Information:
Painted in 2023, later assigned Design index number 004 for the studio records, titled the Lion Summer Mandala.
Photoshop and Wacom Cintiq/Stylus
Artist Statement
The Lion Summer Mandala marks an early, direct test of what the radial format could handle and what my digital skills were ready to build. Moving past pure abstract rings, this was the first piece where I broke into representative drawing, testing how stylized figures could sit inside the discipline of the circle.
The imagery pulls straight from personal history: a lifelong resonance with Leo as a symbol of creative fire, coupled with memories of traveling through southern Spain at age fourteen and encountering the stone lion fountain at the Alhambra. I drew the lion heads to read like stained glass, lit from behind so the gold, amber, and tawny fields feel hot and active against the gradient sun rays.
My background in esoteric and occult philosophy has always shaped how I understand energy flow, and here that occult grammar simply runs the composition. The work is not an academic exercise. It’s a straightforward, honest push to see how much personal vitality, warmth, and symbolic weight I could pour into a mandala without breaking its balance.
Studio Notes for Catalog
Midsummer has a weight that belongs to no other season. In the peak of August, the late afternoon sun stops being ordinary light and takes on a heavy, burnished quality. It turns the atmosphere into something dense and golden, holding its saturated intensity long before yielding to twilight.
That specific quality of light has followed me since I was fourteen years old, on a bus traveling through the dry landscapes of southern Spain. Moving from Malaga up through Andalusia toward Madrid, we stopped at the Alhambra in Granada. Standing in the Court of the Lions was my first encounter with geometric abstraction on an architectural scale.
Because Islamic sacred art avoids human representation, the entire palace relies on mathematical rhythm, interlocking geometries, and stylized forms. From a few steps back, the walls and courtyards read as pure texture and calm proportion. Move closer, and the surface resolves into layered systems of intricate depth. At the center sat the fountain, twelve carved stone lions surrounding a stone basin, acting as both an engineering marvel of water channels and a symbolic timepiece.
Years later, when that memory resurfaced in the studio, it merged with the stained glass rose windows I had seen in Sevilla and other European cathedrals. I wanted to see what happened when stylized figuration deliberately pushed through the clean geometry of my mandalas.
The Lion Summer Mandala is the result of that collision. I drew the lion heads to look lit from behind, as though backlit by high sun through colored glass. Saturated tawny golds and amber fields run directly against deep lapis shadows, capturing the intensity of an August sky. It represents the moment in my practice where the Hidden Light took on the face of a living, mythic presence: an inner nature that burns hot, works deliberately, and leaves an unapologetic mark on the world.
I could not yet identify the melody, but the sparkling flashes of inspired illumination behind the subject’s appearance alone had attracted my attention. My curiosity at this subtle quality of compositions had begun to work its siren song, and the hunt for the Hidden Light had begun, just beyond my conscious notice.