The Remembered Image by Lucy Willis

This feature is taken from the December 1989 issue of The Artist

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The Remembered Image

As well as being creatively stimulating, working from memory has many practical advantages, there is no need to go anywhere to find your subject matter as it is all there in your head, gathered perhaps on occasions when it was impossible to sit down and paint or sketch. There is not the same pressure to work quickly – the light doesn’t change, things don’t move around in a remembered image and you can take time to consider your next move.

In order to be able to recall what you see with any confidence it is necessary to develop a reliable visual memory. I believe that this can be done with practice in the same way as musicians can learn to play by ear, the advantage being that they do not need to refer constantly to the score and can therefore concentrate on interpreting the music.

The more you exercise your ability to recall what you see the clearer and more complete these remembered images become. To begin with it is rather like trying to paint a picture from a dream; the memory may seem as clear as anything in your mind but when you try to get it down on paper it slips from your grasp, the space is hard to pin down and certain crucial elements seem to be missing.

Not surprisingly it seems that working from observations is, in the first instance, the best exercise for developing the visual memory; it makes you aware of tone, colour and the way things look generally; it helps you to understand the way light and shadows work. Anyone who has spent much time painting will probably find that they are frequently making mental notes whilst doing something else – about colour and tone, shapes and patterns. This tendency can soon be developed into conscious memorising of complete images which can be summoned up at a later date in the studio.

When I was a student I filled numerous sketchbooks and drew wherever I went. I think this was valuable drawing practice and it undoubtedly helped me to notice my surroundings and the way things work visually. Nowadays, though, I sketch very little and find that it is better not to sketch at all if I wish to remember a specific image. It seems far more reliable to observe with greater concentration and really drum it into your head rather than to relax and make notes, which can mislead you if you depend on them later on when the memory has faded.

Working from memory opens up a much broader range of subject matter. You are no longer restricted to the conveniently paintable. The first time I deliberately memorised an image, with the view to making a picture from it, was in the dentist’s chair – a bright little light shining in my eyes and the corner of the room beyond. It was very beautiful. The next occasion was in a Greek hospital where I had to wait all night with a friend. It was boredom that drove me to it initially but once I was aware of the light reflecting on the lino floor and a little figure in a distant bed I became totally absorbed in the process of memorising the scene. Every now and then I would close my eyes and test myself on the tonal relationships or the proportions of, say, the figure to its surroundings, until I had gathered enough information from which to work. Since then I have returned at regular intervals to working from memory, either in painting, drawing or printmaking. There are always a number of images stored in my memory which haven’t yet surfaced but, strangely enough, they don’t seem to fade very quickly. From those which have emerged, I have chosen a few to illustrate here.

Cliff Cottage, oil, (60"x94")

This is a large oil painting which I recently undertook in an attempt to portray a house that I am very fond of but visit only occasionally on holidays. I first went there when I was six years old and then not again until I was 30. I have one very clear memory of it from childhood which is of the little bridge to the back door and the mombretia which grew and still grows there. Added to this are the memories from two recent visits; on both occasions I painted a number of watercolours of different parts of the house and garden but it was only just before leaving at the end of the last visit that I looked at the house afresh with the idea of the large painting in mind. It was a year before I started the picture, during which time I mulled over the idea and tried to work out how I would do it. I had done inside/outside pictures of houses before, drawn as if the walls were glass in order to reveal the rooms and their contents inside. This one was to be on a much larger scale and had more scope for exploration than the others but was also based on much more brief memories.

I drew the skeleton of the building first, manipulating the perspective and proportions until it looked reasonably as I remembered and then put in a lot of cast shadows in the foreground. I started off with the sun coming from one direction, the left-hand side, but as the painting progressed I decided to throw caution to the wind and have light coming from wherever I wanted it. So some parts of the outside are in shadow with the light behind whilst other parts are in sun; indoors it is night in some rooms with electric lights on and in others there is blue sky outside. There were inevitable complications when one thing came in front of something else. I decided to let the process of selection by memory take over in deciding what to put in and what to leave out; I could recall vividly certain areas and was completely blank when it came to others. I wanted to get the feeling of a jumbly building, all on different levels, steps going up and down and sideways with the atmosphere of a boat inside. I was continually fighting the tendency to sort things out too much and thus let the picture become too tidy. As it is the result is far less chaotic than I had originally visaged.

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Mortenhoe, etching, (21"x28")

This was the first in a series of beach etchings done over the last few years. It is based on a scene I witnessed on a beach in North Devon – lots of holidaymakers standing in shallow water at low tide looking out to sea. I was struck by the stillness of everybody and their apparent isolation from each other. At first I saw just a confusion of people and reflections but as I began to analyse the tones and shapes it all became much more logical. The first thing I realised was that the perspective was significant to understanding the arrangement of figures; I was standing at the same height as everybody else so their heads were more or less forming a horizontal line at my eye level. The size of the figures diminished into the distance but the heads were all in line. Secondly I saw that the tones were fairly simple; dark figures and reflections against the lighter sea and sky. I made careful mental notes of the subtle shapes and tones of the watery ground as well as the angles of the distant waves.

A week or so later I started a large oil painting of the scene but it didn’t come off – I didn’t have enough information to paint the figures on a large scale and I hadn’t really noted the colours properly. It dawned on me that it might work better as an etching and in my excitement I discovered an interesting etching technique. It is one which I have since returned to again and again when I am after a loose, painterly effect in a print. The impressionistic method I had stumbled upon was well suited to the scant memory I had in mind. I couldn’t remember faces, clothes or colours in detail so I adopted a simplified, tonal approach using limited colour on a single plate – the blue of the sky merging with the brown of the sand to give blackish figures in the middle.

Lurcher, etching, (22"x15")

Memory is useful when you want to try and portray a moving subject. I spend a lot of time looking at my dog, one way and another, but he rarely stays still long enough to be drawn unless he’s asleep. Before starting this etching I did a large number of drawings with charcoal and watercolour. They were done from memory but occasionally I would go and watch the dog in action to get an idea for the next pose. From one of these drawing I made a tracing and then a colour separation on to two etching plates – one for black line work and one for the golden brown tone on the body – to be printed one over the other. By keeping the lines and brushstrokes loose and messy I endeavoured to reproduce some of the freshness of the original drawing.

The Wedding Reception, watercolour, (15"x22")

Here it was the colours and the atmosphere which first attracted my attention and prompted me to try and memorise the scene. Inside the pink marquee there was a diffusion of warm light and the mother of the bride was positively glowing in her peach coloured outfit. Her face was lit by reflected light from the tablecloth and the whole scene was punctuated by the black shapes of men in morning suits. Through a mellow haze of champagne I switched into a memorising mode and focussed on the clothes and expressions, the space and light. It wasn’t until months later, after much procrastination, that I eventually got round to an attempt at revoking the occasion and its particular atmosphere.

Memory, being selective, helps the creative process; pictorial ideas can sometimes be more successfully communicated when you only pick out the most important aspects of the subject whilst disregarding a great deal of superfluous detail. Much as I enjoy working from observation, and will never tire of the challenge, it is very refreshing to have the freedom to develop a picture along your own lines and not be dictated to by what is there in front of you.