So why mandalas?

I drew a lot as a boy, until school gathered me up and told me 'that's nice dear', and pointed me in more functional, reliable directions. I came back to it as a young adult, mostly while travelling, preferring patterns and images in circles with which I seemed to have an affinity, if not yet as 'mandalas'. I tried a more conventional life as a landscaper for many years, which was not without its good times and happy memories, but a part of me was flatlining. Guiding and travel helped with that, but I also found myself with time and space between trips, so when I picked up my pens and pencils again in that winter season of 2015, it seemed natural to pick up where I left off, creating images in circles.

Life is as uncertain and busy as it's ever been, and we all need to find peace in some amount, one way or another. We all want to feel balanced, healthy, with a certain stillness of mind and clarity of thought with which to better go about our lives. In the West, many have taken to calling this 'wellness', and lets be honest, whether we're cynical about some of that or not, we all want to feel well, and most of us realise that we need to actively do something about it in order to achieve this. Whether it be through religion, exercise, sport, music, yoga, reading, meditation, art... you name it. For an artist, what better format to represent this desire in ourselves than through the balanced symmetry of a mandala?

As a mandala artist, designer, illustrator, it's a great pleasure imagining and creating my images... but the carrying out, the repetition of chosen images as pattern is a meditation in itself, and one that helps me feel like my best self.