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Mandala to a Book!


Over the weekend, I finished reading "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and it is just excellent! It inspired me to create a mandala dedicated to 'arting' the highlights from the book in order to remember the most important parts -- from my perspective. It took some time to condense my notes to the main points that could fit in the piece. Above are some photos of it.

The red/white side has quotes from Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and the other side has the painted drawings of the four men (that Lincoln won) who competed for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1860 and my handwritten highlights. Both the book and mandala have actually been a labor of love and learning. I started reading the book in October. It is so large (750 pages) that I felt overwhelmed with the effort it would take to read it. But the writing made it so easy, and the book is now one of my favorites. The mandala was a learning exercise too and called me to be ok with experimentation because its not meant to be a professional piece of art; rather it's meant to be a visual book summary. If you wanted to do something like this to recall the information in a book, what book would you choose to create a mandala for?

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