I’m not a big fan of winter.  It’s now the beginning of February and I feel like I haven’t been warm in months.  The sun is shining as I write this but that is a rarity in this land of eternal cloud cover.  BUT, it is 3 degrees!  Fahrenheit!  Of course that is an improvement of 15 or 20 degrees over last week.  To survive the winters, I have to create my own version of sunshine and warmth.  That’s what I thought I would do with today’s mandalas.

This is no flower more capable of making me and most people smile than a sunflower.  The original image used here is a sunflower from our garden that I photographed in the studio last summer.  I always think that sunflowers are, already, mandalas.  That beautiful and amazing Fibonacci spiral in the center never fails to intrigue me.  As I played with this image and made a few mandalas, discarded a few, and then realized that I could create new types of sunflowers with different patterns in the center.  In no way do I think these are an improvement over that fascinating pattern that is present in all sunflowers, they are just different.  Re-imagining is a fun and useful exercise in art and life.  How have you re-imagined something lately?