History Main / MyArtMyMemory

[[folder:Anime]]

[[folder:Fanfiction]]

Variations include type of amnesia (forgotten event from childhood, event from [[{{Reincarnation}} a previous life]]) and type of art (painting, sculpture, musical compostion).

A Character has [[MemoryTropes Amnesia]] of some sort but is also good at drawing. Unknowingly they start incorporating things from their past into their works of art.

* ''Disney/{{Tangled}}'': [[spoiler:After visiting the kingdom, Rapunzel realizes that she has subconsciously incorporated their distinctive sun motif into all of her paintings, because it was on the mobile above her bed. The connection causes her to remember that she is the missing princess.]]

[[folder: Anime ]]

* It takes the entire run of ''Anime/RahXephon'' before we learn the significance of the paining Ayato is working on: [[spoiler:It's his memory of his first meeting with Haruka Shitow, which he had forgotten due to Mulian mind-wiping technology.]]

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[[folder: Films -- Animated ]]

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[[folder: Live Action Television ]]

* In the second season of ''Series/UnitedStatesOfTara'' Tara, who has DID and can't remember large chunks of her childhood, crafts a model of a house. Later on in the season she and her sister visit the foster house they went to when they were really young. Guess what the house looks exactly like.
* ''Series/KyleXY'': In one early episode Kyle had amnesia but started drawing symbols he remembered in the form of pointillism.
* The TV Movie ''Film/TWitches'' had the two main characters write and draw things about their infancy in their native dimension.
* One of the episodes of ''Series/JohnDoe'' had a "psychic" drawing pictures that lead the police to rape/murder victims. Turns out she was a survivor, and was just remembering her own attack.
** The protagonist later [[spoiler:becomes truly psychic through art]] in the last episodes.
* The ''Series/DoctorWho'' two-parter Human Nature/The Family Of Blood has an indirect version of this, wherein the currently-human doctor draws pictures of things he dreams about in a notebook, those dreams being of his real life as an alien.
** In the episode Hell Bent, the Doctor is forced to erase most of his memories of [[spoiler: his companion, Clara]]. He later composes a piece of music that is said to represent those lost memories, though he doesn't immediately realize it until it's pointed out to him.
* In the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' episode "Riddles", Tuvok gets amnesia, but when he makes a cake, he unknowingly uses the frosting to draw a certain cloaking frequency he had discovered before he lost his memories.
* A story arc in ''Series/AgentsOfSHIELD'' involves a group of apparently-unconnected people who all have a compulsion to create drawings, paintings, etchings or other works (each person using a different medium) featuring the same cryptic pattern of interlocking symbols. [[spoiler:It turns out they've all received an experimental medical treatment based on alien DNA, and the symbols are part of the alien's GeneticMemory showing through. The compulsion is due to the inadequacy of representing the pattern in two dimensions; one man is freed of the compulsion after recreating the pattern as a three-dimensional element in the landscape of his model train set]].

[[folder: Literature ]]

* A musical variation in Creator/RobertAHeinlein's short story "They". A man believed to be insane can play beautiful music on the violin. Later on he dreams about his past life in a higher level of being, including hearing music swelling out of every living thing - presumably the source of his musical ability.

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* In ''[[Anime/TenchiMuyo Tenchi Forever]]'', Tenchi is being held in an alternate reality with an altered memory so that he doesn't remember any of other main characters. However, he unknowingly paints Ryoko twice.

* In ''Film/TheMatrix'' fanfic ''Fanfic/BringingMeToLife'' Max Jameson starts to draw his dreams. Not realizing, in the beginning, that the dreams are events from his past life as [[spoiler:Tom Anderson aka Neo.]]