Saturday, July 19, 2014

Josephine's mandalas: #1 of 21




















In my mother's 74th year she wrote words and made marks and drawings on the inside cover of a spiral notebook.  I am guessing that this was in the context of having been a volunteer who helped out with the children at Starcross Community, and then in the context of having felt drawn to learn about Judaism from the Mendocino Jewish Community because she had a strong sense that she had Jewish ancestors on her German father's side of the family.  On October 18, 1989, she began a formal series of mandalas, completing 20 more of them.  Her final mandala was dated July 12, 1991.  My mother died on December 3, 1994, and the mandalas came to me.  I scanned them at the end of December 2013 and have been meaning to post them ever since.

These mandalas came near the end of her lifetime of spiritual seeking.  My mother had narcolepsy and told me that she made some of these as she drifted back and forth between waking and sleeping.  In that dream state she would hear words in her mind and see images and record them in the mandalas.  

I can imagine my mother keeping a blog and reading blogs.  She was a lifelong reader and creative spirit.  She wrote short stories and poetry until she was about 50 years old.  She had dreamed of being a writer since childhood.  She did no more creative writing after that time, but she turned her attention first to watercolors and Japanese brush painting and then on to silkscreening, batik, stained glass, and finally to complex colorful pattern knitting in her last years.

Click on the images for all of the fine details.  I hope to post one of her mandalas every day for the next 20 days and hope to gain some new insight about my mysterious mother through that process.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your mother's art work is really quite beautiful and the story of her spiritual journey incredibly interesting. I am looking forward to the next 20 days of art.

jarvenpa said...

Thank you for sharing these