Commentary on YouTube: Reuben Margolin, a Bay Area visionary and longtime maker, creates totally singular techno-kinetic wave sculptures. Using everything from wood to cardboard to found and salvaged objects, Reuben’s artwork is diverse, with sculptures ranging from tiny to looming, motorized to hand-cranked. Focusing on natural elements like a discrete water droplet or a powerful ocean eddy, his work is elegant and hypnotic. Also, learn how ocean waves can power our future. Learn more about Reuben at http://www.reubenmargolin.com/
Sunni Brown is young, she’s smart, she’s charming—and she’s being featured on TED talks (Technology, Entertainment, Design). TED speakers are notorious for the contributions that they bring to creative problem-solving and technological innovation.
Brown’s presentation, “Doodlers Unite!” begins with some historical context, which points to the negative connotations associated with the word “doodle” in the past. She then highlights how doodling at the workplace has been viewed as an entirely inappropriate activity up to this day. Brown states,
“I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we’re almost blinded to the value of doodling.”
To subvert traditional notions of doodling, Brown proposes a new definition: “To make spontaneous marks to help yourself think.” But are the marks that one makes when doodling really spontaneous, when an end goal for the doodle has been predetermined?
Brown’s defense of doodling stems from its potentially valuable contribution to deep information processing:
“People who doodle when they’re exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts.”
Why is this the case? Brown suggests that there are “…four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions:” These states involve visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic processing, as well as reading and writing. For deep learning to occur, at least two learning modalities must be engaged or the experience of one modality must be combined with an emotional experience.
Doodling, Brown suggests, involves all four learning modalities coupled with an emotional response. As evidence to support Brown’s thesis, she refers to a “doodle” by Frank Gehri, a preliminary sketch for the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi.
Doodle for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
Gerhi’s doodle is clearly serving a function, since it’s being employed in the interests of exploring design concepts. Similarly, Brown suggests that we ought to leverage doodling in environments where information processing is high, as a “…preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus.” She argues, “Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room.”
The strength of Sunni Brown’s argument is also its weakness: her defense of doodling is entirely didactic. A new definition of doodling must be provided, she maintains, and its definition must embody a purpose: to help you think. Brown notes that one of the traditional definitions of doodling is “to do nothing.” In a culture obsessed with productivity and economic gain, doing nothing is a cardinal sin. “Doing nothing at work,” Brown rightly contends, “Is akin to masturbating at work; it’s totally inappropriate.”
What about “doodling” when you’re not at work? If no end in mind has been consciously identified prior to one’s beginning to draw, is it still doodling? According to Brown’s definition, the answer would have to be “no.” The implied suggestion in Brown’s argument is that so long as one is on task (that is to say, one has not lost focus), then doodling is acceptable. But if drawing does not serve a teleological output, it is not doodling, and by extension, it is not useful.
If Spiegelman’s “drawn over two weeks while on the phone” (Read Yourself Raw, 1987) is not a means for the artist to help himself think, then is it still doodling? Or would Brown argue that we are always helping ourselves think when we doodle? Would Sunni Brown consider Marc Bell’s “pschedoodlia” doodling, according to her definition? If not, then what is it?
Marc Bell, "Greetings from Calgary"
What is the difference between a doodle and a sketch? Is there one?
Perhaps rightly so, Brown avoids making reference to the unconscious mind as playing a role in doodling, instead, she defends doodling by linking it to discernable stages of childhood development; doodling is considered a naturally occurring event in human growth.
Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain predates Sunni Brown by 32 years. In this groundbreaking work, the author refers to discoveries in research involving right and left hemispheric activity in the brain. Edwards applies scientific assumptions about brain activity to the experience of drawing. She suggests that the concrete-sequential, logic-driven left hemisphere may dismiss any drawing as mere doodling, in line with Brown’s description of traditional assumptions about the doodle (The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, p. XVI). Because of the left hemisphere’s dominance, doodling is undervalued in cultures where linguistic intelligence is revered. The bias of left-brained, logical-analytical thinking and verbal expression means that right-brain exercises of the imagination, spatial intelligence and visual perception are sublimated, in particular due to the increasing emphasis on academic subjects in our elementary and secondary schools.
Like Brown, Betty Edwards was also involved in facilitating corporate retreats on the basis of her hypotheses about drawing. And while there’s nothing wrong with making money, I can’t help but be suspicious about the motivation behind encouraging these ventures.
Take a look at the Strategic Doodler Showcase on the Doodle Revolution website. Note the preponderance of words in all of the samples provided. How different is what Brown is proposing, compared with the mind map or the concept map? In the domain of education, mind-mapping software has enjoyed popularity, as pioneered by Tony Buzan with MindMap. Inspiration Software is another strong proprietary player. Open Source mind-mapping tools such as Cmap and Freemind are also effective tools for concept mapping. But mind-mapping has been around since long before software applications developed a digital interface for “doodling.”
Wherefore the recent popular attention to doodling? Sir Ken Robinson, a well-reknowned TED talk speaker, has revolutionized how we talk and think about education. In addition to his acute wit and refreshing outlook on teaching and learning, his talks are now famous for their accompanying animations, produced by RSA Animate.
While doodling’s sharing the spotlight with Sunni Brown is better than its not getting centre stage at all, I still want to doodle for the hell of it, and not because it’s going to solve a problem.
Now that I’ve signed up as a participant in the Sketchbook Project, I’ve managed to devise a clever distraction from actually sketching regularly, in the form of conducting “research” into the sketchbooks of other artists. It’s led to the realization that there is an important body of sketchbooks that have been reproduced and made commercially available by various publishers, documenting comic artists’ process in addition to finished works. Without exception, the most striking feature of all of these’ sketchbooks is the breadth of representation that these creators are capable of depicting; their artistry extends far beyond the medium of cartooning. Here is the first in a series of posts that I plan on writing on cartoonists’ published sketchbooks.
Kuper’s “sketchbook journal of two years in Mexico” was an especially timely read for me, since when Kuper was in Oaxaca, teachers in the city were in the midst of an ongoing strike. Teachers in BC have spent the last eight months at the bargaining table, and they are engaged in a limited job action—with no signs of reaching an agreement any time soon. Though the BCTF’s circumstances are arguably very different, in these interesting times one cannot help to draw comparisons between the attitudes of Big Government worldwide and public servants’ demands for greater work equity.
But politics aside, Diario de Oaxaca was a pleasure if only for its lush language and illustrations that we as readers are invited to vicariously live through. Kuper reminds us at every turn that the world is bigger than us. His drawings are testament to a tremendous cross-section of life in Mexico, from tacky tourists to teachers’ strike occupants, local police, insects, vegetation, its vast array of wild dogs and Oaxaca’s indigenous peoples.
On many pages, a dynamic media fusion transpires, with pen and ink, coloured pencil, watercolour, photographs and bilingual captions conjoining in any number of combinations. Among the stunning pages included in this book are:
People blurred with movement, loosely sketched in coloured pencil over top of a static setting, seemingly some sort of a mall or metro station (84)
Kuper’s vivid description of the Monarch butterfly’s migration site (70-75)
Works from an exhibit curated by Kuper, with contributing artists providing self-portraits based on the theme of the Day of the Dead (78-79)
Photographs of local resistance art (134-139)
Heads designed entirely out of various dead insects and insect body parts (121, 123)
Sketches and photographs of a clash between protestors and riot police (35-41)
A lucid description of the many odours Kuper encounters on a walk, with visual representations of each sense impression follow immediately afterwards (162-163)
Wild dogs! (166-167)
Flying temples! (92-93, 172)
Some points of similarity that I found intriguing about Kuper, over and above what I already knew about him from Stop Forgetting to Remember–I also went through a very early fascination with insects, and used to “map out” their body parts on graph paper, using a Peterson Field Guide to Insects that I still own to this day. And our daughters were both born in the same year. Without knowing Kuper, reading his description and seeing a photograph of his daughter holding baby turtles, about to let them go into the sea (128), was a rapturous moment even for me.
I grew up reading Spy vs. Spy and was recently turned onto World War 3 Illustrated, in particular because the Graphic Radicals exhibit came to Victoria last year, with Seth Tobocman in attendance. Seeing such a wide variety of comic artists’ work up close isn’t an opportunity that I’ve had very often. I took full advantage of it, returning several times for another look.
Diario de Oaxaca is the work of a fully matured artist. Kuper’s snapshots of his time abroad demonstrate his versatility with brush, pen and coloured pencil. The colours in Kuper’s drawings are vibrant and full. One of the joys of artists’ sketchbooks being made public is the emphasis on process, and the free flowing collage of ideas displayed on the page. In between the covers of this sketchbook journal, we see the breadth of inquiry that Kuper brings to his work, and we recognize that for all his cartooning greatness, his genius extends even further beyond.
