The first of 100 mandalas

After my bulletin boards became a regular part of my life, I began to see how visual art made me feel, and how others responded to it. While it was work, it was enjoyable. While I might not be one hundred percent satisfied with the outcome, viewers derived pleasure from it. One day, on a whim, I purchased the Crayola telescoping tower (one hundred fifty colors!) and drew a mandala, something that had interested me in college, but that I had never made a serious study of.

A caddisfly themed mandala for an entomologist friend

Mandalas are sort of spiritual maps, or maps of the artist’s soul, if you like. Drawing fast ones had always given me an idea of where I was, balance and focus-wise, and taking more care in creating them helped me see when to take better care of myself, to add more art into my routine.

A monsoon mandala