Doodles

I wanted to scan some of my teenaged doodles for a lecture so here they are.  I was constantly doodling as a teenager (and I still often do, but less and less do I find myself in a situation wherein I can doodle and this is NOT GOOD for my art work!) These are all liberated from their original context, but I can tell you, they were all on pages of notes from classes and homework.  I always got my papers back with big red comments about "NO DOODLING IN THE MARGINS!!!" Well, I showed them, eh?

Anyway--I would doodle anything.  So long as it was a human!  But as you can see, some are "realistic" some are more abstract, some more expressive and some more observational.  Most are done with ballpoint because I was in the classroom.  But as a result of that "training" I now use ballpoint most of the time.

The thing about doodles is this:
When one is a young artist, casting about to find their "artistic voice"...well this is it.  This is the stream of raw material which effortlessly comes out and here you are, the young art student, struggling like mad to be profound and meaningful...to have something original to say.  In my case, I looked in books, libraries, museums, classrooms...I sweated bullets and stewed in my own juices over this...only to find what I had been seeking was there the whole time but I was still seeing that red ink:
"NO DOODLING IN THE MARGINS!!!"

So I stopped doodling in the margins and now I doodle over the whole page!

By the way: my cat Spock's nickname is Doodles.