Title: Untitled mandala (phase one)

Media: Colored pencil and oil pastel on black mat board

Size: 20" x 20"

Date: late 1980s

Comments: A great many of the mandalas I created during the 1980s were worked and re-worked over and over until they took on a life of their own unlike anything I could have preplanned. I usually used a geometric design using Hindu temple geometry as a point of departure but then kept working the piece until it bore about as much relationship to the original design as a seed bares to a mature plant. Indeed, the idea of how an archetype relates to a manifest form as expressed in the metaphor of a tree seed's genetic code and a mature tree shaped by time and environment was a constant theme in my art and writing in the 1980s. Often mandalas would be re-worked every few months for several years before I felt they had matured. Only a few were photographed during their earlier stages.