Found Object: A Curious Doodle

A curious doodle - ballpoint pen on notebook paper - by an unidentified artist.
(Click to enlarge.)

(This post was originally constructed - as is - in 2021. For a number of reasons, it was stalled in draft mode... but, I found it again recently and decided to let it fly.)

"Automatic drawing... was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move "randomly" across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing while physically taking control of the medium's body."

- From the Wiki entry for Surrealist automatism. Inset right is a 1907 automatic painting by Spiritualist artist (and mystic) Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) found here.

"Austin Osman Spare (30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956) was an English artist and occultist who worked as both a draughtsman and a painter. Influenced by symbolism and art nouveau his art was known for its clear use of line, and its depiction of monstrous and sexual imagery. In an occult capacity, he developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self."

- From the Wiki entry for Austin Spare. For more Austin Spare see the Addendum of this Trans-D post.

"The rest of Austin Osman Spare’s life was spent in abject poverty, collecting cats that he usually spent his money feeding instead of himself, and drawing portraits of South Londoners in pubs for beer money. It was during this time that he would develop his deeply personal and unique system of magick, revolving around the use of “sigils” to unlock the buried abilitiçes of the unconscious mind, and communion with otherworldly forces through the trance medium of painting itself. Spare also claimed to regularly seek to shock his unconscious mind into trances of occult power by engaging in sex with exceedingly ugly or aged women (possibly another Spare exaggeration).

Austin Osman Spare likely would have been completely forgotten were it not for Kenneth Grant, an over-enthusiastic young man who had grown up on H. P. Lovecraft books, who never shook the conviction that Lovecraft was writing codified non-fiction, and who soon undertook a lifelong pursuit of Magick. Like Israel Regardie before him, Grant came into Crowley’s orbit, becoming his secretary in the final years of his life; Crowley obliged the young man by demonstrating occult processes like ether-assisted astral travel."

- Excerpt from Jason Louv's wonderful article: The Strange Life of Austin Osman Spare, Chaos Magician. Inset left is Spare's unique interpretation of the astrological sign of Capricorn - his own birth sign - found here.

"A symbol is in a certain mystical sense identical with that which it symbolizes. A true symbol should be a perfect vehicle for the sum total of energy which goes to inform it; it is thus equal to that which it symbolizes because its energy becomes infinite when belief in it is vital. Belief, to be effective, must be vital, dynamic; it must work subconsciously even to the extent of its denial in consciousness. When it is vitalized by being sunk into subliminal depths it bypasses the ego, is suppressed by the censor and thereby forgotten; hence desire is aroused and this exhausts the conscious content of belief. Absentmindedness then becomes the means of its apotheosis."

- Excerpt from Kenneth Grants's Austin Osman Spare: An introduction to his psycho-magical philosophy.

"I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment."

- Via the great Surrealist - and master of automatism - Roberto Marta. whose untitled work (1965) appears above, inset right. It was sourced from his amazing website. 

***

The doodle which appears at the beginning of this post was found several months ago in a book I was cataloguing for a friend. It was a tedious textbook about biological statistics entitled Biometry and the name M. Smartt was scribbled in ink on the front endpaper. My guess is that the doodle emerged in a college classroom during a particularly boring lecture, and, as for the artist, well, let's just say that he or she was compelled to escape into a more surreal, imaginal dimension. On the other hand, doodling is also known as an indirect way to concentrate and multitask.

(New text, 2/13/2025.)

The common doodle is possibly the rawest form of automatism there is. Ideally, it can bring to light the unconscious murmurings of the psyche in it's symbolic language.

For an artist or writer a doodle can be the seed for a larger creation. A good doodle is an almost magical thing, so it's not at all unusual that it would find it's way into the occult world.

As for the amazing doodle above, well, it almost seems like a narrative of a sci-fi creation myth. Not only that, you might even find bit of your own story somewhere among it's multitude of vignettes. Seriously, study it for a bit... it's teeming with symbols!

Just for fun: Doodle Art Alley.