Drawing from memory and imagination

Wysing Young Artists program, Wysing Arts Centre,
12 October 2011, 2 hours, 30mnts

The workshop offers the opportunity to practice the activity of looking and memorising implied in still life drawing, with a twist.

After an introduction about processes of memorisation and recollection the students will train to look and memorise, the composition in front of them. They will then draw the same from memory in a different environment. After coming back in front of the composition a second round of observation and discussion takes place. They go out at drawing it again from memory. A number of questions start to appear: do they remember the details memorised before and add the new details? do they add the newly memorised details and overlap them with the memory of the previous drawing instead? what to do if they do not remember? do they leave the paper white or do they ‘make it up’?