More on the power of the doodle

It's been a frustrating day.  I've felt tired and demotivated without any reason. Following a walk to clear my head and blow away the cobwebs, I spent some time in my work space trying to make progress on my personal project. I had various strands of thought passing through my brain but two main objectives: to make more holey components (I managed two - see above) and to begin to explore the extruded doodle idea (extroodle..?) that I mentioned in the last post.

For the doodles, I began by pulling some flattened straps of clay out from the extruder and just placed each of them individually but randomly on a board, twisting and shaping without much thought.  I ended up with something that looked like a tapeworm ... :-|  I decided to try and give the worm some marks that might make it look less organism and more mechanism.  The bike chain effect wasn't what I was looking for in this case.

So I had another look at my doodle of yesterday and decided I'd try and emulate it literally (2D) in clay, I wasn't that impressed with the result (too flimsy and flat) but looking at this photo of the outcome, I must admit that I quite like this free flowing design and, although it doesn't work well like this -- i.e. flat with extrusions -- it could be interesting to make some cutters to cut out some of these shapes in holey bricks/tiles/components. Or maybe to try and build it in a more 3D interpretation inside/outside of a brick mould.  The problem would be, of course, in making it strong enough to be able to handle it into the kiln... and to not break at bisque...

Perhaps there's no need for me to go off pursuing this idea of 'doodling' quite so literally. I think maybe I'm just recognising that I need to revitalise and lighten my approach to the making process: i.e. working with some of that freedom of expression I feel when doodling.

Oddly enough, I've had a couple of weird coincides with the doodling theme today.  The first was during my walk this morning.  I walked a route that starts of most of my local rambles, past the lovely Throckley Reigh (pronounced reeth) which is a large tree-lined anglers' pond on the way down to the River Tyne.  This lovely pond changes character through the seasons and just now it is a murky muddy brown and overflowing from recent heavy rains. In the summer it has clear waters filled with the beautiful reflections of the nearby trees. I have taken (probably) hundreds of photos of this pond's waters.  Today, it offered me some doodles...

These marks are reflections of the electricity cables that hang above the Reigh. Really weird effect.  Looks like someone has scribbled on the pond.

The second doodling coincide came from today's TED notifications that popped up on my phone.  (Actually there was a whole host of useful stuff that came up today - including some talks about creative motivation which I need to make time to listen to).  This one is entitled Doodlers, Unite and is a relatively short talk:

Sunni Brown states that the definition of 'doodling' is to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. I think that's partly true but I also find that, when I'm doodling, I'm not aware of conscious thought at all and, in fact, I'm often simply not thinking at all. For me doodling is more akin to 'automatic' painting where you just simply let your body take the pen or pencil where it wants to go.

I need to check out whether this is really true, but Sunni's talk included this doodle which she said was Frank Gehry's initial scribbled design for the Guggenheim Museum:

Interesting!  And just shows how the simplest drawing of a design can hold such meaning to the person who drew it, whilst being nothing much more than a scribbly mess to the observer.