Mandala
Sacred Mandala project
Over the last two years, the Mandala unit has been an absolute favorite amongst students in the HS Art Foundations class. Inspired by Tibetan sand mandalas, students created their own mandala design expressing themselves through symbols and colors. This studio work began with students independently brainstorming significant events that have taken place in their lives, what they are passionate about and what dreams they hold dear. They wrote out their statements of truth and created illustrations from these statements. As a class, we learned about abstract art and how a realistic, representational image can be abstracted. Students began abstracting and morphing their original illustrations into more simplified designs with a focus on pattern, shape and line. In groups, students explored symbolic meanings from numerous cultures around the world and incorporated a symbol into the abstraction process. Eventually, a finalised design was traced multiple times to form a circle. Each student chose a split complementary color scheme to employ after researching the psychological meaning of color. At the completion of the mandala, each student wrote an artist statement in support of the meaning and process behind this artwork. The mandalas are visually stunning, but more importantly, they tell us a deeply personal story about the students artists themselves.
Artist Statement examples:
Aimee Zvinakis 