Exercise: Portrait from Memory

These drawings can be found in Sketchbook pages 48-52 and page 55.

I found this exercise extremely difficult. I don't think my visual memory is very good at all. Either that or I have difficulty translating my visual memory onto the paper.

My first attempt was a portrait of my father. He was on my mind as he has been quite unwell recently. I drew the portrait from memory. I couldn't resist the urge to embellish it with shading and smudging as if to compensate for the lack of accuracy (which of course it didn't - it still didn't look much like my dad - I hope he never sees it!). The basic features are there - beard and bushy eyebrows but the drawing in general feels like a step backwards in comparison to what I'd been doing with the self portraits.

I tried again using someone who I'd seen briefly while watching some rubbish on TV (one of those shows on which young girls try to become models). One of the girls had such striking features that I thought it must be easy to fix her in my memory to draw her. She had a wide eyed look with a very heart shaped face and large lips - she seemed to look permanently worried. My drawing again looks quite naive and child like. In some ways this suits the character of the model but I was confused as to why these drawings from memory should end up looking like a teenager trying too hard had drawn them.

I suspected that what may be happening was that lacking confidence in my ability to recall well enough to draw I had become overly analytical - saying to myself " the eyes are hooded, the eyebrows are bushy" and so on. I thought that maybe the drawing would go better if I used methods more akin to those I used for gesture drawing, so I tried again. This time I tried to hold a visual image of the person in my mind's eye and draw as if I were doing a blind contour drawing from life. This led to much more uninhibited drawings . They weren't any better in terms of likeness but they did capture the essential elements and differences between the two people and I prefer them to my first attempts