Doodling

I teach in the illustration major at WDKA, and yet I rarely find time to draw myself. What I manage to do are doodles during meetings. They become pretty intricate, the meetings can be quite long. Doodling resonates with me because I see the world as a vast compost heap: everything decays, everything transforms. We are all biodegradable, always in the process of returning to dust. Doodling is a similar organic process and it makes this process visible.

In these marks, creatures emerge—cyborg-like insects, alien underwater beings, forms that fuse and mutate with humans. Everything is in flux, blending, dissolving, recombining.

Besides that organic growth, the fable of the grasshopper and the ant is often present: the ant stores, stacks, and plans; the grasshopper sings, dreams, and dances. I have always thought myself as the grasshopper: distracted, imaginative, irresponsibly alive while the world moves on without me.

But my sense of time and mortality has shifted. Death is no longer a distant endpoint, it is here all the time, just as life is. In a material worldview, death is merely the end of systems, the disintegration of structures. But life is also disintegration; to live is to die, and to die is to live. It is a verb, a process, a continuous becoming. There is no fixed essence, no solid self—only perpetual transformation.

Every moment is entirely new. We never “become” compost, because we were never solid to begin with. We are always in flux, always in motion, always dissolving.

When I doodle, without intention, this understanding is sometimes revealed. Everything is radical temporality. Doodling is meditating on impermanence, on the constant blend between creation and decay.