We all have them, some of us perhaps more often than others! Those days when nothing seems to be quite right. This video is an attempt to overcome that feeling, and I think it’s very important to try to do this, because the alternative is so often a deepening of the stuckness and a reluctance to restart. Better to nip the tendency in the bud, seize the moment and shake the heck out of it! Intuitive painting can be very rewarding, once you’ve got to grips with the doodling and mark making process.

Thinking about Doodling

I was taught that if you are going to talk about something it’s a good idea to define what that thing is first. So what is Doodling, and to complicate things, what is the difference between Doodling and Mark-making?

Nowadays doodling doesn’t have the same meaning as it used to have. It was what you did when you were supposed to be doing something else. “Stop doodling in your textbook!” could be heard in school classrooms, and while listening to boring phone conversations doodles would adorn my notepad. But now it means something else. Something artistic even. The process of putting line work on top of a background. To be done in pen, pencil, paint, brush pens or any other method of conveying pigment to paper (or any other support).

Doodling and Mark Making

If this is doodling, then what is Mark-Making? There’s a very interesting article on the Tate Gallery website for art students here – click the photo below:

From reading this article it would seem that anything put on any surface or constructed in any way counts as mark making. The article includes Impressionist paintings, sculpture, music and tattoos in the category of “mark-making” – and as it also includes graffiti and mural art, collage and spray painting, and even shooting bullets through paint on to a canvas I am now asking myself whether that would include the act of doodling.

Doodling in the way I use it in this painting is done deliberately and with the intention of creating a piece of art, however humble. This gives it the honour of belonging to the category of Artistic Mark-Making. Which is a very sophisticated and high-brow form of Art indeed!