Adam Blatner

You may have noticed that my drawings and mandalas are less than perfect or professionally painted. This is for several reasons: (1) Ideas come thick and fast, and so I get impatient. (2) I confess to being a little lazy. (3) I want to get this out to you while they’re still fresh in my brain. Making them perfect would take ten times as long and yet it wouldn’t significantly improve the message. (4) The reality that I envision synthesizes both a degree of order, expressed as symmetry, and spontaneity, expressed as free variations in form.

(The content here is that people discern the outflowing in terms of their own culture. The mandala is of four temples at the four edges of the mandala, all reflecting the way essence operates within slightly more elaborated essence which operates within cultural further elaborations.)

But the message of just doodling these forms is to promote playfulness, the bliss of freedom to fool around. Being painstakingly accurate gives the opposite message, as if to say (as was a norm in the mid 20th century when I was a kid), “If you’re going to do it you must do it right—just right—perfectly!” I don’t buy this. I honor those who are more exact in their art. But I don’t claim to be an artist so much as a minor prophet who sketches diagrams as visual aids in my attempting to communicate the dynamism of the world emerging from dream realms, focusing and to a degree as yet not widely recognized, from the dream world birthing form and event into our one waking world.

I suggest the pre-forms that seek expression. I cannot do it by myself. My hope is to liberate your imagination so that everyone, from kids to elders, will doodle, too. When enough of y’all get on board, it will become mainstream. Kids will be taught to doodle or draw, and it’s another way to express spontaneity in art!