Jack's post on art reminded me of this. I have zero visual artist in me. But for years, in college, seminars, conferences, the margins of my notes were populated with what's in the picture. I wasn't necessarily bored, but when I was purely listening, I needed to do something with my hands. One of my favorites, was making a squiggly self crossing closed loop and then filling in an area and then the non-contiguous areas. Sometimes I liked to extend the figure into an orthogonal figure. Ever since the advent of digitization and my full retirement, I don't doodle anymore. It's not art but what is it and why do we do it? I am not an artist but I always could draw geometrical figures and draft a mechanical drawing.
Reminds me that I have been reading about the marginalia in medieval manuscripts. They aren't doodles, but they often seem light-hearted and even scatalogical, certainly unrelated to the manuscript text. My theory is that a lot of teenage boys were set to learning illumination under some monastic curmudgeon, and snuck in rude pictures to keep each other entertained. Hence a preponderance of cats licking their hind ends and figures mooning the reader.
ReplyDeleteStanley, it looks like you do pretty good drawings of three dimensional objects. I used to doodle on the margins of notebooks in school. Kind of stereotypical teenage girl stuff. Now I'm more interested in colors and how they relate to one another. It's funny, I was never interested in drawing people. More into landscapes.
ReplyDeleteNot only can't I do freehand drawing, I can't understand how anybody can. It seems like magic to me to be able to see something in real life and then draw a recognizable representation of it on paper. However, in high school I was pretty good at mechanical drawing.
ReplyDeleteI have spent much more of my time at keyboards than with a pencil and paper, so I haven't doodled for decades. And when I did, I always drew dogs that looked like horses. Or perhaps they were horses that looked like dogs.
Off topic, but really found "The Wager" a fascinating read! Interesting how the admiralty seemed to skirt the whole mutiny deal at the end. If you haven't read "Madness at the End of the World," it's more of the same only with a lot more ice. Plus Beryl Bainbridge's historical fiction about the Scott Antarctic expedition, "The Birthday Boys," which draws heavily, often verbatim, from diaries from the five who went to the Pole.
DeleteSounds like "The Wager" would be interesting.
DeleteI have seen a lot of Antarctica- themed books lately. One popped up on Amazon today that sounded like it might have possibilities, "Antarctica Station" by sci-fi author AG Riddle. I find Antarctica fascinating, but I don't want to be there.
A couple from our town wanted to get married in Antarctica. Turns out that they couldn't because Antarctica isn't really a country. They settled by getting married on a ship near Antarctica by the captain of the ship.
The Wide, Wide Sea, about Captain Cook's last Arctic voyage, is out now.
DeleteWhile I haven’t doodled with paper and pen, I did do something similar back about twenty years ago when I first encountered the Paint program on my PC.
ReplyDeleteI was still working then. The Paint program provided me with a relaxation period at the computer which was very different both from the extensive amount of data analysis that I did and well as the amount of work-related writing.
I will have to rely on my memory of those endeavors. While I am sure that I have printouts somewhere of my sketches, they will not be easy to locate. I could also have a digit record but that might be even harder to locate (maybe they were on a floppy disk?)
Some of the sketches were of landscapes. Some were more geometric, like something out of Star Trek. Some were a combination. I liked to create two squares; then duplicate them into a quilt pattern.
The thing that I like about the digital world is that one can usually undo anything that one has done, then do it better or differently. The physical world of art is fraught with the possibility of creating something ugly that I can’t live with.
Betty often offers me the opportunity to use her extensive of coloring materials to creative or color something of my own. Again, I would dislike using those materials to create something that I would be unhappy about.
Digital photography offers me the opportunity to create better and better photographs. I can try improving a photograph in various ways without destroying the original starting place.
When Betty told me about the existence of free mandala forms on the internet, I decided someday I may take-up her invitation digitally. I like the current Paint program that allows one to sample the color in any picture then experiment with changing that color slightly. I use it all the time in making frames for my photographs. So, I could see taking a colored photograph and sampling its colors to create a similar but different mandala.
I like Paint. One good thing is that you don't have to pay for it. It came pre-loaded on our PC. I use it for manipulating photos, too. The "crop" feature is probably what I use the most. Another is the ability to create a mirror image, and a negative image. I have used the negative image in making cyanotype prints, where I use negative transparencies to expose watercolor paper coated with some chemicals to sunlight to create the picture.
DeleteThe Boy filled up a notebook when he was about 8 with Paint pictures of a character named Cheese. Cheese was a big round of cheese with a wedge cut out of his head. There was Fearful Cheese, Happy Cheese, Cheese and cat, Father Cheese (a priest), Cheese and his cheese, and a large and frightening Executive Cheese in a business suit.
DeleteI got a different perspective on one's art living on after them last evening. We were with friends, and one of them had been left with the task of settling up the estate of an elderly aunt who had died. She didn't have any children. I asked how things were coming along with that. He said that her house had sold, and now he was figuring out how to get rid of things that no one seemed to want. She had been an artist, and there were over a hundred paintings, mostly not framed. He said some were probably good, but that depended on one's taste. He had given some to a school, and let the other relatives decide if they wanted any of them. It appeared that there were going to be a bunch left over. I said, only half joking, that if no one wanted all of my art after I died, I hoped my survivors would just light a bonfire with the rest. I'd rather have that happen than have it all end up at the thrift store or a garage sale.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a doodler. I think I am too uptight to sully the margins of books with drawings. For the same reason (or at least predilection), I don't mark up books with underlines, highlights, margin notes, etc. The exception is music; hymnals, accompaniment books and musical scores all get marked up - they really have to be. But that is sort of a different category.
ReplyDelete