Botanical Mandalas by Daniel McPheeters
I have always been fascinated by patterns and symmetries, particularly the mandala. There is something about the mandala form that draws the eye to its inherit beauty while centering and focusing the mind. As an avid gardener, I love the natural forms of flowers and foliage. In them I see the beauty of patterns and symmetries as well.
As an artist, I have worked in different media, particularly digital collage. The ability to manipulate images on the computer has given me the tools to create lovely mandala art. I take hundreds of pictures of flowers and foliage from many gardens and pick out the ones that have the most interesting structure. From these I take a wedge shaped segment and repeat the pattern in a circle. I use calculations that are exact to the single pixel. This results in an intricate and seamless mandala. While all of these botanical mandalas are lovely, I select only a few of them that have designs that inspire me and suggest an artistic theme. I then use the botanical mandala as a canvas and weave in my own imagery. Unlike most other collage artists that incorporate other’s images, I have given myself the personal challenge of using only my own photographs, paintings, and drawings in my works.
I am fascinated by ancient glyphs and symbols and often include them in my mandala art, sometimes as part of the frame and sometimes within the piece as well. I also use symbols of the Zodiac and related designs to create my Zodiac Mandalas.
Exploring my Mandala Site
As you explore the Botanical Mandala section of my sculptedimage web site, there are a number of interesting areas to visit.
First, of course, are the artworks. These can be seen in Gallery 1 and Gallery 2. Clicking on the mandala thumbnail will give you a large version, and you can use the navigation arrows to go to the next or go to the previous mandala. Clicking the square icon between the arrows will bring you back to the gallery.
Another area of interest is the section "How I create my Mandalas". In this section I give a simple schematic explanation of how I take a photograph of flowers or foliage and convert it to a mandala.
My mandala project, "A Year of Mandalas", was a year long project in which I created a new mandala each week. I wrote about my inspiration for each piece and posted it (along with the image) on my mandala blog. This project culminated with a gallery show, in which each work was shown along with the blog entry for that piece. These works can be seen on this site in the order that they were created by clicking HERE. A YouTube video of the show can be seen by clicking HERE.During my "Year of Mandalas" I found that I would create dozens of botanical mandalas before I found one that inspired me for a specific work. At the end of the year I had over a thousand wonderful mandalas that I did not use in my works. I selected my favorite thousand botanical mandalas and included them in this site. To see these click HERE.