"You have these kids in this very feverish desire to download information, no matter how trivial." "They are so rich and full of vitality," says Murillo. The results are canvasses that are densely layered with slogans, motifs, names, shapes and drawings, reflecting both the conscious and the unconscious minds of the children that created them. Since then, children aged 10-16 in countries including the UK, US, Brazil, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nepal, South Africa, Sweden and Turkey have drawn and doodled on canvases while at school. He first began the project back in 2013, in collaboration with sociologist Clara Dublanc. This "purity of drawing" was something Oscar Murillo wanted to capture in Frequencies. "It was nice to elevate doodles," says Strauss-Schulson. His collection – which includes scribbles by presidents, artists, inventors, writers and royalty – remained private for years before his wife and two children published a selection of their favourites in a book, Scrawl: An A-Z of Famous Doodles, in 2019. "For him they were profound, like a window into a person's soul." "He thought that they were too unique and too special to sell," says his son Todd Strauss-Schulson. These hidden mysteries were one reason the late autograph and artefact dealer David Schulson collected the doodles of famous figures, amassing an impressive private collection over several decades. There are lots of hidden mysteries and secrets within doodles." "Doodling can allow thoughts and daydreams to slip through from our subconscious, down our arm, into our hand through the pen onto the paper, which can surprise us and delight us and reveal stuff about us to ourselves. He also sees doodling as a way of bypassing our brain's tendency to self-edit, releasing thoughts we might otherwise be too self-conscious to reveal. It's like breathing or singing or dancing and is natural to human beings." "This behaviour is universal, it's across cultures and across economic groups. "Anything that humans have been doing from antiquity onwards, there's something powerful going on," says Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution. "Doodled squiggly lines and mini drawings are encountered frequently in Medieval books, mostly in the margins or on flyleaves," he writes, highlighting one sketch found in the lower margin of a manuscript of Juvenal’s Satires that resembles our stick figures today. Dutch scholar Erik Kwakkel has studied some of the oldest doodles on paper, finding comical faces, caricatures and geometrical shapes in the margins of Medieval manuscripts. Yet these "casual scribbles" are something humans have been doing for thousands of years – at least 73,000, in fact, with the first human drawing believed to be a Stone Age crayon doodle in a South African cave. In the dictionary, a doodle is defined as an "aimless or casual scribble, design or sketch" or a "minor work". They are my collaborators, these almost 100,000 children." "You leave it there for six months at a minimum and then you simply allow for an individual to interact with that, however they wish. "The blank canvas is like a recording device," he tells BBC Culture. The aim is to capture "the conscious and unconscious energy of young minds at their most absorbent, optimistic and conflicted" and the results are currently on show for the first time in their entirety in Murillo's former school in Hackney, east London. Since 2013 Murillo has sent blank canvases to over 300 schools in more than 30 countries. Hence why a new art project is taking doodles out of the margins and placing them centre-stage.įrequencies, by Turner Prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo, collects together 40,000 canvases that have been marked, scribbled and drawn on by more than 100,000 children from around the world. Yet in those scrawls – be it shapes, animals, lines, names – can be something powerful, with what they reveal and how they allow us to express our creativity. If life is what happens when you're making other plans, then doodles are the result of your mind being somewhere else – a phone call, a meeting, a daydream. Usually relegated to the margins of notebooks or the back of envelopes, the doodle is often considered something messy, throwaway and unconsidered. Throughout history, humans – whether royalty or a bored office worker – have doodled. For Leonardo da Vinci, it was everything from crude drawings to the first workings of his groundbreaking laws of frictions.
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