Nature Mandala

I am someone who is fascinated by the work of Andrew Goldsworthy, and someone who admires the patience and perseverance that it takes to collect the materials and create the artworks. Something that both Goldsworthy and James Brunt do is create a gradient effect often in their works. In this assignment I attempted to create a similar effect by using pine cones with different saturation levels.

To begin, I first cleared an area of sticks and leaves so that the emphasis in the photo would be upon the artwork. Next, I collected more pine cones than I would need, so I that I could have a choice of the best ones. After that I began forming the mandala trying to create an evenly spaced spiral inspired by a snail shell. I tried to create a gradient from the orange of the newer pine cones to the black and sometimes white of the very old pine cones, but this was not shown effectively in any of the photographs I captured.

I am happy with how the actual spiral form turned out, and in real life, the gradient effect created looked very good. Now that I am looking at the finished product, I wished I had made it larger, so that the gradient effect was more pronounced, and that so it looked more like a mandala. All in all I am happy that I did this assignment because it got me thinking about non-traditional (or perhaps the most traditional) mediums.