developing the habit of accuracy; of recognizing and correcting mistakes – The drawing doesn’t get up and move after twenty minutes plus the space is conveniently flat  all at the same time!

I should note here that the struggles I recount are primarily with the human figure and anatomy, but are equally applicable to any genre whether it be landscape, still life or any other form when drawing from life.

So, as you can see, improving Mental Constructs and training your hand to make better marks inevitably incorporates the development of Technique, which we will cover in more detail next.