Evanescent art that isn't
Thanks to green_knight for this link to a twelfth century boy's doodles.
I've always loved these brief glimpses of real people. A treasured memory is the front leaves of a very battered and dull Latin historical treatise aimed at schoolboys, printed in the early 1600s, on which some unknown boy had sketched out different styles of doublets. He'd also practiced writing his name in court hand, and various ways.
I used to have a book specifically on monks' marginalia that someone "borrowed" and alas didn't return.
Here is a bit of real life doodling by the workers on an Egyptian monument:
Sometimes the marginalia or doodles or scribbles were words. Or poems.
I am always suspicious of scholars whose speculations contain phrases such as "nothing more than" or "inane" or even "simply" as art is rarely simple, even sketchy art. But still, there are some intriguing theories put forth, and some good examples of ancient art here.
Here is a riff from someone who doesn't have his nose quite so high in the air. I wonder about those gigantic drawings being doodles because it seems to me an immense amount of work went into them. Doodling, I thought, was the quick sketch during a suspended moment in time--an image one sees in one's head, or out the monastery window as the brethren weed and butterflies dance unnoticed around them, or Onfim sitting in the wintry house, longing to be outside.
The thing I love about doodles, marginalia, and the like is the seeming evanescence: someone sparked to the impulse to sketch that moment, that mindset, often at the edge of a work of art meant to endure, dedicated to high purpose. But it didn't vanish.
I've always loved these brief glimpses of real people. A treasured memory is the front leaves of a very battered and dull Latin historical treatise aimed at schoolboys, printed in the early 1600s, on which some unknown boy had sketched out different styles of doublets. He'd also practiced writing his name in court hand, and various ways.
I used to have a book specifically on monks' marginalia that someone "borrowed" and alas didn't return.
Here is a bit of real life doodling by the workers on an Egyptian monument:
Sometimes the marginalia or doodles or scribbles were words. Or poems.
I am always suspicious of scholars whose speculations contain phrases such as "nothing more than" or "inane" or even "simply" as art is rarely simple, even sketchy art. But still, there are some intriguing theories put forth, and some good examples of ancient art here.
Here is a riff from someone who doesn't have his nose quite so high in the air. I wonder about those gigantic drawings being doodles because it seems to me an immense amount of work went into them. Doodling, I thought, was the quick sketch during a suspended moment in time--an image one sees in one's head, or out the monastery window as the brethren weed and butterflies dance unnoticed around them, or Onfim sitting in the wintry house, longing to be outside.
The thing I love about doodles, marginalia, and the like is the seeming evanescence: someone sparked to the impulse to sketch that moment, that mindset, often at the edge of a work of art meant to endure, dedicated to high purpose. But it didn't vanish.