Drawing from memory & imagination

Why drawing from memory & imagination helps me to create abstract paintings (or any kind of art!)

Drawing from my memory and imagination is my favourite way to draw and paint at the moment. Right now I am easing in to making a new collection of paintings, and wanted to share a little bit of the process I’m using to make these pieces, and why, with you. 

Incase you’re new to my blog, hello! I’m Orla an artist and illustrator with a love for the natural world and landscapes. The outdoors (and various thematic offshoots connected to natural spaces) is the inspiration behind everything that I make and teach. I love to share snippets of my creative practice here on Substack through this monthly-ish newsletter, and document my painting practice over on YouTube. If you’d like to dive even deeper or support the work that I do, I share more behind the scenes of my art, plus lots of tutorials & learning resources over on my Patreon page. 

My process & how imagination fits in

To start out, a very quick overview of my creative process is:

1. To research the landscape, in-person outside, through analytical studies, emotional documentation (how places make me feel), lots of sketching, nature journalling, field recording (I love the sounds of nature and often pull this into my artwork too).

2. Then, all that gathered information from photos, videos, sketchbooks and field recordings come back to the studio with me, to develop ideas. I like to pull elements from these research pages, and play with how I can compose them together, to reference landscape and my experiences in it. It’s in this development stage that imagination really comes in to play.

Focusing on process over outcome

When I get back to the studio and want to develop ideas, I love to lay out my sketchbooks and research to have it all close to hand. I’ve noticed that over time, I remove reference photographs from the process, and am increasingly working only from my sketchbooks, or what’s in my minds eye. 

I’ve been finding that taking the reference image away lets me dive deeper into intuitive or emotionally-driven painting processes, which is really at the heart of what I want to convey. My memories of places are more fuzzy than a razor sharp image, and I think this has been helping me to make paintings that nod to the feeling of that place. For example, when I paint seascapes, there’s a nod to a horizon line, or the feeling of a stormy sky that will be captured, rather than a recognisable depiction of a specific place.

Building a library with memory & imagination

Through repetition of this memory & imagination practice, I’ve noticed that a funny thing has been happening: I’ve been strengthening the way I draw things, so that they really look more like ‘my’ marks.

I’ve come to realise that I draw literal and abstract marks to reference nature in similar ways - the way I draw a horizon line, an island, or a leaf, a tree, the feeling of the wind. It’s like a library of symbols, or a map key, that I’ve been developing in my paintings, that I can call upon to improvise with.

This means that I don’t need to reinvent every aspect of my paintings, and I can begin to build consistency and recognisable elements in my work. This has been giving me so much to play with, keeping things light and easy in composition building. 

How I’m expanding my Imagination Library

I’m currently creating a new collection of paintings, inspired by our relationships with the coast. To try and stretch my imagination even further, I opened my collection up to the public (my audience on youtube) to contribute words they associate with coastal and marine environments. I was looking for a way to capture a wider experience and association with place, outside of my own lived experience.

I’m playing with other people’s words as the starting point for each painting, which later forms the title for each piece.

I’ll be using this process of painting with imagination and memory to create an abstract series; if you’d like to share a word or watch this collection develop, I’m documenting the process through videos on youtube:

And have begun painting your words in my latest, here:

If you’d like to learn more about how you can bring more imagination and play to your paintings, and balance abstract and literal depictions of landscapes, I’ve developed a video tutorial to share an exercise, to strengthen your own painting language. If you’d like to know more about my tutorial ‘Symbols of Place’ you can click the link below. We’re also holding a zoom meet up for Studio Play Patreon members to explore this process of developing our own symbols & recognisable elements on the 25th May at 10am (BST/UTC+1) 

See you outside,