Sunday, April 29, 2018

Mandala Series: Fearless and Asymmetrical (For William Blake)



Just updated the slideshow for anyone who hasn't seen my mandalas completed since September 2014.

7 comments:

Sabine said...

This is so wonderful!

Elizabeth said...

Incredible!

bev said...

Loved seeing them in a slideshow. Individually beautiful, but sort of astonishing when you see them together like this.

am said...

Thank you Sabine, Elizabeth, and bev!

37paddington said...

How beautiful! How and when did you get started doing mandalas?

am said...

Thank you, Rosemarie!

The inspiration to draw or paint pretty much left me in 1990 during the time of the First Gulf War That was after a highly productive 10 years of steady drawing and painting. In 2014, I was inspired to post the mandalas made by my mother when she was just a little bit older than I was in 2014. She had been inspired by Carl Jung's mandala practice. Something moved me to begin a similar practice in September 2014. My mother stopped creating mandalas in July 1991, after having completed 21 of them. For the rest of her life, she continued to use her extraordinary creative energy for complex pattern knitting. Earlier in her life her creative energy went into writing short stories and poetry. In 1966, she permanently stopped writing and took a watercolor class, followed by classes in silk-screening, Japanese brush painting, batik, drawing, stained glass and pattern knitting, all of which she excelled in. She died in December 1994. Yesterday would have been her 102nd birthday.

If you would like to see her mandalas and some of her pattern knitting, they are here:

https://www.talking37thdream.com.37thdream.com/search/label/my%20mother

My mother's sonnet is in this post:

https://www.talking37thdream.com.37thdream.com/search/label/sonnet

Anonymous said...

Just watched your mandala film. I noted the dedication to Blake: it is good that people continue to express things that can't be put into words. Jung keeps popping up in my life this week. First, in the comments to the latest post on my blog (thank you for listening -and for your comments!) - the things that have been said so far seemed infused with a sense of the collective unconscious. Then, I read something about Michael Tippett (probably my favourite composer): "Tippett holds that art's role in post-Enlightenment culture is to offer a corrective to society's spiritually injurious domination by mass technology. Art, he suggests, can articulate areas of human experience, unapproachable through scientific rationality, by presenting 'images' of the inner world of the psyche." And now your mandalas!