Through recent exploration of Indian Tantric Art, I have been painting and drawing hundreds of spirals. The Tantric images are created as a religious, contemplative practice by special families in India. Most of the images are very simple forms, using basic colors, revealing the energies and essences of life and spirit. When I look back, I’ve been drawing spirals since I was a child. It’s a very comforting shape to make. Now, I have a daily practice of drawing these forms on a scroll, a spiral of paper.
The spiral is an archetypal, timeless symbol, winding in a continuous and gradually widening or tightening curve around a fixed center point. The center point can be a place of stillness, a new beginning or a final conclusion. The spiral lines that widen or tighten around this point become a path of contraction or expansion, introspection or emptiness, growth or hibernation.
Last fall I was invited to create an art installation for the 23rd Annual Cascade Aids Project Art Evening & Auction to be held on April 28, 2012. The installation has developed around the spiral as a metaphor for life and how the marks of our human experience are contained within this form. The work is almost complete and now I wait in anticipation for installation day!