May 29, 2016 – Kathy Waller

Doodle 2.
Doodle one of your favorite things to do.

Doodle 2. One of my favorite things to do. May 29, 2016. © MKW

My favorite thing is to fly to Albany, rent a car, get a hotel room in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and spend several days driving up U.S. Route 7 to Burlington, Vermont, and down U.S. Route 7 to Lenox, Massachusetts (Edith Wharton’s house), and up to Burlington, and down to Lenox, and then turning east to Amherst (Emily Dickinson’s house), and on to Lexington and Concord (Emerson’s, Hawthorne’s, the Alcotts’, Margaret Sidney’s, etc., house…) But that’s more of a video than a doodle.

So I chose to draw my Saturday morning occupation, the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle. We don’t subscribe to the Times, so I wait till it comes out in the Austin American-Statesman and do it retroactively.

Working the puzzle is a two-step process.

Step One: I start. Sometimes I finish the whole thing or leave only a few squares empty. Sometimes it goes fast. Sometimes I suffer and struggle but persevere. Sometimes I get mad and read Dear Abby instead.

I use a pen. It’s better to blot out wrong answers than to erase and make holes in the paper.

Step Two: When I’ve gone as far as I can go, I hand the paper to David. He fills in the rest. In other words, I do the easy part and he does the part that uses the other 90% of the brain.

Here’s a current photo of today’s Step One. It’s not as neat and tidy as I’d like because (a) Ernest the Cat was draped across my right forearm, pinning it to the arm of the chair, while I wrote; (b) Ernest the Cat insisted on nudging the pen while I wrote; (c) I woke up in a nasty mood and hadn’t worked my way out, and superior penmanship wasn’t a priority.

Yesterday I veered off course and skipped the Times puzzle, and because these things have to be done in the proper sequence, the Los Angeles Times puzzle, which I normally work on Sundays, will have to wait till tonight. Or tomorrow. Or whenever.

In other words, until the nasty mood has passed, I may do no puzzles at all. I may instead hop a plane to Albany and spend the rest of the year visiting every literary house in New England.

Doodle prompt from 365 Days of Doodling, by Carin Channing

Doodle 1.
Doodle something abstract, using shapes and only one color.

Words & Wine Wednesday at Austin’s Writing Barn featured Carin Channing discussing her book 365 Days of Doodling: Discovering the Joys of Being Creative Every Day.

wb DSCF1069 — Seated, L-R: Poets Sean Petrie and David Fruchter of Typewriter Rodeo, and author/doodler Carin Channing

Ms. Channing didn’t know she was a doodler until she was forty, when she accepted an online 30-day Doodle Challenge. When the month was up, she began doodling with friends… and with strangers… and then she started teaching doodling.

Why? Because doodling is–I’m pulling from her long list of adjectives–“fun… liberating… fun… energizing… youthfulizing… clarifying… fun…”

I’ve never been a doodler. I have a heavy touch and a tight grip. My pencil doesn’t sweep lightly, freely, and steadily across the page. The pictures on my paper don’t look like the pictures in my head. Frustration guaranteed.

But at Words & Wine, Ms. Channing made doodling sound as much fun as her book claims it is. She handed out paper and markers and invited us to draw.

I used the prompt “Draw how your day started.”

DSCN1708 — Doodle @ the Writing Barn. Kathy Waller, May 25, 2016. © MKW

The picture wasn’t worth a thousand words, so I added some. The zigzaggy lumps that look like armadillos are cats.

David is a word person, too, but he employs more subtlety:

DSCN1714 — Doodle @ the Writing Barn. David Davis, May 25, 2016. © MKW

Ms. Channing’s books were, like Mt. Everest, there, so I bought one.

Today I did my first official doodle, displayed at the top of the post.

Of course, I dithered first. Abstract? My doodle shouldn’t be anything? How can I draw without knowing what I’m drawing?

Didn’t Jackson Pollock’s wife say to him, “But you have to abstract from something. What are you abstracting from?” (If Mrs. Pollock didn’t really say that, Marcia Gay Harden said something similar in the movie, which is close enough.)

I quashed the dither by turning my pencil on its side and making a blurry square, and another one, and then a couple of ovals, and another blurry square, and another oval… and the ovals began to look like eyes and a mouth. An oval blur in one of the eye-ovals looked like an iris, so I added a blur to the other eye-oval. That made the eyes focus. I restrained myself from putting a ladybug on the shoulder.

So much for abstraction. Some of us, I guess, abstract to rather than from.*

Where creativity is the goal–and this is oh, so important–judgment must be silent. As Mr. Pollock no doubt said to his wife.

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*I write that way, too.

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Typewriter Rodeo, who create “custom, on-the-spot poems for event guests, using vintage typewriters,” was also featured at Words & Wine Wednesday. The typewriters are beautiful. More about that in a later post.

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