Look Away
Three ways drawing from memory returns you to yourself
“I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else.” - Paul Gaugain
In a previous essay I wrote about drawing what’s important. About choosing subjects that matter to you rather than only drawing what’s in front of you. Drawing from memory is a natural extension of that particular idea. It is what happens when observation has done its work and then we can finally be trusted to speak on our own.
Literally speaking, drawing from memory is the ability to produce an image without a direct visual reference. You open your sketchbook and retrieve images from your memory and begin. This kind of memory drawing is earned and does not happen by accident. It is the accumulated result of all the observational hours, all the careful looking. The American choreographer Twyla Tharp put it plainly: “Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.”
Our key word here is preparation and the material doesn’t just store itself. Careful hours of observation and drawing are the deposits. The priming of your artistic well.
Marsden Hartley stated, “I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination.”
A second kind of drawing from memory is less about technical recall and more about interpretive freedom. This is when you draw from memory not because you lack reference, but because you choose not to use one.
Have you ever felt that when you draw from a photograph or a live model, there is an obligation to the thing in front of you? A pull toward accurately rendering what you are seeing?
When you draw from memory you can abandon the role of transcriptionist and become an interpreter. Your hand makes decisions that are yours, like where to simplify, where to invent, and which details can be ignored.
This is not about being sloppy or some excuse for bad technique. It’s about locating the image inside your own experience. Your result will be more personal. It has no choice because there’s no other source it could come from.
The third kind of drawing from memory is the practice of beginning without knowing where your drawing is going.
Pick up the pencil and start. Just make a mark followed by another until something appears.
This sounds irresponsible — but what it does is give your subconscious the wheel. The images that surface when you draw this way are not chosen by your rational mind. They emerge from somewhere else. From association, from feeling, from things you have been carrying around without realizing it and they often surprise you. Sometimes they are the most honest drawings you will ever make.
Lynda Barry, who I have written about before, works this way. Her instruction is to keep the hand moving, to not let the critic in, to trust that the image will come. She talks about drawing as a form of remembering — not just visual remembering but emotional remembering. The hand knows things the conscious mind has filed away.
There is a useful distinction here between making a drawing and discovering one. Most of us approach drawing as makers — we decide what to draw and then we draw it. But there is another mode, where you approach the blank page less like a builder and more like an archaeologist. Something is buried there. Your job is to find it.
Earned technical memory. Interpretive freedom. Subconscious discovery. These are not three unrelated practices. They are three points on the same continuum.
Each one asks something similar of you: that you trust what is already inside you. That you stop looking outward for the answer to what the drawing should be. That you accept the image you are capable of making rather than chasing the one you think you’re supposed to make. Drawing what is important to you gives the practice meaning and purpose.
Your visual library is already there. You have been building it your whole life so that all that remains is to draw from it.
This is really great. I find more and more that what holds me back from drawing from memory and allowing myself to enjoy the discovery process is simply panic / anxiety (which seems so ridiculous when I say it out loud…. It’s just paper—but it’s somehow also my whole soul on that ONE sheet of paper :).) But the more I draw—the more I really put myself in this game—the more I’m able to push that panic aside; for me, that’s the biggest reason to engage in the process consistently. (And thanks for giving us thoughts & a place to process these things. It’s helpful to find words for the experience.)
I think I'll jot these down in my sketchbook as a reminder for the times I don't want to draw from reference but won't exactly be satisfied with strictly mark making... your nuanced description of each practice made something otherwise nebulous (to me) feel a little more solid. Thank you!