Landscape Of The Divine Creatures (Mandala)

The main influence for making this piece were buddhist mandalas. Of course the images that I drew into the mandala are a gross representation of what mandala's are truly supposed to represent, and by all means I am completely ignorant to the religious aspects of the realm of buddhism. Still, the influence from the mandala's were strong because I had watched a video on the making of a sand mandala where the monks used colored sand to create a beautifully rendered mandala, only to be washed away by the flowing rivers. The amount of labor involved in creating these sand mandala's were incredible and the fact that a small gust of unwanted wind, or an accidental sneeze could screw hours worth of work made the sand mandala's even more incredible. The monks created these sand mandala's to pray for those who needed help, so the mandala's had a strong symbolic reason to be created, and then eventually sacrificed.

Personally, I don't have the courage to destroy the mandala that I have created, but I do have my own reasons for creating this piece. I wanted to express the cosmic realm of divine beings that are difficult to understand as human beings. They are imaginary characters created by me, but who is to say there are no such beings that exist in this world. They may be just representations of the fantastic realm, but to me the images that reside in this mandala are of beings that represent our limited understanding of the universe and beyond. There are things in this world that are unreachable as human beings and I wanted to use this mandala to express the realm of the unreachable. Us as humans may not be able to get to these cosmic, fantastic places, but we have something called the imagination and with our imagination we can travel to these realms and make connections with the divine. Hopefully the connections that you make are with the divine goodness and not with those of the bad.