-show human beings in relation to their environment,
-depict a "live" scene observed within the past twenty-four hours,
-seek movement-of-the-whole, i.e. see the whole drawing as a unit,
-do them quickly in about thirty minutes,
-do them without any preliminary sketching or alterations,
Here's my very first one, from December 16, 1998:
My first memory sketch is a drawing of people sitting around a table at a meeting of the Chebucto Community Net board, of which I was a member. I used pen and ink, a medium I’ve loved ever since an art student in my teens, and the technique I used was a kind of fast and furious scribble which I picked up from figure drawing classes doing gesture drawings, a process to feel the gesture and energy of the subject, and the movement as a whole.
I kept a journal during this time, much of it a studio journal where I talked to myself and began challenging myself to become more of a serious artist.
From my studio journal December 21, 1997:
“I’m in between. I’m asking myself, telling myself – no -- knowing that the purpose of my life is to be creative, to express my creativity, to be a channel for creativity. Through the haze, the fog of daily living I occasionally glimpse what I must do, what I need to do, but do I have the courage to do it? Can I to take the everyday steps toward this goal? Is it important enough? I’m in between, again. Between feeling fulfilled and feeling empty. I could just as easily go in one direction as the other, like a storm tossed leaf, or a seed from a tree, on it way to form a new tree or to turn to dust. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? The trick is to be prepared for the best…”
It didn't take me long to start looking for interesting goings on to study, memorize, and next morning sketch. About a year after I started I did this one of my daughter vaccuming while talking on the phone.
My first drawings were pretty awful and sometimes I don’t know what kept me going. I could see what I thought of as progress. I thought they were pretty cool, and maybe I was a little delusional, but I saw tangible evidence of progress and it gave me a feeling of satisfaction knowing that I had some control over my life. It felt like if I could only keep going then all the little things would add up to a level competence within a set of skills that I really do enjoyed doing. You, gentle reader, may see something of yourself in this yearning to find meaningfulness in
life. For me it all boils down to making something greater than the basic materials used.
Studio journal December 16, 1998:
“…I picked up a book on life drawing at a used book store, flipped it open and started reading. A section called the daily perspective jumped out at me. The author, Nicolaïdes, says the serious artist will do a daily perspective every day for the rest of their lives! Basically, you draw from memory a peopled scene observed the day before. A fifteen minute sketch. I’d say I’ve found the third page to add to my daily journal, and a significant creative development...”
Why did I start doing a daily memory sketch? The routine, once I started, was interesting. I’d have my breakfast and after make a coffee and bring it up to my studio room. I’d sit in an easy chair with pen, ink and sketch book at hand, blank page staring at me, I’d cast my thoughts back to the last day or so and in my mind’s eye imagine the various scenes I’d experienced. I’d be looking for something interesting, some incident that happened, some person doing something unusual, or a configuration of people, anything at all, actually. Often I’d stop as soon as I started visualizing whatever image my mind started going over. As soon as I’d start seeing the details or whatever I was looking at in my imagination I’d say, okay, that’s it, and start drawing it. After a while in found myself looking for such scenes.
Studio journal December 25, 1999:
“…I’ve progressed far enough along the path of self realization to find voice for it through this daily journal, and to understand that what I’ve been doing all these years is avoiding my true potential, my creative ability, my special gift, now if I can only start to bring together the things I think and the things I do. Then I’ll really have it all together. Yesterday on my daily walk I found myself starting to think negative thoughts, and I tried something I’d just read about, a method of self-realizing visualization. I started by saying the words “wouldn’t it be wonderful if...” and the rest of the sentence formed all by itself…”
I was a very good economic unit for many years. I started a business, I built a home and raised a family. Then it hit me. What was I doing? Where had I been? Where was I going? I began to search for answers. I was no longer satisfied with expressing my creativity with and through others. I wanted to do it myself! I wanted to use common everyday materials and create something that went beyond. It’s impossible to reach the top of the mountain in one leap, I said to myself, but it’s entirely feasible to do it one step at a time. I thought about what I liked to do when I was a child. I liked to draw! I began to draw. Terrible drawings, tentative and unskilled. What kept me going I’m not sure but I felt that if I could keep working at sharpening my skills then it would be personally satisfying and one day, possibly, I might be able to immerse myself in my art.
Studio journal October 11, 1998:
“…A year ago I was sitting slumped and spaced out in the old wooden swivel chair in my office in a kind of daze. I may have been mulling over what to do with myself, how to achieve meaningfulness in my life and my livelihood. Quick as lightning I thought of my early-in-life interests and talents in visual art, and at the same time my hand reached for a book that’s been on the shelf for two or three years, The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, or maybe it was Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards, I forget which because I rediscovered my way with both these books one after the other and they were both instrumental in my recovery, the finding again of my real self. A stream of creativity ensued. It felt like I had found my sense of purpose – it is to live creatively -- and I’d found a path to follow, a path of creativity, a path going I didn’t know then and I don’t know now exactly where, but a path on which it feels right to be traveling, a path is right for me that I can take one step at a time. Also right in the spiritual sense. The act of creation, making things of beauty from ordinary materials, it gives me a feeling of closeness to the great creator, a oneness with the wholeness of everything…”
I began to see these sketches as a track record of my life. I thought of them as a legacy and imagined some far-off-in-the-future relative scouring over them for clues and insight into the past, my past, with me long gone. Maybe that’s why artists make art; to leave some part of themselves behind. I was at a funeral of a friend’s mother once and she had been an artist. There were eulogies and whatnot, and there were photographs of her, and also some of the paintings she had done. I was very much impressed with the artwork; it was the only thing of her left, the only thing that still carried her personality, her passion, her human thoughts and feelings. Photos and stories didn’t, for me.
Studio journal September 29, 2000:
“…Last night I dreamt I was back at work, back with the company. Will I ever begin to dream art dreams? Dreams of drawing or painting? Will I ever develop a passion for this thing I now know I was put on earth to do, or will it forever be a struggle? Damned if I know, but I don’t think it is going to be a struggle forever. I think I am doing a lot of the right things, and doing them right, and that soon the corner will be turned, the switch turned to on, the light will shine, and my passion about drawing and painting will ring. That’s all I need. That simple change of feeling and I’ll take my rightful place in the scheme of things, assume the role of and claim the right to be called artist…”
I started doing a daily sketch from memory and they have grown to be a big part of my practice. There are only three sources of reference for an artist: from life, from an existing picture, and from memory, or imagination. There are no other sources of reference and an artist’s work will benefit greatly from practice in all three areas. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the memory sketches fit right with this principle. I was working from life in my figure drawing sessions and plein painting, and from memory with my daily sketches. At the time I eschewed working from photographs. I felt that the photo was an interpretation of the subject matter, and art is an interpretation too, and an interpretation of an interpretation just didn’t appeal to me.
Studio journal December 27, 1998:
“…I find myself starting to keep my eye on the look out for the perspective I want to draw the next morning. Suddenly what I’m looking at coalesces in my mind’s eye – it’s the scene I’d like to draw -- and I look again much more carefully making mental note of details. It happened again yesterday all on its own; I was sitting late in the party with half the people having already left and looked over and there were my two daughters. As soon as I looked a voice in my head said “there it is”, and my artist’s eye looked more closely. Just looking back over the last week’s memory sketches gives me a good feeling. It’s a visual record of my life, and whereas my written notes are filed electronically and not easily accessible, the drawings are there perfectly easy to see and understand. It’s going to be something else when I can flip through a year’s worth of the daily memory sketches…”
I really started with the daily memory sketches because I knew that in time and with this regime of practice I could only get better. My goal then, as it is now, is to be a better artist. The implications of this as a goal are huge. It means that big goals cannot be reached in one leap. It just doesn’t happen. You cannot get to the top of the mountain in one step, but by taking little steps in one direction you can in time get there. That’s an amazing concept. But by making my goal to be a better artist I am also acknowledging that making art is lifelong ambition, that there are forever more mountain peaks to climb, more ways to grow. Every accomplishment is significant because it is a step in the right direction, and there is always more to experience and learn. The daily memory sketches made me realize that some of my work is more successful than others. That’s way for me to say that some of my work is awful, but so what? It’s not the product that’s important at all, but it’s the process of doing it that counts. It’s important for an artist to know this, to be critical in self analysis, but never to be one’s own worse critic with negative self talk.
Studio journal January 22, 1999:
“…Luckily I’m doing my morning perspective now, the third page of my morning notes. Man, these morning notes are my salvation, and the best thing about them is that I don’t find them hard to do, they’re not a chore, not a pain to do. Could be if I had to leave the house every day at seven to go to work. What would I do, get up at five in the morning? Maybe I would, I love what’s happening doing these notes so much. I’m pleased because if a day goes by, lie yesterday, that I’m unable to get any art made, then at least I will have made some art, my daily perspective. I can see that I’m going to have sketch pad after sketch pad full of these drawings. I’ve been doing the drawings every morning now about a month and a half, it seems like much longer for some reason, and it is ever a strange sensation to flip through the pages, to see the visual record of my life, well, part of it anyway, the parts that I choose to depict. Each drawing brings me right back to the moment too, it’s kind of eerie, more so than a photo or a memory...”
My first daily memory sketch was in December of 1997 and ten years later I am sometimes astonished to still be doing them. Nicholedes in his book describes the exercise and says the serious artist will do one every day for the rest of his life. That struck a chord in me which resonates still. Every day. But the sketches have become more than an exercise; they have taken on meaning and purpose of their own. They’ve become a record of my passage in life, of the joys and sadness that happens, and of the everyday little things that all of us experience and few of us, regrettably, think about or notice, other than, perhaps artists, poets and parents measuring the daily progress of their children’s development. I find the daily process of thinking about what it was that I did in the last twenty-four hours to be a kind of purl, a backward-looking stitch in time knitting the bits and pieces of my life together into a seamless continuity.
Studio journal March 5, 2000:
“…My only lifeline is my art; without it I don’t know where I’d be. Yesterday I looked up the memory sketch I did one year ago and was very pleased to see that my ability to render the human figure, to capture the everyday occurrences and what’s going on there has improved considerably. I notice I'm caring less and less whether I'm getting perspective or anatomy or proportions, geometry, lines, etc. right and more and more I'm just trying to make sure I'm getting that total belief in the reality, in the immediacy and identification with the life of the thing. When it's working right, it's something that's just taking place between me and the drawing. The outside world hardly enters into it, or even exists…”
To be an artist also means making sacrifices. You need to be a little greedy and selfish to get time for yourself and your art, and you also have to sacrifice and let go of the desire to have things like money, cars, clothes and many of the trappings of this modern society of excess we as a society have built for ourselves. You need to get into yourself and, to a greater or lesser degree, outside the mostly invisible pressures of society. Be your own person, I other words.
Studio journal October 11, 1998:
“…What will happen if I did start working full time as an artist? Why don’t I go ahead and start doing just that right now? Two very powerful questions that are occupying my thoughts quite a bit right now. I think I know what I want to do. It’s clear. I’ve come a long, long way along my personal creative path. My eyes have opened in new ways. I’ve grown in ability and as I do so the path ahead, and the options and choices that will have to be dealt with, become more and more clear. The vision of myself that I see down that path becomes clearer too. I can see now where I need to make some serious choices. To be a working artist I need to simplify my life. I can’t be distracted from the creative process, and I am beginning to get a sense of exactly what that means. I can’t conform to social pressure like I am now and expect to have the necessary integrity required to call myself a professional artist…”
Looking back on the oldest sketches they seem tentative, the conceptualizatioroughn. It makes me wonder what made me continue and not quit in frustration. Something kept me going. I know I worked hard at not being my own worst critic. Reduce and if possible eliminate that horrible self talk that destroys inner confidence and creates moods of fear, fear of failure, fear of criticism, fear of work. What I saw was modest improvement over time, a sense that I was moving forward and making small but tangible gains. I tell myself that if the goal is to climb the mountain I can only do it one step at a time, and every drawing and painting I do is another step in that direction. It’s not important that every drawing and painting be good, it's doing it -- process over product -- that defines success.
Studio journal July 12, 2000:
“…In a way, things are moving along fairly quickly now. After all it’s less than a year-and-a-half since I “officially” started as a full-time serious artist and it was only two years before that that I started drawing again. It’s not like I’ve been doing this for years and years. I’m still only just getting up to speed; this is all relatively new to me in the grand scheme of things, from the perspective of a person’s lifetime. I’d like to be at the point where I’m having a solo show of my work once, twice a year. I’d really like to be infused with energy and passion about what I’m doing but I don’t know if I’m that kind of person, if I’ve got the personality type to be swept away emotionally be what I’m doing. So why am I doing it? Why do I want to do it? Am I seeking approval and support for the course I’ve set for myself, for the artwork that I’m creating? Perhaps. Maybe I’m still a little kid inside and this whole adulthood thing is just a facade, a tough exterior to put up and pretend is impenetrable and that I can be safe to hide behind….”