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.

Doodle meaning