Doodles, disassociation and the art of looking

I used to have a notebook where I'd scribble notes, poems and collect interesting pictures. Now that I'm almost constantly 'plugged in' to my I-phone, the doodles have turned into Hipstamatic photos, and notes and poetry has an instransient quality to it as they are created on the notepad. Much as I love the tech, I recently started feeling the need to start drawing again, so I bought a little notebook to take with me for my more old skool efforts.

As I try to combat the new I-Phone related disassociation syndrome (whereby my every waking moment has to be spent texting, reading, listening to music, researching...sometimes all at once) I've been doodling my friends while out at the pub. Trying to capture some kind of likeness meant I had to really look at the person I was talking to which was a weirdly intimate process.

My favourite

The idea came from the website I'm building at the moment (probably up next week) where I made an image using doodles and examples of handwriting from people like Henry Miller, Allan Ginsberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, Plath, Shelley and more.

Here they are, as well as the finished image.

Henry Miller

Jorge Luis Borges

Franz Kafka

Vladimir Nabokov

 Sylvia Plath

Allan Ginsberg


The final image: