Is Doodling Good for the Environment?

Picasso doodled. So did Leonardo Da Vinci and Winston Churchill. About doodling, famed children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) said, “It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head.” The best-selling and groundbreaking author Judy Blume (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret) once revealed, “I doodle a lot and often get my best ideas with a pencil in my hand.” John F. Kennedy doodled while being briefed on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And JFK wasn’t the only doodler-in-chief — Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon D. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan all doodled on official White House stationary. 

In spite of these heavy hitters scribbling circles and other whatnots, doodling has traditionally had more detractors than defenders. In recent years, however, studies have started to show that the distracted hand can be good for your brain. Articles in major newspapers and magazines are promoting the benefits of the doodling habit. Instead of the tired refrain, “Put that pen down and pay attention,” doodling is inspiring headlines like “The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory” (Wall Street Journal) and “The Cognitive Benefits of Doodling” (The Atlantic).

I’d like to add another benefit of doodling — one that hasn’t gotten much, or any, press until this time. To wit: doodling is a sustainable art form. Think about it. People doodle on used napkins, receipts, and in the margins of books. They scribble circles on envelopes and newspapers, and intersecting lines connecting rectangular boxes on paper bags and clothing tags. Doodlers reuse and they repurpose; they make use of the resources at hand. 

Without reaching for a dictionary, I’ll define doodling as the free flow of pen to paper. It is drawing without forethought, ideally without any thought. It is the release of a line, a circle, a shape — pure and uninhibited. Doodles aren’t aspiring to anything. They aren’t self-conscious. Often doodles are nothing to note, but some doodles transcend simple shapes to enchant and delight, and they often do this on paper that is meant for another purpose. 

Most people doodle, or at least they used to when there were more pens and pencils around the house. I have long been a compulsive doodler. If there is a pen near me, and there usually is, little faces and people are dropping out of it. These doodled people populate pretty much every piece of paper in my house, be it an envelope or an important document that probably shouldn’t be drawn on. I doodle when I’m talking. I doodle when I watch TV. I recently was the scorekeeper during a game of scrabble, and my doodles were weaving through and sometimes over our scores. I would doodle in my sleep if I could. 

It may be a stretch to call doodling an artform, but people have made the case. Medieval manuscripts often have drawings that are delightful, erotic, or fanciful in their margins. Should we consider those examples of marginalia doodles, or illustrations? People have labeled them both. You might say it’s unclear where that line is drawn. 

In 2022, curators Francesca Alberti and Diane Bodart put together an exhibition of work that was shown in both Rome and Paris, entitled “Scribbling and Doodling. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly.”  Ironically, the organizers described the show in language infused with artworld speak, rather than what I’ll call doodler’s diction, but their elevated intent was to highlight the importance of commonplace doodling in the artistic process, even amongst the masters. As the press material for the show stated: “by exploring the multiple features of the practice of scribbling and doodling, the exhibition unveils how these experimental, transgressive, regressive or liberating graphic gestures have punctuated the history of artistic creation.” 

And while the curators of this exhibit discussed doodling in Da Vinci’s time, it should be noted that the word doodle, as used to describe a form of drawing, didn’t exist until it was coined in the 1936 film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Robert Riskin, the father of Bluedot’s founder and publisher Vicky Riskin, wrote the screenplay for the film and is the man who gave us the word as it’s commonly used now.  “Other people are doodlers,” Mr. Deeds (who was played by Gary Cooper) says. “It's a name we made up back home for people who make foolish designs on paper while they're thinking. It's called doodling.”

Scientists started getting involved in 1938, when they undertook the first comprehensive study of doodling. W. S. Maclay, E. Guttmann, and W. Mayer-Gross collected and analyzed 9,000 doodles and produced a paper titled “Spontaneous Drawings as an Approach to some Problems of Psychopathology.” In 2009, psychologist Jackie Andrade asked two groups of twenty people between the ages of 18 and 55 to listen to two and a half minutes of monotonous voicemails. One of the groups doodled while listening to the messages. When asked to recount the contents of the voicemails, the doodlers remembered significantly more information than the focused listeners. Then, in 2016, a study done with Harvard Medical School students revealed that half an hour of doodling helped them to retain difficult information, which means that now the doodlers amongst us even have Harvard on our side.

But that’s not all. Ask Chat GPT what the benefits of doodling are, and you will find out that doodling enhances creativity, improves focus, reduces stress, boosts memory, encourages flow, expresses emotions, and fosters problem solving. 

Chat GPT does not mention that doodling also helps limit waste by reusing materials. Perhaps after this article is published it will. 

Of course, if I’m making the case that doodling is an environmentally friendly artform, it should also be noted that doodling produces no acrylic microplastics lingering in a jar of water that will be dumped down a drain, or turpentine to dispose of after brushes have been cleaned. I am in no way suggesting that landscape or any other artists abandon painting with acrylics and oils, or any other medium they use. Art in all its forms has functioned as an important messenger in the environmental and conservation movements. In fact, America’s national parks might not even exist were it not for Thomas Moran’s extraordinary painting “The Grand Canyon of The Yellowstone,” which is said to have inspired President Ulysses S. Grant to create Yellowstone National Park, the country’s first national park, in 1872. 

Let’s doodle on that for a while. 

Kate Feiffer’s doodles and drawings have been published in newspapers and magazines and in the book “The Lamb Cycle.” Kate is also the author of eleven books for children and the novel Morning Pages.