Lino Carved Mandala

Lino carving is something that I learned in high school, imagine that... So in an earlier post I included a picture of a lino cut that I printed on a t-shirt. that went very well until I washed it and realized that my ink was not permanant ink. I have now ordered permanant colours, and am carving this new Mandala for printing. By bits and pieces this mandalalama project is coming together, a little while ago I received my first order of greeting cards and origami paper. Putting those together in their biodagradable bags took a fair bit of time. And just yesterday I found the perfect display racks for the cards. Attimes I am surprised as to all the details that I need to work out just in order to launch this ...ah but what fun :0)

SNIPPIT

Collage is one of my favourite things, since almost as long as I have loved Mandalas. It seems to me that any excuse to ad colour into life is a good excuse. So, many years ago I bought this old ‘beater’ VW Rabbit for about $300 and I got what I paid for, with my Uncle rewiring and my cousin helping patch the holes finally I arrived at the repainting part of things which was more expensive than the whole car so painting was not an option. But, my sensibilities would not let me drive around in an ugly klunker so I hatched a plan and began cutting out old magazine photos and images (recycled car and magazines,yay). I remember that it took 1,400 ctouts and a week of gluing them onto the body of the car. Then once the glue had set I put on three oats of heavy duty ‘marine ‘varnish... and when I drove her to visit friends in Montreal she was named ‘Snippit... That car lasted only a year but it sure turned alot of heads, in fact I got asked to bring Snippet to a couple of schools to show the kids... In the end she died a slow painful death, I did hang onto her for awhile until fimnally she was shipped off to the junk yard...a sad day that was but that was the begining of a good thing...now I use all kinds of fun stuff for collaging...

Thoughts on process

I have been working on putting Pay Pal into Mandalalama in order to make some of the work here available to others. It amazes me how wonderfully handy our technologies can be ...and simultaneously how demanding the set up is. I heard a good analogy the other day. In order for a plane to fly it has taken years of imagining, building, testing and restructuring before it even leaves the ground. Then it requires an enormous energy boost for the take-off but after all those stages it can rest in a lower energy output for a while in 'cruising' mode. Alright, so I'm not building a plane ...But I would wager that Mandalalama will take us on some wonderfully unexpected journeys.
As for the practical aspects, after 3 years of active construction, the final piece of the puzzle, the website, is nearly ready to go...

New Mosaic floor

Last week I spent way too many hours on my knees, I was tiling the front entrance with found tiles and tile bits that I have been collecting for the last while... Part of our mandate for this little old house was to do all the renovations with used, recycled and re-purposed materials... So far so good. Last autumn I spent four long days pulling up 3\4 inch oak flooring which was condemned to the dump due to a bit of water damage. It has now replaced the vinyl floor in our living room... and why is this good for Mandalalama? Because it makes a pretty neat backdrop for photos of my T-shirts, greeting cards and origami paper... so I am preparing a photo shoot for this week so you can see what else I’ve been up to... all that having been said... have a joy filled day...

First print

Some while ago I started on the path of creating things under the label of mandalalama... the concept revolving around the concept of 'Balance'.

As a part of this creative process I get to learn tons of stuff. It began with me hurling myself into this digital world , I knew bubkiss, so I learrned about emails and USB keys and then I bought a laptop...now it had begun to really get exciting (you see I had recently climbed out of the woods in BC after 12 years) I really knew almost nothing... then I discovered and learned how to register domain names and blogs and facebook... and stumbled apon photoshop and all manner of cool design stuff... only to have all of that bring me back to water colour painting and lino block printing 'old style' so, as Johnny Cash and Hank williams sang....'that old wheel has rolled around again.

I've just finished carving my first linoleum mandala and test printed it and it looks just like the picture shows....

Here it is 1 am and I just constructed a new header for this blog... I havn't written in almost a year and that is not for a lack of anything to write about... events and changes there have been plenty...mostly my time has been spent rebuilding my life, some dear friends have died in the past 12 months and that can send a person into a tailspin...
The result is a whole lot of reflection and a re-evaluating of myself and a re-defining of my path.
I began this blog and some others as a portal to reclaiming my creativity. It had gotten lost, and I discovered that I needed it back, so let's see what happens...
As for the new header , it is kind of hodge-podge and cluttery, a bit, but then apon consideration, that is pretty much me... I collect stuff, I am good at finding all manner of justifications for new stuff... I would add, though, that the stuff that I 'adopt' usually is others discards and or nature finds or really good bargains, and of course those allow me to consider myself as NOT a materialist, I just collect alot of stuff.... mostly to make more stuff out of. How much fun is that?
In the end I suppose I save it from arriving at the dump sooner than it would have...
lately I have learned the term 're-purposing' ...
I suppose that in a manner of speaking my 'self' is also undergoing a form of re-purposing too...

bye for now,
And...

This is the entry that I have put on my website's 'under construction' page it is a bit more complete than this site's first entry...
…And so it begins…How about a bit of background… I have been, to one degree or another, obsessed with mandalas and all things good and round since ever I can remember…I drew round stuff, early in my teens I photographed round stuff with my Dad’s old Vogtländer camera and then, later, with his Canon. Round stuff, wagon wheels, cut off log ends… ooh, and I love stones shaped like smarties too. At 14 I designed and drew my first round house and mandalas having discovered what they are. Later I bought a giant school bus painted it magic and set off for beautiful BC to build my dream home a round stack wood house…Which didn’t happen…and then I was detirmined to build and live in a Keekwillie for a year…which didn’t happen…later still I designed my round Yoga studio…which didn’ t happen either…and finally I also managed to successfully not purchase a Ti Pi nor set it up and live in it for a year too…sometimes life ‘hip checks’ us just hard enough to send us off doing not exactly the thing we think that we want to be doing (say that one three times really fast)… but each dream morphed into an equally interesting dream project… projects I have always had a plenty The round stackwood became a log house that I built with a friend, the keekwillie turned into me buying an old church and turning it into home, add along the way chickens, a goat, a pig and an iguana. The yoga studio ended up being me buying an almost hundred year old grocery store and the Ti Pi well so far it just got lost in the shuffle. And fast forward and we find me out of the literal woods and into the virtual woods, I have acquired a couple of electronic toys that I would never have dreamed of when I was hauling water from the creek and collecting eggs from my chickens. And the result of about 20 years worth of ideas is this…Mandalalama, a place to share ideas and stories and some of my artwork and passions and make available for purchase some of the fun things that I think should be out in the world at large…. more is coming….bye for now,
Stay well,
And be