2000: The Doodleist

 I have been writing autobiographical blogs from time to time, you can find them by going to the desktop version and using labels, or by searching the word autobiography. Hopefully you get to know more about the journey of PJD the artist. When the year 2000 rolled around I decided it was time to do abstract paintings, which have never really stopped after over 20 years now. At first, the paintings were spontaneous designs influenced by Dali or Picasso, they were produced purely through my imagination often with no planning. The other big change was I had moved into my own apartment around this time and had gone through my old notes from undergraduate. The first painting I did from doodles was Master of the Margin, which promptly sold out of the London Ontario Gallery Artisan's Alley. 

 I put away the style for a few years and then painted a small doodle painting from my old chem notes called Caged Mind, and several others along the same line. It was the stress and relative boredom of being in the classroom or lab meetings that inspired the outpouring of creativity in the margins. Over time I called the style doodleism, kind of like impressionism. Later I found out that a similar term doodleism could refer to a love of things related to Yankee Doodle, and that other artists have done doodle-based artwork, often influenced by graffiti art. The first turning point for the style was an outdoor show I did in London Ontario, another artist saw Finding Space,  and suggested that the style needed more form, like objects that people would recognize. That probably explains why my first one sold, it depicted a grinning clown head. 

 The style continued to evolve along these lines, I finally created an object that everyone could sort of recognize in Apple Eye Violet Sky, the Circus Series, and many such as Life of an Onion. I started to really think about the polish and planning of my artwork. In successive paintings I really tried to get every portion to look good and to continue to pull together the overall look. Getting the doodleism style to "look good on the wall" was turning out to be harder than I thought. But I persevered with doodleism precisely because I enjoyed doing it, and I had a feeling that no other artist was doing quite the same thing. The gallery owner in London told me as much, she said my most definitive work was the doodleism and recommended that I keep it up. After all these years I think the first doodleism painting that really came together in every way was the recent Saturation Costs (I just posted a new photo of it in the updated blog), which is explained further in this blog. 

By the way, I usually post some never-before seen paintings in the autobiography blogs. Instead I scanned some new doodles from Lab Book #23, which hopefully I get the chance to turn into paintings one day!