Life Book 2012 - Light and Dark Goddesses

This has been a very interesting challenge - to represent aspects of oneself through the imagery of a dark and a light goddess; but without going with the evil/good aspects. These are to celebrate the contradictory yet complementary sides of the personality and of life: light/dark; birth/death; yin/yang; feelings/logic; private/public; secretive/open...

I had a generic moon and sun goddess as a work in progress and I knew I wanted to add a bit more detail to them and also name them...

So I have used watercolour glazes and pens and given them some hair to die for!!
I am pleased I carried on as they have a lot more drama and personality now...
They are now Arianrhod and Bridget - I always thought the sun/light goddess was Bridget but my moon/dark goddess was Artemis and I really wanted a Celtic equivalent.

Explosive mandalas

The big bang!!

More mindful mandalas!

Mandalas and Sacred Geometry - Squaring the Circle and other symbolic mandalas

Of course mandalas can be used as profoundly spiritual routes into meditation so I have been looking for mandalas with an added message or significance.

I feel very relaxed when I am filling in mandalas, whether I have drawn them myself or chosen them to complete, so I have been browsing around the web to look at the spiritual aspect of mandalas.

There is a lifetime's reading out there! And I am still only scratching the surface with Jung and his mandala work , however I keep coming across the idea of a sacred geometry

 which has been felt to underpin everything that exists; including the tree of life, Metatron's cube and squaring the circle

Wikipedia says "Squaring the circle is a problem proposed by ancient geometers. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straight edge. More abstractly and more precisely, it may be taken to ask whether specified axioms of Euclidean geometry concerning the existence of lines and circles entail the existence of such a square.
In 1882 it was proven to be is a mathematical impossibility.."


However, geometry notwithstanding,  I found this rather natty template on www.charlesgilchrist.com and have been playing with it, using a ruler, protractor and circles template because - as is the way with scissors, rulers, glue etc,  I have mislaid the compass.


I much prefer the metaphorical approach to squaring the circle:-

"From the domed Pantheon of ancient Rome, if not before, architects have fashioned sacred dwellings after conceptions of the universe, utilizing circle and square geometries to depict spirit and matter united. Circular domes evoke the spherical cosmos and the descent of heavenly spirit to the material plane. Squares and cubes delineate the spatial directions of our physical world and portray the lifting up of material perfection to the divine.
Constructing these basic images is elementary. The circle results when a cord is made to revolve around a post. The right angle of a square appears in a 3:4:5 triangle, easily made from a string of twelve equally spaced knots. But "squaring the circle"... drawing circles and squares of equal areas or perimeters by means of a compass or rule... has eluded geometers from early times. (2) The problem cannot be solved with absolute precision, for circles are measured by the incommensurable value pi (π = 3.1415927...), which cannot be accurately expressed in finite whole numbers by which we measure squares. (3) At the symbolic level, however, the quest to obtain circles and squares of equal measure is equivalent to seeking the union of transcendent and finite qualities, or the marriage of heaven and earth. Various pursuits draw from the properties of music, geometry, and even astronomical measures and distances. Each attempt offers new insight into the wonder of mathematical order."
Rachel Fletcher,
Squaring the Circle: Marriage of Heaven and Earth
Nexus Network Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2007 119"




I have also found the comtemplative  labyrinth  at Chartres cathedral and used it as a mandala...

It was used by pilgrims as a path for meditation (and I  see it also comes up in the http://www.charlesgilchrist.com/ site on sacred geometry; I did not notice until I was fact checking just now about the labyrinth so I seem to be sticking well to my theme:))

The Kabbalistic tree of life....

and a temple plan based on the Vasta Purusha Mandala

also interested me as meaningful mandalas  ...

More mandalas

Using the template from the Willowing free mandalas course; it is fascinating how different the same mandala template can be!

Roses on My Table, Journal Journey

This is a prompt on new beginnings/openings; I used some found poetry and butterfly stencils to celebrate new starts:-

Pottery modelling

My new term at pottery starts today and I have decided to make a little statue of Epona and the white horse from my journal page - so this will be a work in progress.

This is the first drawing...I will use this to get the basic dimensions...

And thus is the beginning of my model...

Life Book

This is my first page for the Life book 2012 on http://willowing.ning.com - it is "an honouring and celebration of you", so I shall be honouring and celebrating me!!

It is very hard to do positive comments, I can list loads of bad things but listing good things feels really difficult.

Anyway, this is celebrating my inner goddess, so I have chosen Epona, a Celtic goddess associated with horses, (as I have a thing about dreams of white horses and I also had Sandy, above, in the 80s and loved her to bits.) but she is also connected with family, nurture and dreams.

We learned to do a three quarter portrait; I am pleased with her because she has a real expression, whereas my ladies are usually swooning pre-Raphaelites, and I also snuck a horse in...

New mandalas

Hand drawn and painted mandala, with  a series of circles and watercolour plus Sakura Soufflé and Gelly Roll pens, Staedtler coloured fine liners and a fine black Sharpie.
I wanted a feeling of energy exploding outwards...



 I also did this one on the left but it felt static








 and even with a lot of extra pen work it still felt lifeless and I think that mandalas should be full of energy and worth really looking into


so I had another go and  I added a lot of soufflé pen work to it -  and now I think it has lots of depth and the  hidden elements make it more interesting to look into instead of look at - umm - or ohm maybe:)