Doodle

I am a doodler.

I doodle in notebooks, in the margins of important documents, and during meetings to keep my mind from wandering farther than it has already traveled.

Doodling offers no rules or outlined plan for a measured result. There are no misplaced marks when doodling, only new lines of intrigue. Doodling is freeing; no critic, no profit-loss statement to be analyzed, and no expectation of "company growth".

Yet for some, doodling is paralyzing. "What should be drawn?" "What if it doesn't turn out right?" "What if no one likes it?" These questions should never be entertained in the doodle process. They are anti-doodle.

Doodling is about uninhibitedly exploring "new", simply "because". Doodling is about getting something on paper as it just might be enough to birth inspiration. Doodling is about releasing that which we have held captive for fear of not fitting in.

I need to doodle more. Our world needs to doodle more. It begins with you.

What will you doodle?

The Art Around You

Last Saturday I was with my family at a collaborative art show/experience downtown Grand Rapids called Art Prize. Artists from all around the world entered their work to be on display throughout the downtown area.

Art in the buildings, outside of the buildings, on the buildings, street performers...at Art Prize, art is everywhere.

The Art is impossible to ignore.

In my daily routine Art doesn't emerge as brilliantly as it does at Art Prize. The mundane of each day (looking as it did the day before) has a way of neutralizing anything that speaks afresh. Sometimes in a sea of repetition, painted in variants of grey, it seems as if Art has left long ago.

This void of Art, beauty, creativity, and wonderment creates a vacuum in which the air itself becomes too difficult to breathe.

Yet the Art is not gone.

It is there; the Blue of the Sky, the Texture of the Tree Trunk, the Sound of Children, the Chill of a Fall Rain.

Lying just beneath the surface of the Institution, the cog of Industry, the Normal, and the Mass Produced, Art is everywhere.

It takes creative insight, the Artist, to excavate that which society has covered over; to point to the beauty ignored because of mass repetition. In a world where Industry is on the decline we need Artists more than ever, to open our eyes to the beauty that has been there all along; to point out for others what has always been present.

Wherever you find yourself today may you be aware of the Art that surrounds you and may you point it out for the benefit of others.