Thank you Kat Cuadros for sending along the August 24th, 2021 BBC story about an exhibition currently running in London that showcases doodlers from around the globe, and how not meaningless these doodles are. Turner-prize winning (as in mega-prestigeous) award-winning artist, Oscar Murillo, collected more than 100,000 doodled canvases by children around the world. IN Clare Thorp’s wonderful and well-researched article, she reminds us doodles have been around for a long time, at least 73,000 years, and these squiggly lines, graffiti to documents as serious as a White House presidential memorandum, are not meaningless. Thorp reminds us that doodles reduce stress because they leak out of us when we have absolutely no artistic agenda. We doodle without any regard for the end result. Kat Cuadros was heartened to read this article, and I was too because a common self-complaint when people begin to meet their inner artist is that “it’s just doodles.”
Thank you Kat for reminding me that the very first card in the Genesis Way deck, called Adventure, was an image that took shape by doodling over and over till the conical and iconic Mount Fuji near Tokyo mysteriously appeared.
“Doodles can surprise us and delight us and reveal stuff about ourselves, says British-born artist Jon Burgerman, whose spontaneous art arises from the same doodling process.
Some may argue that any child can doodle, and when we adults doodle, we can easily be self-critical. But if we want to draw like Picasso, we ought to think like Picasso too. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Doodling, which we do plenty of in Genesis Art Workshops, returns us to the creative fountain of our youth, the innocent artist within.