Tag Archives: geometry

Doodle Bug

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pen & inkI would like to state for the record that I am not, nor have I ever been, to my knowledge, an actual doodlebug, either zoologically or as a rolling or flying vehicle, a dowsing rod, or a method of seismic activity tracking. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those. And it’s probably safe to say that my garden and numerous dimly lit corners of my home are probably full of living and dead pill bugs (what we used to call potato bugs when I was growing up), and I confess to thinking it highly amusing that these creatures are in fact tiny crustaceans that live right in my house and look like–indeed, are scientifically named after–armadillos. House Armadillos or Domestic Crustaceans, either way kind of weirdly cool in my estimation.

But I digress.

What I am is one of the many humanoids prone to doodling. And that’s not a bad thing, either. Doodling (or randomly scribbling on whatever is handy, usually a cocktail serviette or textbook or office paperwork or top-secret legal document, depending upon one’s status and age and current supposed activities) often leads, though many a grade school teacher would vigorously deny it, to thinking. And on occasion at least, thinking is not an entirely bad thing.

Whenever I’m struggling to get a piece of writing, a drawing, or frankly, any other project underway, there are few motivational tools that compare with doodling. The serendipitous or random mark that merely records a purportedly thoughtless and pointless motion of the hand can sometimes come to resemble an actual Something, and well, Something almost always leads to Something Else. In drawing as in life, just getting in there and starting, whether I’m ready or not, is the best way to potentially get anything done. Who knew!

Today’s doodle is brought to you by my propensity for turning many of my scribbles and scrawls and squibs and squiggles into things that resemble simplified linear paisley patterns or rosemaling, or any number of other folk design traditions. Once I get going on them, I find it meditative to a degree just to follow the whimsical path of inserting repetitive forms and line treatments, geometries and organic outgrowths of the marks, until I’ve filled much of the available space. Many of these folk-like, repeating elements become almost a trademark doodling style that might be as identifiable to some as my handwriting. Though, hopefully, more legible. And while the doodles don’t necessarily lead to specific or pictorial drawings in and of themselves, they do lend themselves neatly to a more relaxed and receptive state of mind in which those more concrete thoughts and ideas can indeed begin to insert and assert themselves usefully. And that can lead to different sorts of drawing, whether more topical or more sophisticated or more directed. Or not! The inspiration is in the action.digital painting from a P&I drawing

Today I was led by the doodling, not to a different drawing entirely, but to scanning it and playing with it digitally, first layering colors all over the place, then digital textures, then altering the proportions of the image, and lastly, stitching the resulting mash-up into a larger grouping of four copies of the same image arranged in a pinwheel fashion and then stretched, skewed, cut-and-pasted, and electronically stamped into a fabric-like whole that uses the same idea of the initial doodles repetitions-with-evolutionary-changes so that the end product still seems to appear quite handmade, as it’s not symmetrical or fully even from side to side or top to bottom. Now, if I were to take that square and repeat it, even if I turned it 90 degrees each time, for example, it would finally become more machine-made in appearance as well as manufacture. But that’s just mental doodling right there, isn’t it, because I could further alter the combination every single time I ‘copied’ it.

Which illustrates exactly what I was talking about as characteristic of doodling. One thing does lead to another, as long as we bother to do the initial one thing.

That said, I suppose I should get up from my desk and go forth to do a few individual things that might lead to getting some other essential things done around here. Cheerio!digital image from a P&I drawing

Arithmetic, Thou art No Friend of Mine

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photoAnd lo, how my thoughts go round and round upon the subject.

It must come as no surprise whatsoever that I am among the multitudinous math-phobes peopling (pimpling?) the world of the creative soul. Why do you think we really all took those arty, wondrous, supposedly “Easy-A” classes, eh? Escape Route, we thought, freedom from the horrors that lie between the covers of every arithmetic text known to humankind. Only to find out we’d been hoodwinked and were expected to know how to disassemble and reassemble an ellipsoidal reflector in under ten minutes and with fewer than two “nonessential” parts left over after completion (what is this word “two”?), or whether one could type 200 words of dazzling script per minute while trying not to be hopelessly hypnotized by Mr. Young’s* blindingly mustard-colored toupee. I was able to accomplish the former task, by the way, but the latter, not quite so fully. However, I only lost consciousness for a split second and did not actually fall off of my chair.

*Name has been changed to protect someone vain’s glabrous secret.

In fact, by taking uni-approved ‘alternative’ courses (“I’ll take the class behind Door Number, uhhh, B, Dave!”) I managed to go all the way from 9th grade algebra, passed mainly by babysitting for the teacher’s kids on the weekends, to grad school without having taken a single other mathematics class. Then I got stuck: first those lousy entrance exams, which are now a blissful blank in my memory bank, followed by Graduate Statistics for Pedagogy, or whatever they called it. Hell, I tells ya! The only thing that saved me was that my older sister had survived the same course with the same prof a year earlier and coached me every cotton picking minute of the way through it. While I wept copious and bitter tears. I squeeeeeeeaked by with the B grade needed to pass the course and ran screaming all the way to graduation. Which commencement ceremony I skipped to go to Mt. Rainier with friends from Australia, because once you’ve paraded down the catwalk in those hot mortarboard and gown get-ups, never mind adding a hotter yet academic hood, on a sweltering summer day, in an auditorium full of people you don’t care to know, to grip that rolled-up piece of parchment that says “Redeem for Actual Diploma at Registrar‘s Office on Tuesday after 4 pm or for a Free Pizza at Gianni’s on Main after 5 pm”–well, once you’ve gone that route there’s really no need for a repeat, is there.

Although come to think of it, skipping The Forced March may mean that I didn’t in fact officially graduate and so taught college for two decades under false pretenses, and what’s not to like about that! In any event, I did finally, truly knock down that last class on the looming list, if without particular distinction or panache.photoMath, though, remained a bane. It was hideously disappointing to realize that a grasp of basic functional math was the only thing that stood between me and, say, a growling, slavering pack of credit card representatives or perhaps the growling stomach of starvation after having demolished the pantry stores by reversing the quantities of salt and sugar in yet another foolproof recipe. On the other hand, it was something of a relief when I finally realized that I was worrying needlessly about something I could never, ever fix. Between my dyslexia (or more accurately in this instance, dysnumerica) and my utter disinterest in getting better at math for the sheer unfathomable pleasure of it, I could see that this was something I should learn to put aside and compartmentalize safely to keep it away from unnecessarily pestering me in my everyday Happy Place.

Not to say that I didn’t have to find some truly inventive ways to do a (cough!) number of things. Balance my bank accounts. Figure out the current time/date in another time zone. Calculate the distance and ETA to work locations. Without GPS and Google Maps, because I do predate plenty of Modern Miracles by a significant margin. Teach drawing students how to draw in two-point perspective. Memorize ridiculous chains of randomly generated numbers to have even the remote hope of regaining access to umpteen kinds of personal accounts, not least of all ones containing personal information or money.

That is where you find me today, where numbers serve only the most rudimentary decorative purposes in my quotidian existence, for the most part (some of them being visually pleasing as abstract shapes, at least), but still occasionally rising up to help me remember my home telephone number so that I can call my more numerically astute husband to solve all of my more knotty mathematical problems. Because no matter how crummy my skills and how limited my knowledge when it comes to things numerical, I have what is for me a far more useful piece of wisdom, which is: one should always have great resource persons to call upon when one lacks the required smarts, information and/or tool handling artistry to accomplish the task of the moment. Stand ready, y’all.photoThe only sort of geometry at which I am expert, apparently, is circular thinking. But look where it’s gotten me thus far!