2009-02-27: Cutting-edge adventures

“Adventure” is a bit strong. This post is about cutting. No, not self-mutilation (although I had to deal with that god-awful phenomenon when I was a school principal), but more like cutting out paper dolls. Only what I’m cutting out (endlessly, endlessly) are the zillions of doodles I’ve drawn over the years (nearly always during interminable meetings of one sort or another).

First of all, the doodles: I figured out that doodling is not a distraction: rather, it helps me focus. It is the manual equivalent of something I seem to do subconsciously when driving: humming/singing the same tune over and over again (but in a “theme-and-variations” kind of way). I have not been formally diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder), but I sure have all the classic signs, and yes, the “extra activity” (be it humming or doodling) takes up enough of that part of my brain that is distractible to allow the rest of my brain to focus on the meeting at hand (to listen and actively participate). My doodles are sprinkled throughout my notes.

Most of my doodles are of faces, and these faces come from I don’t know where. I learned early on not to draw people in the same room: for one thing, if people think they’re having their portrait drawn, that becomes a distraction to them; for another, the reaction of the “portraitee” tends to be one of two kinds: either they love the caricature or portrait and then start bugging me about doing a “real” drawing of them, or they hate it and are insulted. Best not to draw people in the meeting.

It would be a facile thing to say that the expressions on the faces I draw in some way reflects how I am feeling at the moment, but given the wide range of expressions, styles, and so on, that burst forth from one minute to the next in the same meeting, this seems unlikely. I can say, however, based on numerous fancy calligraphic renderings, that my most common feeling is expressed by the word BORING. In the worst or longest-lasting meetings, yawning faces (sometimes accompanied by a ballooned calligraphic YAWN emanating from the drawing’s mouth) are present.

I have been drawing faces since my earliest childhood. My paternal grandmother saved a drawing I did when I must have been around 3 or 4: if I recall correctly, it’s a picture of a policeman from the waist up, in profile (even if the nose-in-profile is on the order of nonexistent). 

When I was in kindergarten, I won a district art contest (in the kindergarten category) for drawing three men’s faces. I was indignant when people assumed I’d drawn The Three Stooges (I don’t think the faces looked anything like Moe, Larry, and Curly) — I most certainly had not: these were faces from my own imagination. By then, I assume I had figured out that mustaches belonged underneath the nose, not above, but I don’t remember if any of these three faces sported a mustache or not. I vaguely recall one wore a hat. (The only other memory related to this art contest was how hard a time I had choosing the prize: I could either have Are You My Mother? or A Pickle for a Nickel. My teacher, Mrs Sullivan, patiently read both books; then, as I still couldn’t make up my mind, she put both behind her back and instructed me to pick left or right. I ended up with A Pickle for a Nickel, long out of print, I believe—whereas Are You My Mother? is still available, and I’m happy with the choice.—But I digress.)

Anyway, I’ve been drawing faces for my entire life. I regret that there’s pretty much nothing from my elementary school days, nor even junior high, but at some point during high school, I started saving my doodles and made a “scroll-collage” out of them (on the paper that carpet-cleaning companies would put down after shampooing our wall-to-wall). (I still have an envelope with more doodles that need to go on the last part of this collage, by the way.)

Collage, you see. That’s what I’m after, that’s why I’m spending the time culling and painstakingly cutting out these doodles. I’ve already done one framed work, “The Engineering Meeting,” which I hope that daughter no. 2 recovered from the start-up on whose walls it hung for awhile. I recently put together a smaller collage, but discovered to my dismay that the rubber cement wasn’t holding on the drawings after a short time: I think the problem was that I’d forgotten to check if the base paper was acid-free (it was not). I will have to peel off everything and try again on the right kind of paper.

Acid-free base is important, but I wonder about the paper on which my doodles are drawn. I intend to scan everything, of course. And I suppose I will have to rely on scanning and printing out to deal with another unfortunate phenomenon: the fact that at one point I doodled on both sides of the page. Very bad. I don’t do that anymore (well, hardly ever). Which of the faces to use? Well, I want ’em all.

Meanwhile, I find myself occasionally cutting in meetings instead of drawing, but I think people find the cutting more distracting in the larger sense than the doodling itself, so I’ll have to confine myself to cutting in, say, doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms and other down-times. I wish to heck I could cut out my doodles while waiting for a plane, but since gott knows that I’d use my scissors as a weapon (sigh),  that’s usually a couple of hours of cutting time down the drain. So far I have remembered to put my scissors in my checked bag, but I can just imagine that one of these days I’ll forget. And then I’ll get royally angry at this kind of stupidity-in-the-name-of-security yet again as I watch the agents confiscate my “weapon.”

I am tired of cutting, but It Must Be Done for the Sake of Art. N’est-ce pas? Mais oui!

ADDENDUM: I want to point out that I did not doodle in all meetings: If I was conducting the meeting, for example, or if the meeting was convened expressly to deal with (say), the school I ran, especially if the meeting was held in the presence or at the behest of Big Cheeses, I rarely if ever doodled. In France in particular, I think my doodling would have been misconstrued as a sign of inattention (or worse, disrespect) rather than a technique to aid focus. I rarely doodled (or doodled only a very little bit) at school board meetings, for example, but I doodled a lot during Conseils de Classe—class councils, mostly because at best we’d have only a handful of American students in those classes, and since all students were discussed one by one, I had a lot of time on my hands. But again, I took notes, jotted down ideas and observations based on what I was hearing—and hearing better, I think, for allowing my Right Hand free rein to draw at will.