GJ Book Club: Chapter 18: Visual Memory

On the GJ Book Club, we're looking at Chapter 18: "Visual Memory" in Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing.

The role of memory is a subject that's not often talked about in drawing books. I'll paraphrase the key points in my own words, followed by Speed's elucidation and a few comments.

1. The art that we've seen influences our perception of the world.
As Speed puts it: "After seeing the pictures of some painter whose work has deeply impressed us, we are apt, while the memory of it is still fresh in our minds, to see things as he would paint them."

The greatest tribute we can give to artists of the past is that we see the world in terms of their artwork: We see in nature a Turner sky, a Maxfield Parrish dusk, a Wyeth barn, or a Rockwell character.

How many of us have seen a tree as a "Rackham" tree?

2. In the 19th century, England and France produced two contrasting artistic responses to the direct observation of nature, the English Pre-Raphaelites and the French Impressionists. Those differences reflected contrasts in their national temperaments.

He says, "The intense individualism of the English sought out every detail, every leaf and flower for itself, painting them with a passion and intensity that made their painting a vivid medium for the expression of poetic ideas; while the more synthetic mind of the Frenchman approached this search for visual truth from the opposite point of view of the whole effect, finding in the large, generalised impression a new world of beauty."

Note that by "synthetic" he means unifying separate elements into a whole. He doesn't mean our modern sense of synthetic as "artificial." This is a fascinating way to look at the two outdoor painting movements, which are so different in their goals and results.

3. Observation without memory leads to commonplace results.
This is a wake-up call to the contemporary "plein-air painting" movement, and also to our contemporary obsession with taking photos of everything as a substitute for memory. Speed says "the system of painting continually on the spot is apt to lose touch with [the artistic impulse]."

This can especially be a problem in commercial "plein-air paint outs" where the whole idea is to go to a place we have no feeling for, and quickly hunt down a subject that we hope will have the greatest likelihood of selling that day for the maximum price.

In N.C. Wyeth's letters, he talked about the painters who would arrive in the Brandywine Valley on weekends to "bag a landscape" the way trophy hunters would "bag" big game in Africa. For both N.C. and Andrew Wyeth, the inspiration for painting outdoors always began in the memory and the imagination, and they already knew the painting they wanted to paint before heading outdoors to nature.

Isaac Levitan, Such moonlight scenes could only have been painted from memory 

4. Why memory is so important to the painter.
a. Memory retains essential things, and discards non-essentials.
b. We can make better pictures if we cultivate the "flashes of inspiration," that we see fleetingly, often in momentary light or transitional moments.

5. Memory can be trained.
It's not easy at first, but there are systems. He mentions the memory drawing school of Monsieur Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Speed recommends that "What students should do is to form a habit of making every day in their sketch-book a drawing of something they have seen that has interested them, and that they have made some attempt at memorising. Don't be discouraged if the results are poor and disappointing at first—you will find that by persevering your power of memory will develop and be of the greatest service to you in your after work."

6. Don't chase effects.
Every landscape painter learns this the hard way. Changing light, especially on a partly cloudy day, presents one inspiring light effect after another. But once you commit to a particular one, you have to stick to it and not be lured away by another effect. That requires the discipline of memory.

Feel free to offer your comments on any of the points mentioned above, or other points I may have missed.

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Harold Speed (Dover ed.)

The Practice and Science of Drawing is available in various formats:

1. Inexpensive softcover edition from Dover, (by far the majority of you are reading it in this format)

2. Fully illustrated and formatted for Kindle.

3. Free online Archive.org edition.

4. Project Gutenberg version

Articles on Harold Speed in the Studio Magazine The Studio, Volume 15, "The Work of Harold Speed" by A. L. Baldry. (XV. No. 69. — December, 1898.) page 151.

and The Windsor Magazine, Volume 25, "The Art of Mr. Harold Speed" by Austin Chester, page 335. (thanks, अर्जुन)

GJ Book Club on Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)

GJ Facebook page


Overview of the blog series
Announcing the GJ Book Club
Chapter 1: Preface and Introduction
Chapter 2: Drawing
Chapter 3: Vision
Chapter 4: Line Drawing
Chapter 5: Mass Drawing
Chapter 6: Academic and Conventional
Chapter 7: The Study of Drawing
Chapter 8: Line Drawing, Practical
Chapter 9: Mass Drawing
Chapter 10: Rhythm
Chapter 11: Variety of Lines
Chapter 12: Curved Lines
Chapter 13: Variety of Mass
Chapter 14: Unity of Mass
Chapter 15: Balance
Chapter 16: Proportion
Chapter 17: Portrait Drawing
Chapter 18: Visual Memory
Chapter 19: Procedure
Chapter 20: Materials