Miriam Badyrka is The Doodler

Things I Am Looking At

Tile from Westminster Abbey

I haven’t done a linky post in awhile, but it is past time to clean out those bookmarks. Hopefully, this will distract you from realizing that I didn’t post a doodle for this week. Believe it or not, I didn’t make a single doodle last week, so there was nothing to pick from.

 Never fear, The Doodle of the Week will return.

I love these Medieval tiles  from The Textile Blog. I compulsively read a couple of very long and not so good books about cathedral building by Ken Folliet, and am googling all sorts of things Gothic and Medieval. 

Illustrations from the Aberdeen Bestiary  are amazing. A bestiary is a book of animals and allegory. I find them fascinating in general, and especially love that often the illustrators draw animals they have never seen. This is a Leukrokota, a beast which can call to men in a human voice. According to this, it was probably inspired by a description of hyena.

This is a good place to learn more about bestiaries. 

Look, Ma,I can time travel! Jumping ahead several centuries...

Doodle of the Week

Sliding into home just ahead of the ball with this one. Baseball imagery? Yep. It is spring.

More big medallions for you this week, with a few smaller ones scattered around for the heck of it. This is a bold group, lots of high contrast. The big medallions are 7.5 to 8.5 inches across, and this group is about 17 x 22 inches all together.

I went on a studio visit to meet Ellen Currans, the well known Oregon potter, this week. A wonderful lady, and an amazing artist, and she makes a killer coffee cake.

She has a great place, and it is chock full of things. I mean: Things. There were bits of wallpaper, parts from machines, old lino blocks, cards, toys, anything with a pattern or texture on it. This article gives a good description of how she uses this stuff in her work.

I could have stayed forever just poking through her stuff.

You can see Ellen's lovely, and very affordable, pottery at the OPA Ceramics Showcase April 29th- May1st, at the Oregon Convention Center.

Image stolen from the Ceramic Arts Daily website.

Doodle of the Week

 
I would usually call this a group of medallions, but I think that this bunch has some that are large enough and involved enough that I am comfortable calling them mandalas.

The largest medallions in this group are about 8 inches across. This entire group is about 12 x 50 inches. One of the things about this format is that you really can't tell the size and scale of the doodle. I should be better about posting the size of these doodles.

On the otherhand, reducing the image size makes them look neater than they actually are. You can't make out the individual pen stokes I make as I blacken in large areas. I am not certain that is an advantage, as I like to see the hand of the artist in their work. Don't you?

Doodle of the Week

I am not sure if I like this one, but it is interesting.

This doodle is angular. The patterns roll around corners like scorpion tails. The medallions rise from the bottom and congregate in odd groups. There are lots of pointed shapes which makes it look prickly. If I were to apply an emotion to this doodle, I would say that the whole thing clearly looks annoyed.

Or maybe that's just me.