Doodling

I've been going back through my old sketch books and getting rather depressed at the lack of anything that was in them. I don't a sense of time or ideas that went along with the drawings back in those days. They are just a collection of spartian images that I thought were cool at the time.

I never really understood how much of a creative force doodling was. I would always sit down with one idea and try to pound it out of my head. And I would always get frustrated that another idea would come in when I was trying to produce another. And so I would just stop on one drawing and move to the next page.

But with a doodle it's just getting the image out from the brain and onto the paper. Not only that but the doodles themselves fill the page with a sense of idea and thought and emotion of the time. Filling a page with doodles gives the page a sense of identity and story and memory that later on you come back to that page and you can get the feeling of what was going on that day and relive it kinda.

So I'm going to go do that now. I'm not going to try and capture the day in images (what I always wanted to do before) or even a thought in images. I'm just going to let the pen wander and see what comes out.

I've never understood how creative doodling is or how much emotion a doodle can capture. It may sound weird but looking back on my old drawings I find they lack a sense of emotion and memory. And that's what I want to capture now.

It's not about making my art better. That comes with repition of forms and look and experimentation. No this is just about emptying myself of ideas so I can look back later and see those ideas and maybe spark something in something new I'm creating.

So I urge everyone to doodle. Doodles don't just have to be pictures, but stray thoughts, stray ideas floating around. Just jot things down, conversations you hear, things you see, things that weird you out or comfort you. Write, draw, paint, spill, anything.

This rant brought to you by old sketchbooks and No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. A Martin Scorsese Picture.