Mandalas

And it was then that all these kinds of things thus\ud established received their shapes from the Ordering\ud One, through the action of Ideas and Numbers.\ud \ud If I have a philosophy about art, it is this: because we are\ud human, we cannot ever completely divest ourselves of our human\ud feelings; we cannot look at a picture or an object of art without\ud bringing to it our own individual experience, whether the art is a\ud portrait to which we respond human to human, a landscape to which\ud we bring associations of our own past environments, a geometric or\ud abstract shape to which we unconsciously attach symbolic meaning,\ud or simply a color field which evokes an emotional response. With\ud artistic education, we can suppress or override purely intuitive\ud response and objectively analyze. But we can never escape it\ud entirely, this emotional response, because of our unique human\ud experience.\ud For the past several years, I have been involved in a series of\ud centered geometric works which I call "mandalas". These paintings \ud are almost a complete departure for me. They are perhaps a ritual of\ud purification and discipline. I set out to do them because I realized\ud that my paintings up to that time had been rich in variety and\ud inspiration, but lacking in attention to the problems of construction\ud and composition, plasticity and surface quality. The mandalas\ud confined me more narrowly and forced me to pay attention to the\ud plastic concerns of my art.\ud These paintings, by the fact that I have called them "mandalas",\ud denote some symbolic meaning. A mandala is basically a symbol for\ud the universe which is used in Eastern religions. To me personally, it\ud is a metaphor for the life force, eternity, the universe, God. I\ud think that each viewer will bring to these mandalas his own experience,\ud but will almost surely connect it consciously or unconsciously with\ud some sort of symbolism, whether it be Eastern religious mandalas,\ud mathematical Venn diagrams, rosette windows, the hex designs painted\ud on New England barns to ward off evil, Jung's concept of the layers\ud of human consciousness and unconsciousness, or the structure of a\ud snowflake. Geometric figures, and the circle especially, have been\ud imbued with symbolic meaning by all cultures. Therefore, one cannot\ud separate meaning from these mandalas entirely. But it is a subjective\ud meaning. It is whatever one brings to it.\ud Since the beginning of the project I have purposely refrained\ud from doing any research on mandalas because I did not want to be\ud influenced by whatever else I found out. I wanted to keep them as\ud personal as I could. Aside from subjective symbolic association,\ud these mandalas will, I hope, bring to the viewer an interesting array \ud of cognitive and perceptual relationships.\ud In creating them, I often started out with one preconceived idea.\ud Then an anomaly such as the phenomenon of reversible perspective, the\ud illusion which makes a surface at one instant recede, and at another,\ud project forward, would present itself, and I changed my course to\ud preserve that in the painting. Other illusions which have occurred\ud are the apparent differences in color and size of like areas created\ud by the contrast of these elements in adjacent areas. The heptagonal\ud mandala, for instance, has apparent motion and seems to pulsate.\ud Most of these illusions have been accidental. I have merely noticed\ud them while the painting is in progress and tried not to lose the\ud anomaly. (See more in text