Weekly Mandala: Hope

I  usually avoid animated GIFs, but after seeing what Vincent did over in his blog, I got to thinking.  Let me know if this just annoying or if there is an entrancing element to it.  

Here is another bit of weirdness.  Look at the first line of text below the image and focus on it.  Stare for a few seconds and try to ignore everything around it.  After a bit it begins to look like you can reach your finger right over the edge into the mandala.  I love optical illusions like that.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Weekly Mandala: Rose Fire into Tipareth

There is something very soothing and safe in this piece.  All that warm yellow light...the comfort of a lazy afternoon.  The red would usually makes me think of something more sanguine, but here I feel contained and safe.  It evokes a sense of rose petals or the reddish color of shadows turn in the presence of a candle.  The source material for this did have candles in it, but I feel there is a difference between the mere presence of a candle and the comfort that comes from it.  So many of my pieces have an element of urgency or emergency in them, but I feel no danger here.  Makes me want to take a nap.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

Laptop Update

They were able to retrieve my data! Thank goodness for small favors. I've found an affordable replacement, but it is going to take me awhile to amass the cash. As it stands, until then I'm still connected, but only sporadically. I'll post as I can. See you all soon. :-)

Pause for station RE-identification

I'll keep this short as my current access to the web has a definitive time limit.

My laptop died. The horrible my-logic-board-and-hard-drive-are-dead-no-returning-from-dead-kind-of-death. The nice people at the istore are currently trying to retrieve my data. (fingers crossed). I'm going to be gone for awhile unless something changes VERY dramataically in the next few days...

Thank you all for reading and commenting. I'll be back as soon as I can. Wish me luck. I need as much as I can get.

Weekly Mandala: A View from Malkuth

Here we are standing in the kingdom, Malkuth, looking up into the Tree of Life.  Malkuth is the sephiroth within the Qabalah system associated with the realm of earthly matter.  It is the world of our day to day life, the physical realm, Earth.

Many of the mandalas I've worked on always seem to have the intimation of a circle of entities or people around the outer edges.  The same holds true with this one.  I can see what looks like a group of bearded men.  Some are wearing large turbans, others seem to be in dark robes of some sort wearing crowns or headpieces.  They seem to be singing or chanting.  They each hold a cup or a chalice.

The men emerged as an image and were present through most of the process of making this mandala.  At one point I tried to eliminate them as I like to keep the mandalas mostly abstract, letting the viewer's eyes determine what is seen.  I'm kind of glad they're still in there...or maybe they aren't really there at all and they're just what I'm seeing and bringing to the piece.  :-)

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

UPDATE: Kevin's Dream Catcher Completed Tattoo

Here is the finished version of my friend Kevin's Tattoo.  With Kevin's permission, I will post a photo of his arm once it is complete.  At some point (also with Kevin's permission) I need to post what his arm looked like before.  More on that later...

My post with my initial drawing of the Tattoo is here.  As you can see we shifted the whole dream catcher structure over.  The preexisting paw is very close to Kevin's arm pit and as I understand it, that is a very sensitive area for tattooing, so to avoid causing him too much pain, we shifted everything over.  :-)  We also changed the web design a bit to give it more organic, less structured feel.  I added the border around his existing paw to make it look like a large carved piece of turquoise attached to the dream catcher.  The feathers are modeled after the feathers of the Great Horned Owl.

{Drawn in Pencil, Scanned, Color Created in Photoshop}

UPDATE:

Here's Kevin's Tat, fresh from the shoppe! I'll post another once it has healed completely.  :-)

Weekly Mandala: Plutostorm

Here is a face for the bombshells Pluto has been dropping into my life over the past year.  Cool energy, but volatile and corrosive.  A strange combo to be sure, but from what I've experienced so far it seems to be a highly solvent influence.  It has been dissolving the old structures of my life one after another with alarming regularity.  More on Pluto in Capricorn.

From this point forward, I'm going to try to post a weekly Mandala.  They are a good way for me to decompress and rekindle my zen...and I haven't done any in quite some time.  I'll try to avoid getting too repetitive with them.  I know after awhile they can all look the same.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

Night in the Forest of the Blue Gates

This one needs a scary new age soundtrack.

I really don't know where this piece came from.  It started as something completely different and turned into this strange dark forest very suddenly.  I'm still not sure what to make of it.  Such a strange vibe.  I know that the period that this came from was very intense and uncomfortable for me.

It feels like underneath.  Some contained underworld place that is difficult to escape.  I definitely don't want to get too close to those columns, they look hungry.

As well as the scary new age soundtrack, I also hear the hum of a dying fluorescent bulb here.  I suspect that light in the Forest of the Blue Gates flickers.  As soundtracks go - perhaps Steve Roach: Dynamic Stillness.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Melek Taus

This piece makes me think of  Melek Taus but also a bit of Shiva.  The night I was working on this was just before all the intense tornadoes and storms in Alabama.  I know that Shiva has associations with weather, I'm not sure about Melek Taus.  Some connections here with the Feri Tradition's Blue God.  Also, please see my post on Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This piece and the one in that post were created from the same source material, but went different directions.  This one has a softer feel and a perhaps is a little more balanced overall.

I struggle with pieces of this nature, because I often want to give the work more detail and make the image I see clearer, but the whole point of this kind of artwork is that it is supposed to be vague on a certain level.  Much digital art is focused on being overly rendered and having every single bit detailed.   This kind of art is meant to imply or evoke the image that the viewer sees. 

When confronted with visual ambiguity, the imagination is forced to fill in the gaps.  Due to that ambiguity, each person that sees the piece gets a different view of it, thus everyone sees their own individual piece of art.  There are of course bits that everyone will acknowledge as an eye or mouth or hair, but the kind of eye or mouth that each person sees subtly changes the overall meaning of the piece.  The vague boundaries between these things opens the piece up to greater interpretations of meaning, expanding the piece beyond being a single image with a single meaning.  Suddenly, out of one piece of art you can get fifty different pieces.  This is no excuse for laziness or poor craftsmanship though.  There ARE images within the piece, but their boundaries have been overlapped and blurred to let greater meaning in.

Part of the joy of this kind of art for me is the discovery.  I will often spend hours developing the image until I uncover its inner core.  With particularly stubborn pieces, I will have to leave and return later to try again.  Sometimes though, it is like breathing: just letting the air in.  The image is already waiting.  I just have to pick up pen, pencil, or mouse and let it happen.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Passage of the Dark Daughter

I begin to understand.

I have found my way.

Without words,

Without reason,

I went blindly inside,

Fingertips feeling through the unending night

And found safe passage to the sky.

I found my way.

Not of this world and all its answers,

Not of sight or of numbers or of phones,

But of the ocean inside my veins.

The pressure of my pain and fear

Burst me like ripe fruit

And open,

My glistening seeds fell into me.

I look back at myself in wonder,

I found my way!

There is nothing you can give me

There is nothing I can hold to.

The way is all that matters now.

I thought it lost to time and torture,

But I followed the waters,

Oh blessed patient waters.

I found my way!

I slip beneath my waves

And into my indigo depths.

I undulate like my heart

And feel only the within.

The endless within.

The quiet dark part of me speaks.

{Digital images manipulated with Photoshop}

Update 05-12-12
Recommended Listening:

Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke
The Circulation of Shadows
from Duality

Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel

This piece represents the presence of your internal personal guiding force within coming forward to say hello, or to make your brain explode with insights, visions, memories, emotions.  This is my recognition and interaction with my internal silent witness.  This piece and the one following in my next post are very similar, but they both took on  distinct visions so I decided to keep them separate.  They were both created from the same source material. 

I've felt this force in my life several times.  Its presence is always overwhelming and energetic.  It always seems to show up when I am writing or drawing...a time when I am not thinking of myself at all, when I am lost in the creative process.  I can sometimes tell it is coming before it shows up.  Like the tide coming in or the Moon growing fuller.

I cannot profess to have had the specific experience of  The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel , but my experiences seem similar.  Regardless, this piece is about that idea and process.  More information may be found at Thelemapedia.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Update: The Great Stone

This is a reworking of an older piece.  The original was mostly just a sketch in an attempt to capture the idea as quickly as possible.  This is more finished than the other, but now that I'm looking at, I'm wondering what kind of painting it would make...or a sculpture.  LOL!  Ah the meanderings of art.  I suspect that a painting would take on a radically different style.  I would also add color.  Hmmm....there may be another post of this in future.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

From the Archives: That Smile

Here we are with Sheep's clothing and all that.  :-)  Although I often feel we have more to fear from sheep than wolves.  The Devil never shows up with horns, tail, and pitchfork like we imagine.  Not that I'm much into Christian iconography...I see this one more as a trickster.  Coyote.

Yes he is smiling, but if you look beyond him you can make out the aura of a furry beast...not that furry beasts are necessarily bad.  ;-)  However there is an element of danger that you must respect.  Wild beasts are just that, Wild.  If you do not respect the nature of a thing or person or beast, it can very well turn against you.  Then you have no to blame but yourself for ending up between the toothy jowls of some hairy man...uhm...I mean beast.

This is another one of those pieces that was found on the way to a mandala.  Just some fun image mining.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}