Who Knew??

I've been a doodler forever. Black ink on white paper, filling as much empty space with designs as possible. I thought I might have a mild form of Horror vacui, (cenophobia). It's the way I occupy my mind and my hands when the TV is on, and passes the time when I'm working in one of the galleries and business is slow. I've always been a fan of M.C. Escher's graphic work and optical illusions. One of my earlier ones is above. I also did a few around words, with a little color:

Recently I read a blog post by Catherine Witherell, who makes beautiful art journals, and found out that I'm NOT THE ONLY ONE! And that these things have NAMES! They're called either Zendoodles or Zentangles and the internet is covered with them. There are YouTube videos out there (see my previous post) and I found a Flickr group containing thousands of them and saw many of the patterns I've used being done by others.

The first one shown in this post took days to complete because it's tee-tiny. So is the "Peace" one. The desire to do these comes and goes. I'll work on one for a few days, a little obsessively, then the pens and the sketchbook are put away for awhile. I had just done the one above when I found out that (seemingly) everyone is doing this. I have mixed feelings - a little like the world has stolen what I thought was mine - and the joy that there's so much inspiration to carry this even further:

I found out that by simply drawing a shape with a large pen, or dividing the page into sections, and filling in each section with a different design makes the work go so much faster and, I think, a more interesting final product. I guess it's true, though, that there really aren't any new ideas.