Category: MANDALAS

Sunflower and mandalas

From the Sunflower series: Blue Sunflower.

This is part of a small series of sunflower pictures made from photos of sunflowers, mostly in the community garden where I had a plot. Sunflowers are another of my favorite plants and the seedhead in the centre (one of nature’s patterns) together with the surrounding petals, makes something like a mandala.

At the back of each sunflower in the series are two circles containing cultural, religious or universal circular patterns, in this case a star and a maze.

Sunflower, yellow

From the Sunflower and Mandalas series: Sunflower, Yellow

This was the first one in a series made from photos of sunflowers, one of my favorite flowers, in the community garden, or elsewhere. This one, festooned with spiderwebs, was in the garden of friends.

Each of the series has, behind the sunflower, two circular designs reminiscent of mandalas, some religious, some cultural. The pattern on the top left is very similar to the pattern of sunflower seedheads.

Mandala of Chaos crossing Order

The “mandala” of chaos and order was made long before we felt the chaotic global effects of whatever caused the Covid 19 pandemic to start.

The apparent wave of “chaos”crossing my symbol for order here (from a clay clock-face which I made in my pottery days) arose out of yet another combination of chance, real liquids and solids and finally, digital art.

The order of the universe itself, plus the order which we believe we see in it, plus chaos, chance, complexity, uncertainty, the interconnection of all things . . what we do with all that : c’est la vie!

Mandala: Lines of Connection

Just as I have many Tree pictures, I also have quite a few mandalas, created in many different ways. It is the making of them, more than the final result, which is the project for me. It also happens to be soothing and absorbing in times of stress (such as during Covid 19 !)

This mandala, if it is “about” anything, is probably about the tangled interconnections between . . . everything!

A page about Mandalas in general is coming to the header soon.

Perfectly Imperfect Mandala

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This mandala is titled “Perfectly Imperfect”:

1) because it is made from a photo of a natural process. 2) because I much prefer somewhat asymmetrical mandalas to rigidly constructed, perfectly circular ones.
3) Life, to me, is both “perfect” and imperfect. Don’t ask me to explain that one!!

I make my digital artworks in several different ways; the category, Art Methods (in the header) explains several of them for those interested. In the case of this post, the method explains the name, so I’ll tell you here. It’s simple: I notice something. I take a photograph of it. I play with it … and something else “arrives”!

I have a small, square black plate. I don’t have a dishwasher, so sometimes a few dishes may remain on the counter by the sink overnight! In the morning I noticed that as the plate dried, it had grown some crystals, flat ones like frosted glass, probably from a bit of salt or soda and probably a splash of dish-detergent. Where there was a glass standing on it, a circle appeared. I started to wipe the plate then realized that the circle was somewhat mandalic and I could make something of it. So I did!

This way of working appeals to me because it involves three things: the offerings of the world, chance, and whatever I make out of it. ( As we all do every day: just what we do with what we are given!)

All the added parts are cuts from the photo of tiny crystal formations. The picture below shows the black plate with the crystals. Unfortunately I wiped off the bottom part before it occurred to me to save it.

Blue Moon Mandala

This is not really a mandala. It is not really a Blue Moon either, maybe not even a moon at all! You might see a moon like this only once in … a blue moon! When a title for some art piece just arrives to me and I like it, it sticks!

In this case, what I began with reminded me of the way a full moon often looks in a dark sky, when you see the clouds lit up over the moon. The moon on that night, the real moon, had a shadow somewhat resembling the Ying-Yang sign, which happens to be a favorite symbol of mine, for many reasons.

The symbol was familiar to me many years before I knew what it meant, because, when I was a young child, my Dad subscribed to a magazine with that symbol, in red and white, on the cover. Many elements of early Taoism still appeal to me. So I decided to put one in my picture!

Art Method follows, for those who are interested:

This was made by my favorite method: chance, natural processes, liking a pattern, plus foto-fiddling.

This is a “black plate” piece. My “black” plate is a Japanese-style small square plate (made in China !) and glazed with a dark-grey pewter-like “metallic” glaze. When certain liquids left on it dry, they form dried puddles in various shapes, different each time. On a photo of the plate, I draw out the colours which I want, and add or change other details as I wish to.

What do I mean by drawing out the colours? As painters know, grey is not always a mixture of black and white but may be made by mixing complementary colours. The beautiful thing is that colours reside almost everywhere, even tho’ you may not notice them! If you take a photo of a dark scene, and later try to increase the saturation of the darkest areas, you may find, not black, but coloured pixels. You may be able to look at the corners of a darkening room and see that the grey is not black-white, but a scintillating “grey” made of the colours which you see in the daylight.

Here is the black plate original. I up-saturated the colours, found shapes which I wished to emphasize, and drew a ying-yang symbol in the centre.