Serendipity is defined as ‘a seeming gift for finding something good accidentally’. That’s how I found  Sarah Ann Greene.

I’m not surprised. Those of us on the mandalic path are bound to intersect like a good Vesica Piscis.  I was attending a yoga teacher training, and one of my fellow yoginis laid Sarah’s 2009 Calendar on me. Nice! Every month is a visual treat.

But when I read about her PROCESS, things got even more interesting.

The drawings and paintings are all done completely free hand, using no compass, rulers, or aids of any kind. There is no plan regarding shape, symmetry or color.  They all start with a dot on the center of a blank page and a creative impulse. She may work anywhere from 3 days to 5 months on a mandala. She explains:

” I don’t have visions beforehand, they simply spill from my pencil tip.  As they come forth, each layer has a deeper meditative effect on me. I spend most of my time not actually drawing, but learning what each layer has to teach me until it is time to move on to the next one.”

I find this small but incredibly important detail one that is often disregarded in the Creative Process.

The WAITING, the LISTENING, the WATCHING.

Often, art is valued as a commodity. Judged with linear thoughts such as “How long did it take her to do that?” or “My kid could do that.”  Certainly in Sarah’s case, one can easily witness the intricate work and understand how it could take  months to complete a drawing. But the point is that the creative process, no matter what the medium, will require this meditative frame of mind of the artist. This critical aspect of the creative flow is quite difficult to quantify or measure. In yogic terms, this SPACIOUS GAZE is known as Drishti (pronounced: drish-ty). This is a point from where your concentration is directed inward.

Sarah Greene had a deep connection with mandalas when they spontaneously started to emerge as freehand drawings during a difficult and confusing time as a teenager. Without knowing how to draw them, she put the pen to the paper and invited them. They showed her an order and intelligence that lived inside of her that she hadn’t been aware of, and of inner capacities and beauty she hadn’t known. They also helped still the noise in her mind.

Sarah’s experience is a Divine Intervention with Art – Mandalas as Medicine. I truly believe working with the circular form can heal us in so many ways. And even if we are feeling great, they will just make us feel greater!

Everyone can benefit from stilling the mind, playing with color and envisioning their own inner beauty in sync with life’s resonant geometry.

“My hope is that the mandalas bring you some of the joy and benefit they have brought me: knowing that there is a center of stillness inside no matter what is occurring in life, knowing that when you get a big enough perspective there is an intricate order governing even the most seemingly chaotic situations, and realizing that we all have great beauty and untapped capacities dwelling within us waiting to be expressed when we begin to trust our own feelings and creative impulse.”

So, Serendipity brought mandalas to Sarah, and her to me, and now, dear reader, perhaps something is clicking for you?

Art Saves Lives. I’m just sayin’…

Visit Sarah’s Website and Store: 2010 calendars now available.

www.ordered-chaos.com

ordered-chaos.ourinternet.us/store/

My friend Gregangelo is a real whirling dervish.

A whirling dervish is a mystical dancer who stands between the material and cosmic worlds. His dance is part of a sacred ceremony in which the dervish rotates in a precise rhythm representing the earth revolving on its axis while orbiting the sun.

Gregangelo ran away and not only joined the circus but started one. He is artistic director of the fabulously colorful and diverse Velocity Circus. One of his life long influences is Egyptology, and he has created his home as a living museum in the style of an elaborate Egyptian temple. I featured The Gregangelo Museum in my Guide to Mosaic Sites, because it is encrusted in mystical mosaics, by the equally fabu, Laurel True. It is open to tour by appointment.

For the month of November, Gregangelo will be Artist in Residence at the de Young museum in San Francisco with fellow artist, Jim Berenholtz, in conjunction with the KING TUTANKHAMUN exhibition.

Greg and Jim will be on site Wednesday–Sunday, 1:00–5:00 p.m. (until 8:45 p.m. on Fridays).

RA-Balisk, The Temple of the New Sun

Artists in Residence Jim Berenholtz (Hu Ra Designs) and Gregangelo (Velocity Circus) create a multi-media theatrical adventure through a solar temple. Explore the mysterious inner sanctum of the temple with archetypal wall paintings, three-dimensional altars, and dazzling special effects integrated into the interactive installations.

The temple art is based primarily on ancient Egyptian icons, motifs, and symbols, and also incorporates influences from other solar-worshipping, pyramid-building civilizations, such as those of ancient Mexico and Central and South America. Traditional iconography is interpreted with a contemporary sensibility, making RA-Balisknot an ethnographic documentation of something that might have existed in the distant past, but rather a vibrant, living, sacred space that brings the ancient artistic spirit forward to the present and into the future…

The Deets:

1:00 PM – 5:00 PM, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

November 4, 2009 – November 29, 2009

deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park  - Kimball Education Gallery

Special Friday Nights open until 8:45 PM!

Seems like everyone I know is exclaiming about how quickly time is passing. Phrases like these are common place.

“I can’t believe it’s over already…”

“Where did the time go?”

“Time sure does fly!”

“Has it been a YEAR already?”

“Tempus Fugit”

It is not our imagination…

Recent observations of distant supernovae reveal that the expansion of the universe is not slowing, as previously thought, but is instead accelerating.

Something was overcoming the gravitational power of all of the matter in the universe. The acceleration has not been present from the Big Bang on. For billions of years the speed of expansion slowed. Then, about 5 billion years ago, acceleration began. Obviously energy–a lot of it— was required to explain these phenomena. This is “dark energy.” We cannot detect it and currently know almost nothing about it. Today scientists believe that 5% of the universe consists of “ordinary” [observable] matter, 23% of “dark” matter and 72% of “dark energy.”1

Is it any wonder the mysteries of life continue to fascinate us? So much force! Our material, tangible world is literally the TIP o’ the (melting) Iceberg.

http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1708

1-http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/einsteins-telescope-the-search-for-dark-matter-and-the-future-of-the-universe.html

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/32/images/a/formats/print.jpg

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

~Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” Walden, 1854

Here’s a watercolor I made over the past 10 days while in a yoga teacher training. Every day after hours of energy work and yoga, I would work on it, so this one’s super charged. Soften your eyes, gaze, and  let it take you on your own journey.

I didn’t know much about the Wu Tang Clan, but when I saw rapper, the RZA (aka Robert Diggs, aka The Abbott) interviewed on  Colbert Report last night, I was blown away. The RZA’s ability to put philosophical ideas into understandable terms is a true gift.  He spoke of  m a t h e m a t i c s. The TAO means the Way, and he has explored the way through ancient Asian martial arts codes and various religious philosophies for many years. A globally successful artist, his new project, The Tao of Wu,  provides some creative fodder for seekers around the world.

In another interview with Gilbert Cruz of TIME he sets it down simply:

“Any way you can reach self-enlightenment or self-worth works. Many great men have left paths for us. In the end, we are all searching for the same thing. We’re just taking different routes to the same location.”

— the RZA

Starting next week, I will immerse myself into an intensive training program that explores a blend of Sacred Energy Arts. The program uses Chi Kung, Yoga, Pranayama, Tai Chi, sound healing, and anatomy as pillars of the sacred mind-body discipline.  I’m intensely curious to better understand my physical and energetic being.

We are witnessing an unprecedented merging of  Science, Spirituality, Art and Sustainability. So many people are feeling the call to take on deeper inquiry.  The RZA, who just turned 40, has followed his path from a housing project in New York through gang shootings, comics, chess, acting, rap music, film, and writing.

He frames his philosophy under seven “Pillars of Wisdom,” which represent seven “key turning points in his life” that he hopes to impart to his readers. The number 7 is symbolic in itself, representing consciousness in numerology, and considered a divine number in several faiths such as Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

His creative path may be different than mine or yours, but when we take it down to the basics, it is the beautiful multi-layered pattern of geometry, mathematics and numerology that can provide a window into our mysterious, wonderful world.

The boddhisattva comes in all forms.

(And he loves the Bee Gees.)

LISTEN: INTERVIEW with Kai Ryssdall on Martketplace

		
some subjects we discuss in my classes

In this photo provided by the Rubin Museum of Art, the museum’s chief curator, Martin Brauen, left, and Felix Walder, great-grandson to Carl Jung, inspect Carl Jung’s “The Red Book” after it’s arrival at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009. “The Red Book,” will be displayed to the public for the first time on October 7, coinciding with the first-ever publication of the book by W.W. Norton & Company. (AP Photo/Rubin Museum of Art, Stuart Ramson)

NEW YORK, NY.- The preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) considered his Liber Novus, the famous Red Book, to be the “prima materia for a lifetime’s work.” Many contemporary scholars regard it as the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.

Now this cultural touchstone—in which Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—is to go on public view for the first time in a special showing at the Rubin Museum of Art. Entitled The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology, the exhibition from October 7, 2009, to January 25, 2010, coincides with a major event in publishing: W.W. Norton & Company’s publication of a facsimile and translation of Jung’s original.

For a book that would transform psychotherapy from a practice concerned with the treatment of the sick into a means for the higher development of the personality, the Red Book is a strange hybrid of thought and image taking the form of a 11.57 x 15.35 inch red leather-bound manuscript. In more than two-thirds of its pages, Jung paired his abstract and narrative brightly hued graphic forms with thoughts written in a beautiful calligraphic style.

The work has never been seen in public before, outside the circle of Jung’s family. Alongside the 95-year old volume which Jung worked on from 1914-1930, the Rubin Museum will present a number of oil, chalk, and tempera paintings and preparatory sketches related to the Red Book and other original manuscripts, including the Black Books, which contain ideas and fantasies leading up to the Red Book. In addition, copies of the new publication will be available for perusal in a reference area in the gallery.

“This exhibition will cast new light on the genesis of Jung’s work and the making of modern psychology, and open up possibilities for understanding how mandalas and mandala-like structures are understood across cultures,” says Martin Brauen, Chief Curator, Rubin Museum of Art.

Dr. Brauen, who is particularly interested in the mandala-like paintings in the Red Book, first encountered Jung’s work as a student at the Jung Institute in Zurich and in his own research into mandalas. “Mandala: The Perfect Circle,” an exhibition he is organizing, will be on view concurrently at the museum with the Red Book this fall.

“Jung described the mandala as an ‘archetype of wholeness,’” continues Brauen. “The Red Book of C. G. Jung is in some way the focal point of all of the exhibitions we will present in Fall and Winter 2009/2010.”

Visitors to the Rubin Museum will be invited to see the ways in which Jung sought to translate the symbols he encountered in dreams and fantasies into contemporary graphic form, often using the circular diagrams of the mandala, which resembles structures represented in Tibetan Buddhist art. On display will be Jung’s first known mandala-like work: Systema mundi totius (1916), a cosmic representation of his reflections on spirituality and the soul, drawn from a series of recorded personal fantasies. Jung considered this work—along with about 25 mandala sketches that he created while serving as a Medical Corps Doctor and Commander of a British internment camp in Switzerland during the last two years of World War I—to be important documentations of his psychological and spiritual development.

The works of art and archival materials included in The Red Book of C.G. Jung are on loan from the Foundation for the Works of C. G. Jung, the Jung family private archive, and private collections.

press release from artdaily.org

I love connecting patterns through Circles. Don’t get me wrong – I love other shapes too, but the Circle is my BFF. I spend a lot of time seeking how the mood of today’s culture gets interpreted in this form. Maybe someday I will show you some of my own work, but in the meantime, whoa— this stuff is just dope. Another Mandala Mash-Up for you.

First up: DAVIES AND STARR from NYC play to my consumerist chord with masterful, high-fidelity advertising patterns. Colorful wheels of computers, shoes, games, bicycles…Stuff. Beware of meditating on these for too long.

more…

Next up: AUTOTROPHS. An autotroph from the Greek autos = self and trophe = nutrition, is an organism that produces complex organic compounds from simple inorganic molecules using energy from light or inorganic chemical reactions. These pulsating orbs are constructed using simulated video feedback.Now, I don’t really understand this, but like crop circles, I don’t need to.  Mr. Prudence blows my mind. These images feed my soul. Self-nutrition indeed.

more…

Now, while we are on the topic of orbs, can you handle it: Masakatsu Sahsie’s ORB PAINTINGS depict yet another vision of consumerist life in a dystopian future. Video games, pachinko parlors, fast food, TV’s, and old Showa-period buildings meld together in floating balls of visceral vestige above faceless surroundings. Funny, this description fits closely to where I grew up in Northern Indiana…all that’s missing is the smell of burning tires. Below is “Slingshot”.

still more…

Finally, while we are floating above Japan, the designer-symbologist in me is most pleased with the discovery of TYPOGRAPHIC TOWN LOGOS. These are official graphic identities for municipalities, based on the Japanese hiragana and katakana characters. In a brilliant coupling of meaning with clean, decisive form, these symbols sum up the essence of place in a blink.

Abiko’s logo uses a stylized katakana ア (a) that symbolizes Lake Tega.

Click a “round” for more on all this:

Davies and Starr

Paul Prudence: Autotroph Flickr Set

Masakatsu Sashie

Town logos

“The good, of course, is always beautiful,
and the beautiful never lacks proportion.”
— Plato

I just received the latest installment of Michael Schneider’s Constructing the Universe Activity Book Series! Secret Windows makes use of our EYES and our instincts. No compass and straightedge are required, only a desire to perceive a new “window on the world.”

Like the toy in the Cracker Jacks – this book comes with a plastic sheet having six geometric constructions already printed on them. You’ll soon be packing these panels in your pocket, ready to view the underlying patterns of familiar items around your home, garden and neighborhood. You’ll begin to see and understand the beauty of geometric proportions inherent in our world.

A Rose is a Rose is a Pentagram

Children, teachers, artists, and seekers, will love Secret Windows. It is written in simple language and busting with illustrations. Each chapter will guide you through the succession of geometric radiations: triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, and so on. You may be surprised and delighted to learn of the underlying proportions of your Nissan Sentra Hubcap or Grandma’s precious doilies. Michael researched, gathered images, and tested his theories for over a dozen years to create this magical doorway into our world.

I highly recommend all six of the Constructing the Universe Activity Books, and Secret Windows is a must.

You can purchase the Activity Books exclusively through Schneider’s website.

Posted in Geometry ]]> http://sfmosaic.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/secret-windows/feed/ 1 sfmosaic Volume 6 Cover HaileyFlower2 http://sfmosaic.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/piece-by-piece/ http://sfmosaic.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/piece-by-piece/#comments Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:18:48 +0000 sfmosaic http://sfmosaic.wordpress.com/?p=1016 ]]>

Begin by looking within

During my month in Los Angeles, I had the honor and joy to be invited as Visiting Artist Instructor at Piece by Piece organization. I offered a 2-session Mind’s Eye class and we explored mandalas, color theory, and techniques for creating color effects in mosaics. This was new information for many, and it was enthusiastically received.

A happy childhood dream collected

We began with my favorite exercise: mandala drawing. This is done first by centering the breath and calming your mind. We then start to draw without thinking or planning, being attracted by whatever colors, shapes or ideas may come to mind. It’s like free association drawing, while working with the circle as a “container.” In fact, one interpretation of the Mandala can translate as Mind Container or Essence Container.

People were surprised with their work. Even those who resisted the idea of drawing at first, ended up loving it!

Founder, Sophie Alpert’s idea for Piece by Piece was inspired by successful micro-finance models used in South Africa. Piece by Piece offers free training in mosaic art and hosts several shows a year, allowing a venue for these new artists to sell their work, if they choose. For every sale of mosaic art, artists keep a percentage and part goes to continue the program. Participants earn much needed income while gaining a skill and lifting their self-esteem.

Eutiquio gathers inspiration from crop circle geometry

Many of the participants have been formerly homeless and are very low income individuals who are battling any variety of problems from mental health issues, to domestic abuse, to unemployment. The program services on average 30-40 people per class period, twice a week. The 2-year old non-profit is rapidly gaining momentum and they soon hope to raise enough funds to find a permanent studio.

Lillian explains the Color Wheel as Luz translates into Spanish

The glowing embers at the core of the program are Artistic Director Dawn Mendelson; glass mosaic master, Luz Mack-Durini, who was my awesome translator; and Leigh Adams, colorful glass and installation artist.  Together, with a group of dedicated bi-lingual volunteers, they create a classroom that is an open, safe and supportive environment in which to create art.  The Piece by Piece artwork is of high quality and available for sale.

Dawn jokes with a Piece by Piece artist

Check out their website and Flickr page for what’s new and support this project – Art Saves Lives!

More photos of my class here.