Artist Bio

Sam Taylor-Wood (born 4 March 1967 in London) is an English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist. Her directorial début was 2009’s Nowhere Boy, a biopic about Beatles singer John Lennon, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA.  (wikipedia)

Sam Taylor Wood on White Cube

Sam Taylor Wood on Artnet

Jabson Rodrigues on Flickr

Sam Morrison on Flickr

Sam Morrison’s Website

Read more comics from Paul Madonna’s Sketchbook . . .

See the Escape into Life post on Paul Madonna

Artist Bio

Andre Masson (1896-1987) was one of the major early French Surrealist painters. A close friend of Andre Breton, Joan Miro and Max Ernst, he joined the Surrealist movement in the early 20s, then disassociated with it in the early 30s, focusing instead on the human condition – the fundamental impulses of love and hatred – and reacting to the Spanish Civil War. In the early 40s, Masson moved to America and became interested in mythical imagery. Many of his paintings from this period show a focus on African American and Native American myths, and the style of his expression and brushwork influenced many young American painters.

Although Masson is most often associated with Surrealism, his work evades definition through any one twentieth-century movement. In some ways, the identification with Surrealism has been confusing. Not only has it focussed attention on a partial aspect of his career, but has obscured profound differences between them. If it is true that some of his finest paintings were produced when he was closest to Surrealism, it is also the case that they were generated by deep tensions: as he wrote himself, “Painful contradictions are sometimes the source of the greatest riches”.

Masson had especially close relations throughout his life with poets and writers, and they in turn responded to the qualities in his work that spoke to their shared concerns. But that is not to say that he was a literary painter. Andre Breton, for instance, celebrated the chemistry of the intellect” that marked for him Masson as the painter who understood the full implications of the surrealist project. But before his encounter with Surrealism in 1924, others had made him their elective artist: Michael Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, and a little later Georges Bataille. For them, who were to be the “dissident” surrealists, or, in the case of Bataille, “Surrealism’s old enemy from within”, Masson’s work possessed another, Dionysian, character, as Leiris called it, that was to challenge Surrealism on its own grounds. (bio)

Andre Masson at Tate Collection

Andre Masson at Animation and Fine Art Gallery

Artist Bio

Wayne Miller (American, 1918 – ) was born in Chicago and attended the University of Illinois, Urbana (1938-40) where he studied banking and worked part-time as a freelance photographer. From 1940-42 he studied photography at the Art Center School of Los Angeles and went on to serve in the US Navy where he was assigned to Edward Steichen’s Naval Aviation Unit (Miller would later assist Steichen in putting on the record-breaking “Family of Man” exhibition at MoMA in 1954). After the war, Miller won two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships (1946-48) and photographed a body of work entitled “The Way of Life of the Northern Negro,” which was later published as Chicago’s South Side (UC Berkely, 2000). Miller briefly taught at Chicago’s Institute of Design before moving to California where he worked for Life magazine until 1953. He became a member of Magnum Photos in 1958, serving as its president from 1962-66. He later went to work with the National Park Service and in 1975 abandoned professional photography in order to dedicate himself to the defense of California forests. (bio)

Wayne Miller at Stephen Daiter Gallery

Artist Bio

Camille Solyagua is a fine art photographer based in Portland, Oregon with a focus on black and white and traditional photographic techniques.

Camille Solyagua’s Website

Artist Bio

Issei Suda is a Japanese photographer.

Born in Tokyo in 1940, Suda graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1962. From 1967 to 1970 he worked as the cameraman of the theatrical group Tenjo Sajiki, under Shūji Terayama. He has worked as a freelance photographer since 1971. Suda is a professor at Osaka University of Arts.

Issei Suda at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

Artist Bio

Wim Delvoye (Wervik, 1965) is a Belgian conceptual artist known for a number of unconventional projects.

Wim Delvoye’s Website

Artist Bio

Paul Dibble is New Zealand’s foremost contemporary sculptor. Having studied sculpture at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, he set up his own bronze-casting foundry. He received numerous commissions and had a first solo exhibition in 1971 at the Barry Lett Gallery in Auckland. Over the years, Dibble has taken up several prestigious teaching positions.

Dibble’s bronzes often engage the viewer in metaphysical reflection. His Magical Realist or Surrealist imagery connects the viewer to a world of wonder as a starting point to reason about reality. (bio)

Paul Dibble at Gow Langsford Gallery

Paul Dibble at Page Blackie Gallery

Faith Georgia

Jabson Rodrigues

molossus aka rooibas

Jim Bradshaw

Matt Lyon

jdfy333

Sam Morrison

Penny Raile

Mariann Johansen Ellis

celiaaa

Roy

Snippy Snippy

Don Moyer

Artimess

Filippo

Daniel Dors

Sherrie Thai

Dave Bollinger

eklektick

jdyf333

Check out the essay, “Beyond the Doodle,” by David Maclagan

Pierre Alechinsky, La Jeune Fille et la Mort [The Young GIrl and Death] (1966-1967)

Although the doodle is treated as if it were a natural, spontaneous and universal phenomenon, it is in fact an invention, a concept that emerged at a certain point and rapidly became extremely popular. There are a number of possible reasons for this: the spread of literacy and the bureaucracy associated with it, the emergence of graphology (at its peak in the early 20th century), the diffusion of psychoanalytic ideas about free-association and unconscious thought, and an interest—half admiring, half malicious—in the careless drawing of celebrities (politicians, actors, writers). Of course marginal drawings in manuscripts and books have a longer history, though we can only guess at what prompted them; but the doodle has a specifically modern psychological slant to it.

The term ‘doodle’ seems to have emerged in the mid 1920s, and within a decade had become something like a fad, with an expanding interest in the reproduction and ‘analysis’ of celebrity doodles (eg ‘Everybody’s Pixilated’ by Russell Arundel 1937). Nevertheless, as a spontaneous and absent-minded form of drawing, doodling was regarded from an essentially egalitarian perspective: most people, whether they thought of themselves as creative or not, did it on the side (literally, in the margins), during meetings or lectures, or while on the phone, and any ulterior meaning it might have was largely unintentional. But the combined influence of graphology and a generalised version of Freudian psychoanalysis contributed to the many ‘analyses’ accompanying published doodles, which linked their style to their author’s character or unconscious pre-occupations.

Paul Klee, Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net (1920)

At the same time as doodling became popular there were parallel developments in modern art: many modern artists (Kandinsky, Klee and Miro, for example) and some avant-garde movements (especially Dadaism and Surrealism), were interested in modes of inscription, whether verbal or non-verbal, that could be called automatic or unconscious, and hence, like doodles, outside conscious control. The work of children, the art of the insane and the productions of Spiritualistic mediums were three of the most obvious sources for such material. All could be thought of as stemming from a spontaneous creative source that was unfiltered by education or professional training. Dubuffet’s notion of ‘Art Brut’, with its insistence on the self-taught and the radically eccentric, is the most dramatic and polemical version of this. All of this fostered the image of an art that was both non-representational and non-communicative: these selfish and irresponsible characteristics are also typical of the doodle.

Although doodling begins as a reaction against the rules and structures of writing, it also colludes with them. Some of its earliest precursors are to be found in the margins of mediaeval manuscripts, as well as in later manuscripts, most famously the ledgers of an 18th century Neapolitan bank (Gombrich 1999). It’s not difficult to imagine the boredom or rebellion of scribes or clerks both against a strict institution and against the authority of the ‘system’ behind it. This authority was not simply to do with their immediate superiors, it had to do with the laws that governed such things as the ‘proper’ use of writing and other forms of representation, and even the status of decoration or ornament. The doodle’s relation to these laws is both playful and aggressive: for example, letters can be embroidered to the point of illegibility, and authority figures may be caricatured. The private and secret nature of doodling provides a cover for deviant or rebellious impulses of which we may be only partly aware.

doodle by Jack Kerouac

The rules enveloping doodling are not just these conscious ones, imposed from outside: even on a purely formal level, they also include what psychologists and psychiatrists have tried to analyse in terms of the regular patterns beneath the superficial variety of graphic automatism (for example ‘creative form constants’). These include repetition, symmetry, inversion, geometrical structuring, as well discovering or inventing faces, figures or architectural constructions. There are destructions as well, such as overlaying or blacking out. In fact one could say that doodling plays out a dynamic relation between order and disorder, constraint and freedom, public and private—this perhaps being to some extent a reflection of the context in which it is engaged in.

This brings up the question of the limits within which the ‘normal’ or mundane doodle comes into being. Time and space are usually in short supply: the meeting ends or blank space on the paper gets filled up. What happens when these constraints no longer apply, when the doodle is left free to expand without them? There are certainly quite a lot of drawings, made in widely different contexts, that have many of the characteristic features of doodling, but in an extended or concentrated form. I have called these ‘meta-doodles’, because they go beyond the normal limits of doodling, and they are most obviously to be found in Outsider Art.

Laure Pigeon, Dessin (1961)

Sophie Podolski

Here we encounter another function of doodles: as an alibi (‘It’s just a doodle’) that frees its creator from having to worry about their ‘art’ status. This also refers to the way in which such drawings often seem to unfold autonomously, independent of their creator’s will. In fact, as early as 1922 Hans Prinzhorn, in his seminal work on the genesis of art-works amongst psychotic patients singled out ‘aimless, unorganised scribbling’ as the most rudimentary form of the ‘configurative urge’ (Prinzhorn 1972). ‘Scribbling’ is, of course, a derogatory term: yet many of the ‘scribbles’ reproduced in Prinzhorn’s book would today be considered wonderful abstract or ultra-ornamental drawings.

Both ‘scribble’ and ‘doodle’ are shifting categories: at one time humble and underestimated, at another time a kind of creative last resort. It’s as if there is a kind of dance going on, between them and the sophisticated world of Fine Art. The latter often tries to appropriate the former’s free-range innocence; but echoes of the world of art can also be found in doodles, even if it is simply in the form of framing devices. In fact they draw upon a kind of cultural silt or compost, into which degraded versions of what were once startling Modernist innovations have sunk. Post-Modernism in particular has taken a perverse delight in blurring the boundaries between the two (for example in the work of Pierre Alechinsky or Cy Twombly).

Although doodling has the reputation of being escapist or self-indulgent, it actually serves a number of overlapping functions. It can indeed be a kind of invisible holiday from the task in hand. But it can also be ‘idling’, in the sense that an engine is ticking over (there is research suggesting that doodling aids concentration on something else). It can be a way of throwing up unexpected material, letting the hand work rather than the mind. This latter function is first cousin to Modernist experiments in deliberately losing control through the use of chance, automatism or a trance-like state (sometimes drug-induced). Of course there is an element of conscious interference in most doodling, but because of its widespread and democratic nature, it can be seen to display some of the fundamental characteristics of drawing.

André Masson, Automatic Drawing (1924)

When we look at the relation between the modest and surreptitious nature of doodling and the more dramatic forms of drawing of which it seems to be the poor relation, we can see it as a node, from which numerous kinds of drawing are offshoots. These might include: celebrity doodles, including those by famous writers and artists (American presidents and film stars, Samuel Beckett); mediumistic drawings (Victor Hugo, Raphael Lonné, Laure Pigeon); Art Brut works (Marc Lamy, Michel Nedjar); and fine art drawings (Paul Klee, André Masson, Jackson Pollock). But there would also be unclassifiable fringe drawings: the delirious excursions of psychiatric patients, drawings done under the influence of drugs (Henri Michaux, Sophie Podolski), ‘asemic writing’ (Tim Gaze), and possibly even the ‘meanders’ of paleolithic cave art.

It’s interesting that many of these more or less distant relations of the doodle offer us some insight into a variety of psychological states that may be either their cause or their effect. Automatism in almost all its varieties (from Spiritualism to Abstract Expressionism) is evidently connected to a dissociated or trance-like state, and many meta-doodlers report that their drawings feel as if dictated to them, or are the result of some obscure compulsion. But, on account of its temporary nature, and because of embarrassment at disclosing it, inside descriptions of actual doodling are rare. Yet such testimony could tell us a lot about the nature of the creative process.

Modernism’s quest for imagery as close as possible to the ‘original’ sources of creativity—in the ‘primitive’, the ‘childish’, the ‘mad’ or the ‘outsider’, for example— has arguably led, in each case, to the corruption of that source’s innocence. It may be that a too intense or self-conscious focus on the doodle could have the same effect. On the other hand, there is an astonishing range of material hidden under that deceptively modest label.

Once we relax the spatial and temporal boundaries it looks as if doodling is just the tip of an iceberg of more elaborate spontaneous and informal art. It’s all the more sad that so many current DIY doodle books (take a look at the range on Amazon) are for the most part banal and prescriptive.

Check out Celebrating the Art of the Doodle: 20 Awesome Doodles

David Maclagan is a writer, artist, lecturer and retired art therapist, living in W Yorks. He has published numerous articles on Outsider Art, art and imagination and psychological aesthetics (the title of a book published in 2001 by Jessica Kingsley). His latest book Outsider Art: from the margins to the marketplace has just been published by Reaktion Books.