Doodling as Art
My friend Melissa told me there was this new drawing thing I might be interested in checking out. It looks sort of like the doodles that decorate most of my notebooks, only it's not doodling, it's a Thing. Called Zentangle.
Looking at it, I'm somewhere between curious and appalled, with a dash of annoyance.
It's basically instruction in doodling, which strikes me as silly. People have been doodling as long as there's been something to doodle with and on. Slapping cute little names on patterns is, well, cute*, but they aren't new patterns either. You can call it OOF or MOOKA or BEELINE or SNARGLE or HOBOKEN, but they aren't new patterns and people didn't just 'invent' them. I'm pretty sure I SNARGLEd all over my sketchbook from high school, and I'll scan it when I dig it out of the closet.**
I found a blog post here where the Zentangle originators talked about visiting the Getty museum, with the line "We again collected many inspirations for new tangles. We also saw iterations of existing tangles. For instance, centuries ago, tanglers used Dex to adorn this bust."
...
Seriously? Tanglers? Is this a Smurf kinda thing where you just add some variant of Smurf to every noun, verb and adjective, and smurifly smurf around in your smurfmobile?
"Tanglers" didn't adorn the bloody bust, PEOPLE did. Don't smurf all over the museum.
On the positive, it's something that might encourage people to draw, and have fun with it, and not feel like they have to be a top notch artist to justify picking up a pencil. And I know at least one person I'll mention it to because anything to get him to calm down and de-stress would be good. And I might suggest it to the people I meet who say with sort of a shy pride how they can't do ANYthing creative and can't so much as draw a straight line***.
And if a couple calligraphers can make a few bucks off of teaching the pridefully un-artistic to make nifty doodles, smurfy for them.
*A large part of my annoyance is a severe allergy to cutesy stuff. Probably a lifelong allergy but it definitely got worse watching the "Pluckyfluff Movement" where people spin dreadful, often unusable yarn, slap a usually very cutesy title on it and treat it like the Mona Lisa of the fiber world.
**Yes I still have my sketchbook from high school. Don't judge me.
***Straight lines can be made with rulers. Worry about the curvy ones.
Looking at it, I'm somewhere between curious and appalled, with a dash of annoyance.
It's basically instruction in doodling, which strikes me as silly. People have been doodling as long as there's been something to doodle with and on. Slapping cute little names on patterns is, well, cute*, but they aren't new patterns either. You can call it OOF or MOOKA or BEELINE or SNARGLE or HOBOKEN, but they aren't new patterns and people didn't just 'invent' them. I'm pretty sure I SNARGLEd all over my sketchbook from high school, and I'll scan it when I dig it out of the closet.**
I found a blog post here where the Zentangle originators talked about visiting the Getty museum, with the line "We again collected many inspirations for new tangles. We also saw iterations of existing tangles. For instance, centuries ago, tanglers used Dex to adorn this bust."
...
Seriously? Tanglers? Is this a Smurf kinda thing where you just add some variant of Smurf to every noun, verb and adjective, and smurifly smurf around in your smurfmobile?
"Tanglers" didn't adorn the bloody bust, PEOPLE did. Don't smurf all over the museum.
On the positive, it's something that might encourage people to draw, and have fun with it, and not feel like they have to be a top notch artist to justify picking up a pencil. And I know at least one person I'll mention it to because anything to get him to calm down and de-stress would be good. And I might suggest it to the people I meet who say with sort of a shy pride how they can't do ANYthing creative and can't so much as draw a straight line***.
And if a couple calligraphers can make a few bucks off of teaching the pridefully un-artistic to make nifty doodles, smurfy for them.
*A large part of my annoyance is a severe allergy to cutesy stuff. Probably a lifelong allergy but it definitely got worse watching the "Pluckyfluff Movement" where people spin dreadful, often unusable yarn, slap a usually very cutesy title on it and treat it like the Mona Lisa of the fiber world.
**Yes I still have my sketchbook from high school. Don't judge me.
***Straight lines can be made with rulers. Worry about the curvy ones.