With kingfisher, bramble, rose, convolvulus, bryony, bracken, hazel, crab apple, puffball mushroom; butterflies: speckled wood, common blue, red admiral

 

This mandala features pentagonal geometry and it's inherent expression as a Golden Spiral, the spiral form that unfolds abundantly throughout nature, from tiny fronds to vast galaxies. It offers us repeated glimpses of an underlying order to things: a ratio of relationship between parts of things and the wholeness of themselves; between whole things and their surroundings, echoed through and through and through. The main theme of pentagonal geometry is regeneration, which you can see in the way the five pointed stars repeat within the design; stars within stars. Totally mesmorising!

 

The painting is set during the turning point of summer giving way to autumn, with the equinox threshold approaching; a swirling time of change and counter-currents. The last of the warm summery days are edged with a chill in the air. The plants are fruiting, even as they begin to die back, leaves drying and changing colour. The joyful abundance is tempered by an urgency for gathering in, in readiness for the dark and cold of winter.

 

Unusually for my mandalas, the design also includes a human; a pregnant woman carrying new life, her belly a seed pod of fruitfulness. Pentagonal and spiral geometry is part of our nature, too! She is embodying this unceasing spiral journey of relationship, of herself to the unborn child, of herself to the more than human world; in a constant renewal of perspectives.