WHAT INSPIRES THE DOODLE?
It strikes me as being impressive how many people I know display artistic talent. They exhibit it unintentionally when they “doodle” with pen or pencil.
Maybe you doodle as I do when you are on the phone in a not too demanding situation, or waiting for someone or even looking-at rather than really watching TV. Often you simple make little squiggles, checks, x's, ovals or “push-pulls”- as they were called if you are old enough to have had “Locker System” handwriting exercises in your early school days. Up-and-down, up-and-down - endlessly across the page until, it was full, but neat as could be, mind you. Neat and orderly. They were doodles, of a sort, marching under your control in disciplined rows.
Just this morning my wife did a fine doodle drawing on the small clipboard pad we keep next to the phone. It was a five-inch flower sketched down one side of the pad, and if I had available some means of copying it I would have done so. A fine bloom of some complex type, with leaves coming from the stem complete with convoluted shades and shadows marking every subtle second of growth. I don't know the nature of the phone call in which she was engaged at the time, but the flower was well done. Had I asked her to draw such a flower for me, I doubt that it would have been so satisfying.
All of which has, this day, caused me to wonder how often other facets of change and discovery have first been thought of in the doodle mode.
There is a certain freedom and spontinaity when we do things which have not been pre-cut, patterned, templated or in any way set. Working too hard at something can cool creativeness, at times, and it is possible that some great inventions have been sketched out as “might be” things. Only then, do they become real when one, erases the “ifs” one by one to make them realities, you might say.
Notice too, in so much of the literature you get suggesting contributions to charitable causes, how important – really essential – the seemingly casual photograph of a needy child is considered to be. Think of it a “doodle art” and the copy ...the test printed nearby is merely the tool which tells you where to send your contribution. The picture does the selling of the idea of doing so!
There must a school of social doctors who can see personality traits by studying a person's doodle drawings, too, I suppose. Great potential values may be there, as well.
Let's not discount the art of doodling and call it idleness until we have made sure it is not all the things it seems it could be.
A.L.M. November 5, 2002 [c470wds]
