Do you have the courage to doodle? (In art, music and life.)

For years I’ve been creatively paralysed by perfectionism.

Receiving praise in childhood build up an ego around my art and music. Put it in a field of tension of having to meet expectations. Since I was reasonably talented, they were high.

That took the playfulness out of it.

That’s why I stopped drawing, playing and writing for a decade.

(It’s not good enough, etc.)

But now I just want to have fun and refresh my soul, so I’ve decided to doodle both visually and musically with no aim apart from enjoying the exploration of rhythms, textures and expressions.

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Characters

If you feel like playing this track, don’t expect “music”.

It’s more a musical recording of a thought process, or, actually of a few characters walking by outside my window. Can you guess who the characters were?

For a less humorous and more emotional sketch in the language of sounds, check this one.

For the kind of art I do when I give in to social pressure to paint something “proper”, look here.

 

Grassroots of doodles

Curiously, when going back to “proper art” after a decade of neglect and doodles, I’ve noticed that doodling changed the way I treat textures and colours in non-abstract paintings.

It’s perhaps like the doodles build a relationship with the materials and first elements from the bottom up, growing like grass.

It’s slow.

But then, when meeting an idea (or task) for painting something concrete “from above”, the two fuse in new ways, in ways that infuse the concrete art with a different character.

If I may get so analytic about mostly doodles.

But it’s a curious process.

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Please share

Do you doodle? What value (if any) do you see in just playing around creatively as a form of meditation on material, texture, shape, energy?