Doodling: The Joy of Spontaneous Art

The Joy of Spontaneous Art
LISA LIPSETT
DOODLING
THE JOY OF SPONTANEOUS ART
Lisa Lipsett, Ed. D.
We are here to become integral with the larger Earth community. The
community itself and each of its members has ultimately a wild component,
a creative spontaneity that is its deepest reality, its most profound mystery.
- Thomas Berry
One day, while I walked home along the back roads of my island
home I noticed natures doodles in the bark of trees, on blades of grass, in the
dirt, on leaves. Even the cracks in the paved portion of my route had a
doodling quality to them. The sheer number of these creations
reminded me of a capacity we share with nature - spontaneous creativity.
This article is a brief celebration of this shared capacity and how utilizing
creativebynature.org
it not only brings joy to our lives but strengthens our relationship to the living
earth. Each time we create with no plan, we spark a powerful shift to feeling,
intuition and sensation that puts us in intimate relationship with self and
Earth. We access our inherent capacity for creativity and connection and
feel more whole as wild aspects of self jump into awareness and onto the
page.
Practices that support this shift can be so helpful. To better understand
the power of spontaneous drawing and painting, educator and psychoanalyist
By awakening our
Marion Milner (1957) chronicled her personal journey to knowing self and
spontaneous nature we
the world through spontaneous expressive art, or what she termed,
better align with other
free drawing. She titled her book On Not Being Able to Paint and used the pen
creatures in the
name Joanna Field as hers was a deeply personal journey which ultimately
moment and access our
stood in sharp contrast to educational and analytic values at the time. She
capacity to empathize.
took it upon herself to make a drawing or painting each time she felt a strong
emotion or simply felt the need to create. She aptly described her experience
of a shift to a state of more complete awareness, each time she created:
When painting ... there occurred ... a fusion into a never-before-known
wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate,
but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action.
She concludes: So what the artist ... is doing, fundamentally, is not
recreating in the sense of making again what has been lost (although he is
doing this), but creating what is, because he is creating the power to perceive
it. By continually breaking up the established familiar patterns (familiar in his
particular culture and time in history) of logical common sense divisions of
me-not-me, he really is creating nature, including human nature.
The more we are able to nurture our own spontaneity, the more
sustainable and ecologically sound our thoughts, actions, and
feelings become. We learn to trust what comes spontaneously as having
a kind of natural connected intelligence of its own. Further, by awakening
our spon-
Doodle leaves
Each time we create

with no plan, we spark
a powerful shift.
taneous nature we better align with

other creatures in the moment and
access our capacity to empathize.
Empathy, compassion for all life,
including ourselves is about feeling
anothers feelings, seeing through
anothers eyes, truly experiencing
another without fear of losing self.
According to storyteller and
ecophilosopher David Abram we are
born wired to empathize with the
living earth. We have such potentially grand powers for empathy and
communication, since there is something in us of every animal, and something of plants, and of stones and of
seas, for we are woven of the same
fabric as everything on earth, and
our textures and rhythms are those
of the planet itself.
Free drawing awakened Marion
Milner's creative nature. By following the core principles of creating spontaneously, it can do the same for you!
Spontaneous means occurring or caused by natural impulse (Chambers
Dic-tionary of Etymology, 1988). The word spontaneous is synonymous
with instinctive, automatic, involuntary, uninhibited, unforced, and natural
(Rogets College Thesaurus, 1978).
Spontaneous art creation can take many forms including but not limited
to sculpture, poetry, drawing, improvisational music, painting, dance, movement, writing, and drama. However, the medium used is secondary to the
nature of the process of letting go of the analytical mind and shifting to a place
where creative impulses can run free. Most exciting for me has been the
discovery that spontaneous painting and drawing can be done anywhere at
any time.
The backbone of spontaneous creating involves proceeding with no
plan. We let what is meant to happen take place as it shall. In its purest form
this is a challenge because the analytical habit of planning is deeply engrained.
It is perhaps the most universal problem how to replace in us the will to
form with the will to accept natural form. Wu Kuang-Ming
This is where closing your eyes, using your non-dominant hand, and
using both hands, along with regular practice helps smooth the way to a shift
from thinking to feeling, sensing and intuiting. We can also spontaneously
create with dreams, body sensations, plants, animals, our sixth sense, texture,
sounds, etc. In these instances, I often talk of drawing and painting as a way
of tracking an experience but we can also riff with these experiences, like we
Top: Jeans doodle

Above: Phone doodle
are in one big improvisational dance. In fact,

spontaneous drawing looks and feels suspiciously like
doodling. Yes doodling, that much ma-ligned freeform drawing expression you might find yourself
doing on a restaurant napkin, or in my daugh-ter's
case, on the leg of her jeans.
When she was seven, my daughter said she was
double minded. She can remember every detail of a
story being read to her while she draws, cuts paper or
sews. She says it is harder for her to concentrate if her
hands are not engaged in something creative.
When I was a child, doodling didnt really get the
credit it deserves."Stop doodling and do your
Math, my grade two teacher would cry out. Doodling was seen as dawdling, meandering without focus or purpose, wasting
time, getting nothing done. I still like to doodle. I like to dream on the page,
go with no plan, not apply myself and play with line and colour with a sleepy
mind, with no particular direction. Somehow, when I doodle while on the
phone I become deeply present with the person with whom I am speaking
while I also understand more about how I am feeling as I watch an image
unfold. I can actually see how the dialogue feels.
There is now research to support the notion that doodling helps to
awaken more of our capacity for engagement. Doodling activist Sunni
Brown agrees that doodling has had a bad rap. Click below to listen to her
Doodlers Unite TED talk where she puts to rest the myth of doodling being
a waste of time www.ted.com/talks/sunni_brown.html. In her latest book
The Doodle Revolution, (2012), she claims to prove that doodling can ignite
your whole brain. Psychologist, Jackie Andrade, published an article in the
Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology (February 2009) entitled: What
Does Doodling Do? In it she recounts improved concentration and a 30%
improvement in memory retention of participants who doodled while
listening to a list of names over the phone versus those who didnt.
In conclusion, simply setting an intention to be spontaneous is a powerful, easily accessible channel for connection that makes us empathic participants in the earth story. If we pay attention to and act on what draws us in,
we can spontaneously respond with a creative gesture to what nature
presents to us anywhere, in any given moment, Over time, repeatedly
creating spontaneously teaches us how to shift into a body-mind state that
better aligns us to live in harmony with ourself and all earth beings. We are
able to feel, to perceive, to meld more fully with the world. We activate our
full human capacity for connection and participation. We access a fresh way
to know self and earth through our creative nature.
I invite you to try it yourself. Grab 3 pieces of paper and a pen, close
your eyes and let your right hand run freely across one page like a wild horse.
Then turn over your page, switch hands and let your left hand out to play.
Top left: Two hand doodle

Middle: Car window doodle
Above: Drawing on icy rock
Top right: Coloured hand print
End by drawing with your eyes closed using both hands at the same time.
What fun! Follow where your hands lead. Truly savour this time and rest
your attention on the sensations associated with the movement of your
hands.
Maybe your images will look something like those on this page.
I invite you to follow this up with a nature walk. Where do you see
doodles? Where can you doodle today? What draws you in? Maybe its an icy
rock, sand, a car window. The possibilities are endless.
Finally here's a link to a video called Ice Art I made just after the Ontario
ice storm Christmas 2013. It demonstrates that you can truly be
spontaneous anywhere at any time! http://youtu.be/NvRiaNrI6y8
Maybe it's time to start your own spontaneous art practice. There are
lots of activities to get you started in my book Beauty Muse: Painting in
Communion with Nature (2009).
Learn more about Lisa Lipsetts work at www.LisaLipsett.com

Visit Creative by Nature Art- classes, events, resources, video,
fine art and blog at www.creativebynature.org
This article originally appeared in Sage-ing Journal, www.sage-ing.com Spring 2014

Doodling: The Joy of Spontaneous Art

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Doodling: The Joy of Spontaneous Art

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Doodling: The Joy of Spontaneous Art

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Joy of Spontaneous Art

Each time we create

taneous nature we better align with

Top: Jeans doodle

are in one big improvisational dance. In fact,

Top left: Two hand doodle

Learn more about Lisa Lipsetts work at www.LisaLipsett.com

You might also like