Drawing from memory: some thoughts on the Stephen Wiltshire experience

Have you ever been asked on the spot to draw someone a map for directions to your place or somewhere else? In the video below, Steven Wiltshire takes this to a whole new level. Having flown over the city of Rome once, he's able to sketch and reproduce it from memory in amazing detail and accuracy.



The difference between most of us and Steven is that he is able to re-access that information directly from his mind with very little distortion whereas in many other people's case our attention is so selective that only certain details will be recalled -- details with which we probably made other mental associations with. It seems that with each association our view and memory becomes increasingly more subjective.

For me this brings up an interesting question: Is everything we see is recorded and physically etched in our minds at that moment, only later to be recalled (or not), or is the filtering mechanism that prevents us from accessing exact information made at the time of perception? In other words is Steven's perception so clear (and free from association) from the beginning that the raw data in his mind is somehow more accurate that in other people (or for example compared to the pilot that flew with Steven), or do we all record absolutely everything only later to experience various degrees of accessibility?

As I use to teach drawing, I noticed that many students would "draw from memory" even when sketching a still life. They would glance up at the still life, make sure it was still there, and look back to their paper and draw what they remembered seeing. This would create a wide range of inaccuracies and variations based on individual perspectives of the same still life, which of course was very interesting and not "wrong" in the least, BUT were they really looking at the still life and recording it directly into their memory or did they already begin to project their associations directly onto what they were seeing, and in effect influencing the information that was being recorded in their minds?

outer and inner dimensions -- Osho style

I heard about Osho a few years back and was instantly put off by the "Brand" and the mega marketing campaign of pseudo-new age books that followed his death. It took me some time (thanks to a friend N) to realize that this person was infinitely more interesting in his living years and thanks to the magic of you tube, I have seen that his magnetism on video reaches out much farther than his name printed in all caps on a glossy book cover.

that plus I dig his far-out spacey outfits and the way in which he speaks so slowly as if summoning each word.

Anyways -- this isn't a blog about why osho is actually pretty cool -- it's about innerspace and representing this space in some direct way. The video below begins as an exploration on the limits of science but concludes with the idea of understanding and recognizing the inner dimensions of reality.

the one and the many

I found this in an old daily planner and it brought back to mind a few ideas at that time that I was working with. I was facinated with the symbol of a triangle with a circle on top ever since I saw the symbol carved on a side of a mountain outside of Petra, Jordan. I went for a climb and found myself at a fairly high point in the mountain. Then across to a parallel rock formation across a deep ridge was a large carving on a triangle with a circle above it. I looked at it in wonder for a while, trying to figure out how old this carving was and how it was placed there. I imagined some kind of floating alien with laser fingers drawing it into the mountain side (although obvisouly that would be pretty unlikely). As I climbed back down I found some local bedouins and asked them if they had ever seen it. It turns out that they hadn't and were very interested in it, and asked me to take them to the carving.

I saw something similar to this symbol as I watched the movie Stargate and recognized it again.


The image stuck with me for some time after that and I thought about it initially as a mountain with a sun above it. Of course the movie incorporates many Sci-Fi associations with it. However, later I came to think of it a little differently.

In various schools of yoga or yantra an upward facing triangle represents man on earth and his aspirations towards the divine. I thought of the symbol of the circle representing the "whole" or oneness -- seeing the circle as representing "the one" and the triangle representing man or "the many".

Visually this was also somehow translated as the triangle representing a classic "trinity" of human relationship and the sun serves as a unifying force.

In general I drew this shortly after the experience of the mountain and seeing the carving. I think this doodle attempts to decipher the symbol. But another influencing factor was that on November 9 2005, the day after the doodle there was a bombing attack of three hotels in Jordan. During that time I found the approach of people in reaction to the bombing very uplifting. Rather than fear and disillusionment taking over, demonstrations were held which showed an insistence on unity and resistance into falling into the perceptional trap of terror which antagonizes and separates people in pain. At that point the "message" in the sketch took on a larger significance for me.

The secret power of time - amazing video

I came upon this video a little while ago and saw it again recently on the Creative Something blog. The original link is here and the site contains other interesting lecture topics (such as work motivation and empathetic societies) which are also illustrated in this graphic note-taking flow-chart style.

There are a couple reasons I decided to include this video here. One is that the sketches remind me of doodles, especially doodles one would take during a lecture in a class. Referring back to my blog post on doodling and concentration, the video not only shows the complete illustrations but moves through the process of illustrating while the ideas are being narrated. The process allows the viewer to experience the information visually at the same time one takes it in orally (as if you yourself were the one doodling). The technique of combining the various forms of input, visual cues, keyword note-taking, and audible information, allows for a powerful grasp of an otherwise complex subject.

Another reason I included it was the subject matter. Time is a theme which often keep coming back to. The theme of Time, as far as looking into the past, present, or future, shows itself in many of my doodles and funny enough one of my favorite places to unconsciously start doodling is in the margins of a daily planner or calender. It is as if the concept of time feels so abstract that a visual access seems to be the most accessible way of neatly dealing with it in the mind.

Relating to the video, I find myself often struggling between all perspectives of Time mentioned (Hedonistic present vs. Unplanned present and Past oriented vs. Future oriented). This could be linked, according to the video, to the fact that I have lived in many varying geographical, time-durational environments. Sometimes I find myself jumping between my hedonistic impulses and future oriented ambitions from one minute to the next (and I am pretty sure I'm not alone in this). I have often considered the issue of modern life re-wiring my sense of time and wondered whether my attention span is ever decreasing as a result of it.

As the video's narrator, Professor Philip Zimbardo, explains in this clip "Many of lives puzzles can be solved by simply understanding our own TIME PERSPECTIVE and that of others."

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automatic drawing and psychic drawing

I suppose the difference between a "doodle" and an automatic drawing lies in the intention. Both somehow reveal aspects of the subconscious and allow one to draw without a specific form in mind. However, whereas doodling can often be a byproduct of boredom, the passing of time, or a simple urge to draw without an aim, automatic drawing is a "conscious" attempt to access the subliminal.

In my personal sketches I tend towards both and now in hindsight I recognize when I had the intention to access my subconscious in search for a message or insight into my state of mind, or when I simply drew in a completely unconscious way, only to "wake up" minutes later and discover I had zoned out all over a random bit of paper.

According to the Wikipedia description of automatic drawing:
Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing whilst physically taking control of the medium's body...

Most of the surrealists' automatic drawings were illusionistic, or more precisely, they developed into such drawings when representational forms seemed to suggest themselves. In the 1940s and 1950s the French-Canadian group called Les Automatistes pursued creative work (chiefly painting) based on surrealist principles. They abandoned any trace of representation in their use of automatic drawing. This is perhaps a more pure form of automatic drawing since it can be almost entirely involuntary - to develop a representational form requires the conscious mind to take over the process of drawing, unless it is entirely accidental and thus incidental. These artists, led by Paul-Emile Borduas, sought to proclaim an entity of universal values and ethics proclaimed in their manifesto Refus Global.

As alluded to above, surrealist artists often found that their use of 'automatic drawing' was not entirely automatic, rather it involved some form of conscious intervention to make the image or painting visually acceptable or comprehensible, "...Masson admitted that his 'automatic' imagery involved a two-fold process of unconscious and conscious activity

I can strongly relate much of this description, especially to this two fold process of unconscious and conscious combined drawing methods. Most often, if not always, I begin a doodle with seemingly random marks or scribbles. This continues for as long as my mind can remain blank and my pen feels the urge to keep moving. The minute of course that my conscious mind starts to think, as if stepping in to take control of the situation, the scribbles pause and I look for patterns or the beginnings of an image. At that point I continue the drawing in an attempt to bring out that image more clearly.

Sometimes I when I use automatic drawing I receive little messages as seen in some earlier posts and in the case in the doodle above this "message" seems almost to forewarn myself about the future in it's text, "Brace Yourself".

Ominous as it may sound, these apparent sneak peeks into the future come as a comfort. Sometimes deep down we can feel the playing out of patterns in life and we know things that we don't always want to consciously acknowledge, but bringing these intuitions to light can ease the stress of uncertainty.

Whether they some drawings are prophetic or not I can't always say. One relating example which comes to mind happened some years ago before while I was living in the US and before I knew I would leave to live abroad. I made a painting using an "automatic" process and produced an image of a figure, guided by another spirit-like being, being sent to a land with desert and mountains in the distance. A year later I was compelled quite suddenly to move to the middle east and later recognized that same mountain range as the view over the dead sea looking onto Palestine. At the time of the painting I had never scene this view nor had I foreseen a life for myself outside the US.

As for psychic drawing as a kind of mediumship, I also touched upon this in an earlier post where I described the process of "tuning into a friend" to make a sketch. This draws back to the point I made in the beginning about intention. Some describe a similar process with channeled writing, and I have attempted to use drawing in a way in which I sit down with the intention to receive a message or tune into someone trying to set my personal ego aside and allow another kind of "inspiration" to guide the process.

Once I sat in on a "pranic healing" workshop where we were asked to partner with someone, sitting back to back from the person. We were given crayons and asked to draw their Aura, or energy field around them. I can't remember what colors my "aura" was suppose to have or if there was any weight to this process at all, but I remember having my doubts. Just the associations with an aura can conjure pictures and colors. It's hard to really put all preconceptions aside (like charka colors, personal favorite colors, or preconceived notions you might have already about someone.)

You never know, however what can come out of this process. The following video is an embarrassing example and it absolutely cracks me up every time I see it.



It's hard to say if she was "picking up" something from him or expressing something deep down from herself!

innerspace

I listened to a interview on an internet yoga radio show called Yogapeeps today with the female yoga instructor Sadie Nardini.
Anyone who knows me personally would know that yoga has been a large part of my life for some time, both in my personal practice and in teaching others. Once in a while I enjoy hearing the perspective of other "modern-day yogis" even when (or especially when) their particular yoga style is different from mine. I find it helps me stay broad in my understanding of what's out there.

Today something in this radio interview struck me very deeply. Sadie spoke about finding your "core" message in life. This core (nice yoga term by the way) is basically the message you offer to the world by your very existence. This sounds pretty vague and vast but if you look closely at patterns in your creative life and personal pursuits, you may find that many roads lead to a common direction. She described her message and how the points she stresses in her yoga class and her marketing center around these points and around her central teaching. She also said that she can tell when a yoga teacher is "in touch with his/her core" when reading the description of the yoga class. This made me start wondering what my core message is, and whether or not it is being expressed?

I sat in my art studio/room and glanced over the paintings on the wall and framed photographs leaning against my desk. I thought about my yoga and martial arts practices. I thought about my interest in further study in radiography and the facination I have as a photographer with imaging the inside of the body. Then I thought about this blog and the "innerspace doodles" and I suddenly felt closer to realizing what i've been drawn to and what my subconscious has been expressing -- an innerspace reality.

I have been characterized before (especially in my earlier post college years) as one of those dreamy, inner world, slightly dorky, dark hair and glasses kind of girl. I resented of course the simplification and catorization of these labels and somehow came to a conclusion that "growing up" meant living in the "real world". With the years I felt my innerspace drift to the background and the "day to day" come more into the present. Reassing this now, I see that being present requires embracing both realities -- and that the "inner" is too often overlooked, unestimated, and not fully understood.

Science now in the "real world" has been confirming the mystery of physical reality more and more and showing how even at the smallest atomic levels most things are made of an almost immeasurable inner space. For me, seeing inside and making contact with this innerspace drives most of what I do and I find that many of my doodles seem to express this as well. In the end, I feel that integration of the outer and the inner is the point I keep aiming towards.

relating

Somehow this doodle looks more literal than others. There seems to be more density to the form and unlike many other drawings which have mostly androgynous figures, the sex of these figures can be deduced.

As to why my doodles often show androgynous beings, I'm not exactly sure, except to say that if there is such a thing as past lives, I believe a soul could have both male and female incarnations. "They" say that a soul doesn't necessarily have a sex but will often prefer to experience reality in the form of one more than the other.

It's not that I do it consciously, but in general, illustrating androgynous beings allows me to connect more directly to the figure on a soul level and I hope keeps the experience which is represented is then open for more people to relate to.

But outside of crude scribbles on a kitch "noody doody pad" which someone gave me once (it shows the outline of a male and female figure and you basically fill in the blanks), this is one of the least androgynous doodles in my sketch book.

One thing that does often repeat in the drawings however is the emphasis on the heart region. I have more illustrations regarding this which I'll probably post soon and maybe theorize a little more deeply on then. Sometimes i show the heart as a kind of portal or gateway, but here both figures are wounded somehow. I think many people regardless of their current relationships carry alot of pain in the heart which gathers over their entire lifetime. When two people come together to relate, they bring the sum of their emotional experiences with them.