I’ve been speaking with a lot of people recently who’ve expressed how much change they’re going through these days. Maybe it’s the economy or the realization that the environmental chickens have finally come home to roost, but it does indeed seem like change is in the air.
For my 2010 Mandala a month, I’ve called July’s entry “Change”. Although a mandala is fairly static, the fascination I have with mandala’s is how they focus my mind. It’s like watching a fire. It’s mesmerizing.
By way of explanation, this mandala is based on the golden mean – that is, the number 1.61803399. There have been a lot of studies done into design in nature as well as asthetics that indicate this number prevails. For example the nautilus is based on it.

This isn’t a scholarly document, so I’m not going to go into details about how the golden mean (ratio) comes into play here, except that it does.

My first draft of turning this into a mandal was promising, but not really up to standard (my measurements were off for one thing).

The problem was that I couldn’t figure out how the circle came out of the square, so I decided to jetison the squares and look at circles instead. The core concept, still fitting with the nautilus (golden mean) ratio and placement resulted in the following:

I then replicated it four times, recoloured it, used that set angle at 45?, played with opacity, shading and voíla!

July - Change