Full Moon Love Mandala

  

 

Back in April this year I was driving to art class in the direction of a giant, rising, full moon. The traffic was slow and every traffic light that I came to was red, so I had plenty of time to gaze in awe at how beautiful it was.

 

Coincidence and synchronicity have become very much part of my experience at my weekly process art classes. I have almost come to expect there to be some sort of coincidence. So when I arrived at class and found a large circular (full moon shaped) piece of paper on my desk, I simply gave a quiet little "huh".

 

We were going to do mandalas. (Mandala comes from Sanskrit meaning "circle.")

We started off, after a guided meditation, paging through magazines and tearing out pages that resonated with us. A smaller circle had been drawn in pencil in the middle of our paper. We collaged some of our magazine pictures into this smaller circle.

 

But THEN, the class took a whole new direction! We were instructed to pass our work to the person next to us, and in so doing we received someone else's work. We were then given a few minutes to add something to the work in front of us, using magazine pictures or ink. We passed each work around the class, stopping to add something to each person's work.

By the time your original work came back to you, it had taken on a new life and may have gone in a totally different direction to what you had "planned". (shock horror!) Which was precisely the reason for the exercise. You are not supposed to plan your work in these classes. It was a good way to force you to LET GO and to not be too precious about the outcome of your work.

 

The "gifts" I'd received on my mandala by the time it reached my desk again where lovely.

Someone had divided my page up with some ink lines which made me think of a clock. Time.

Someone else had painted an ink heart. Others had added magazine eyes, a picture of a fig, a stick like figure and star shape.

Funnily enough, the magazine pictures that I'd torn out at the beginning of the session, and later added to my mandala, worked very well with what had been added to my page by others.

My end result included many hearts, Cupid's arrows, men making eyes at and flirting with voluptuous women, rock paintings, two stags with locked horns and two Greek stamps with a picture of a centaur, the symbol for the zodiac sign of Sagittarius.

 

 

I made this mandala a few days after spending a lovely "date day" with my Sagittarius husband.

(I posted some pictures from that day here.)  I called it "Full Moon Love Mandala".

We have 3 young children who keep us very busy and we hadn't spent quality time together, just the two of us, in a really long time. Our "date day" felt a bit like starting from the beginning again. Courting. Flirting. Falling in love.

Collage work - Process Art classes

Earlier this year, in the fourth Process Art class that I attended, we were required to do a collage using pictures from magazines.

We started off (with the help of a guided meditation) by writing about a memory from our childhood to do with a book or story that someone had read to us or told us.

Mine was 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. I used to have a recurring bad dream about that story when I was little. In my dream the bears were at our front gate, coming for me, and I had nowhere to hide and nowhere to run to. I felt such fear of getting into trouble for doing something I'd been told not to do.

We paged through magazines and tore out pictures that caught out attention and resonated with us, not necessarily pictures that illustrated the story.

I was never a huge fan of collage work and found it hard to get into. I did not enjoy the class that much. I was also disappointed with my work at the end of the lesson.

In those early days of Process Art classes I was still hung up on the final artwork or end result and hadn't quite got into the 'process' yet.

The collage that I did in one of the first Process Art classes.

A month later, we did another collage. This time we started with wax crayons, inks and bleach before paging through the magazines and tearing out pictures to paste onto our work. Amazingly, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I was completely unconcerned about what the end result would look like. I was actually humming happily (but very quietly) while I worked. I was surprised at the end result but this time did not focus on it as an 'artwork' or place any judgement or criticism onto it.

The collage that I did a month after the first collage.

At the end of that term we were given all our work back in a large brown folder. I laid my work out on the floor to get a good look at what I had achieved and it immediately struck me that these two collages had strong similarities.

All the work done during the first term of my Process Art classes.

From top left: Guardian Figure, Flower - Symbol, Silenced Love, Gateway, Flow, Immerse Yourself, Creative Block, Untitled

The Two collages:

Both collages have a path leading to an open doorway positioned more or less in the middle of the picture.

At the start of the pathway in the first collage, is a jumble of torn pieces from a picture of dried autumn leaves. They look a lot like flames.

In the second collage there is the shape of a lotus flower made up of petals cut from a picture of flames.

In the first there are rays of light coming into the picture and in the second there are rays going out from the centre of the page.

While doing the first collage I felt stuck, frustrated and irritable. While doing the second one I felt free and full of joy!

I can read a lot more into both of these works, but for me the most exciting thing is the idea (or even the proof) that my subconscious is hard at work during these Process Art classes.

A friend asked me what it is that I gain from doing these classes. What 'therapy' am I getting from them?

I think what it is, is that I'm giving my subconscious a voice.

 A bit like analysing ones dreams?

A way to feel connected to something greater.

REWIRED. Creative Block - artwork

The task in one of my process art classes was to create an artwork called 'Creative Block', using... a... block.
We were given a selection of wooden blocks in various shapes and sizes to choose from. The idea was to work on every surface, using anything we wanted (pencil, ink, paint, magazine pages, fabric, found objects etc.) to create our final work.

I am a "Creative Block Survivor" (more about that later), and could not help but interpret this project literally. The subject immediately brought up strong feelings for me .

I chose a beautiful small block of Oregon pine. I loved the colour, the grain, the smell. My plan was to do sophisticated, beautiful, emotional ink illustrations leaving much of the wood grain visible and to carve into the wood in places. I most certainly wasn't going to glue any bits onto the wood. That would just be ... um... tacky! ;)

I grabbed a magazine to page through for inspiration and to look for possible references for my illustrations I'd planned. (I'm not very good at drawing from my imagination).

Before I knew it, I was like a woman possessed, wielding a hot glue gun. I went mad sticking and gluing all sorts of bits and pieces onto my block. I was having so much fun.

The end result was really surprising. Not at all what I'd envisioned or set out to do.

But, it made me smile.

I called it "REWIRED".

My Lesson:

To let go, be free, have FUN, express yourself in WHATEVER way. Stop taking art and creativity so SERIOUSLY! Who cares what other people will think.

... But is it ART?... Hell Yes! Because it means something... to me.

... Would it sell? ... Hell no! Most probably not ... So then, why do we make art? ...

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

- Thomas Merton in No man is an Island



Flower

This work is called 'Flower' and was done in one of my process art classes.

The class was about Symbols. The works were created by printing with dyes, printing inks and wet clay using any object that was flat enough to print or stamp a mark onto the paper.

There was a vast selection of objects and shapes to choose from. I was drawn to using my hands, dried leaves, feathers and a beautiful old wooden printing block with a flower design.

I started off by covering my hands in wet clay and making brown 'clay prints' onto the paper.

I was feeling a bit 'paniced' and out of my depth having no direction or plan in mind. (Process art is a creative journey or process, rather than the end product of art and craft, which takes some getting used to.) Getting my hands 'dirty' and making a bold start really helped me to get into the session.

I experimented with some dried fine leaves, feathers and the flower stamp and made prints using red and orange dyes that are quite translucent and black and red printing inks that leave a bold, opaque print. At times the test prints that i did on separate paper turned out so well that i cut or tore them out and collaged them into my final artwork. I used a wet Rooibos tea bag to stain the paper and finished off with some hand prints in (sticky) black printing ink.

 

 

Detail of "Flower":   An example of one of my test prints of a feather

done on brown paper, cut out and collaged into the final artwork.  

 

 

SYMBOLS and their meaning:

 

Hand print - Symbol of a human's life, achievements and legacy, the creative spirit, channelled energy.

 

Feather - Sacred universal symbol of flight within the spirit world and serving as messenger to Great Spirit.

 

Flowers - Symbolise a relationship to the sun.

 

Leaf - Wealth.

 

A list of other symbols and their meaning can be found here.