Telephone Doodles

My friend Blenda recently asked “…what do artists doodle? When I’m mindlessly doodling I draw flowers. Do your doodles end up in your artwork?”

So I got to thinking about it. When I’m on the phone I doodle, and when I doodle I make these obsessive expressive patterns that consume the whole paper, with big looping shapes and little circles and squares that multiply like bio-organisms. I get OED, Obsessive Expressive Disorder, LOL. If the conversation isn’t going well, you can tell by the angry doodles.

So I’m wondering what other artists do when they get a phone call while painting. For me it’s great if I’m at a point where I’m really into the painting, and the non-prefrontal lobe inner doodler gets set free. But if I’m preparing to paint, a phone call slows me down. Sometimes I’ll call a friend or my Mom when I’m deep into the painting because it gets my head out of the over-analytical mode and lets me go into the play place.

I still remember that during this painting, “Desert Drive”, a phone conversation with a friend led me to get loose and paint the dark green vertical wavy line in the bottom right area. It was a very controlled painting and that was a big leap, to see that potential line and just freehand it on top of the other layers of paint.

The picture shown is my photo of the original painting. I’ve worked on that image in Photoshop to create a new digital pigment inkjet print.