WHEN I was at school I was sent to the headmistress's office for doodling on an exam sheet.
It was a multiple choice test and you had to tick the right answer.
I ticked the answers then had to wait a good half hour until the exam was finished. I turned the ticks into crosses. Barely five minutes had passed.
I embellished the crosses with little legs. Still most of the half hour to go. I kept embellishing with little legs and before I knew it, I had inadvertently turned my ticks into swastika symbols. And not a chance of erasing the penmanship.
Even I understood when I was taken to the office that this wasn't a desirable symbol on a test paper and certainly not one that would make the marker want to give me 100 per cent. (I should note at this point that I have visited a church on Norfolk Island that is completely adorned in the same symbol apparently originally a religious one.)
Once berated for my innocent doodling, artists everywhere are now celebrating it (doodling that is, not Nazi symbols).
The idea of doodling as an art form had previously escaped me, but not only is it now something worthy of framing, but like anything worthwhile it also has its own name. I hark back to a time when graffiti was just something done by a would-be doodler with a spray can (now there is a place where I have seen the odd swastika).
But now the graffiti of the toilet wall has come into the lounge room as a piece of fine art, skilfully administered and beautifully framed.
It's called zentangle and I learned the word and the skill at a recent art class.
Unimpressed my own doodles, which only enforce my complete lack of drawing ability, I had low expectations of the end result.
But I was pleasantly surprised. Repeat a pattern often enough in a small space and it can look surprisingly attractive.
In mine, I traced my hand, filling the fingers with musical symbols (no swastikas here). Perhaps I was guided by the "zen" of the zentangle, but my doodles of old have come of age. My headmistress would be proud.
