Doodle is “A rough drawing made absent-mindedly”, said Oxford Dictionary. Yes, we all know them, they are these small drawings made with pen often found in the margins of school notebooks.
Last week I found myself enjoying/making a big doodle for a small advertisement. What surprised me, once more, in this process of drawing was the pleasure that I was overcome by an “overwhelming compulsion to scribble, draft, trace, sketch out, or outline”.
“Pleasure” is a complicated word says Jean-Luc Nancy in his book “The Pleasure of Drawing” (strongly recommended) but in this text as in this blog we are trying to describe part of this “feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment, as opposed to necessity” (Oxford dictionary).
Although the accumulation of abstract signs gives an image of lovely handmade “embroidery”, the objective of this small post is to comment that this form of pleasure “is not satisfied by grasping an object”.
In words of Nancy this form of pleasure “satisfies itself in transporting a subject outside itself”. In other words this form of pleasure is in the joy of action where repetition is no longer a repression or where the absence of the need to represent something makes the repression of the repetition a kind of pleasure.
There is a pleasure in tracing these almost repetitive figures and adding them to compose an image. It is the pleasure of feeling safe and secure which is given by moving with a compulsive rhythm which dictates the game by unifying small non-significant signs in a “mosaic”.
As a lector I love those posts that end in a suggestion such as What about you? Have you shared a similar experience? Have you ever made an unforgettable doodle or doodle sessions that surprised you? Of course, this is not a popular blog and nobody is going to answer but I couldn’t resist asking.
I also remembered other doodles.
This is a text written by anthokosmos with the help of Kalliopi Kasagrande.