Title: Untitled Mandala

Media: Colored pencil and oil pastel on white paper

Size: 22" x 22"

Framing: unframed

Price or Current disposition: $700.00

Date: 1987

Comments: One of a number of mandalas worked and reworked over several years until it became just an expressionistic sphere of color. This is one that seems to me both problematic and important. Many of the mandalas reworked during this period went through phases much like this but then I ended up turning them into something more pleasing to the eye, more dreamy, more pastel, more sellable. However some of those reworkings seemed to mask what I found to be important formative stages. A work like this is virtually impossible to sell and is most likely to draw a comment of disdain like "my kid could do that." So, does that mean that I should not do it, or that I should not put it out there? If the work exists as a record of my exploration, and not principally as a decoration for someone's home or office then it has value more truly as art, as an artifact, and not merely as an object of craft or some kind of objet d'art. Indeed, from my own perspective, from my own experience, this has greater intrinsic value than many of the more graphic works that I've been able to sell.