A flower mandala – moving us towards our centre, our soul, a place of calm and inner peace.
Several years ago, a very dear friend recommended that I read a particular book about drawing and painting mandala’s, and the idea came to me that I could paint flower mandala’s inspired by my own photographs. I subsequently curated a collection of flower images, each selected and cropped to enhance the concept of a circle, the meaning of the Sanskrit word ‘mandala’.
The deep purple star-shaped bloom of the kangaroo apple shrub, Solanum laciniatum, was one of the first mandala’s I painted. Native to Australia and New Zealand, and known as ‘bush apple’ to the Australian Aborigine and ‘poro poro’ to the Maori’s, this plant is indigenous to my local area, and abundant in the bush on our property, so I had many reference photographs of the stunning flowers.
Whilst it was the colour that initially caught my eye, I was fascinated to find that the five large fused petals with fluted edges and deep notches at the tips, seemed to have the classic ray petal shapes embedded within their substance. Overall, the petals made a showy and ostentatious display, with frills and flounces at the edges, waving happily in the breeze to attract insect pollinators, and guide lines, created by the edges and central veins of the ray petals, to steer them to the heart of the flower to do their important work of fertilisation.
The heart of a mandala is the central point of the circle, variously said to represent either the universe or the human soul. The word mandala is constructed from two root words: ‘manda’ meaning essence and ‘la’ meaning container, so the mandala symbolically contains the essence of the universe or the essence of the soul.
If a dot in the centre of the circle is expanded, it becomes the perimeter of the mandala, then it’s just the universe enlarged, representing the ‘one-ness’ of everything. If the centre of the mandala represents our soul, then it’s the journey inward to find our centre and become one with the universe that becomes the goal.
In painting the kangaroo apple, intuitively I worked from the outside towards the centre. I began with purple washes to the petals, then deepened the hue and honed their detail. Purple is the colour of the energy centre at the crown of the head, creating a conduit to spirit, reflecting the journey to the centre. The heart of the bloom, with its bright yellow stamens surrounded by a halo of white light, was the final part of the journey. Gold and white are also said to be colours seen in the energy wheel of the crown chakra, thus we have reached the soul of the flower, its essence contained within the mandala.
Although painting mandala’s may be a meditative and focused way to quieten the mind and move us closer to our soul, in my experience as an artist and creative, painting any subject matter from the heart is an expression of the soul that moves us closer to our centre. The famous psychologist Carl Jung believed that the mandala motif symbolises wholeness, and where it is contained within a quadrangular shape, like the frame around an artwork, it represents the conscious realisation of this wholeness.
I have always been guided by my intuition to paint the inner detail of flowers, and I find it calms me and puts me ‘in the zone’, whether or not the flower is presented as a circular motif and/or contained in a frame. So, just keep creating from your heart to quieten your mind, move closer to your centre and find some inner peace.
I wonder what your experience is when you create from your heart?