I grew up and went to college in Michigan and am now living in Chicago. I decided in '93 to begin working in color pencil and created my first mandala in the fall of '93 as a part of a series I was creating. A little later I wanted to create a big mandala but had no big paper so I taped and glued some notebook paper together into a big piece of paper. After the first mandala I stuck with this process and have since made around 20 large color pencil mandalas.

The images I am submitting represent my latest phase of mandala. After college, art became a focus on spirituality. Each of the mandala was basically a meditation on the idea "the infinite faces of God." I cannot claim to have a strong discipline of meditation but each mandala was another glimpse or reach into the Divine.

Around the year 2001 the mandalas became a bit more complex, The set Truth-Beauty-Justice was not only my first tryptich but also represented an attempt to relate 'higher ideals'. Truth and Beauty were well within the series before but Justice represented a new level of the mandala for me. Around this time I also became more interested in politics and history, economics and power structures. I read many books to learn better why I had a liberal opinion and just what that actually means. It felt like the first time I really cared about being a citizen rather than just an artist.