Mandala

This is my Madala.  It was super fun to make! We were asked to make it have radial symmetry, we were asked to inorperate things in our life that we love.  I love music, I love gardening, I love the change of seasons, I love birds, I love the ocean...etc... We were also told to use markers and create a different sort of texture with them.  I didnt want bright markers on my pretty pastel looking thing, so i decided to take a paper towel and color it with marker and then smear my mandala with it.  It looks like chalk on my mandala but it is really marker.  I loved how this turned out-- it really came out nicely. 

What is Art?

It would be difficult to find a definition of "art" that is applicable to everyone.  Art is such an emotionally based, abstract idea almost, that it is hard to discredit something that someone finds artistic.  If an individual thinks something "unusual" to be art, how could you defend that it couldn't be art because "an animal or a baby made it" or because it wasn't created at all?  You couldn't, because to that person, it IS art. I can, however, explain how I define art for myself.  I view something to be art when I feel an emotional response to something that I see.  I see art when I simply pay attention to life- a beautiful building that someone designed, graffiti on the side of a cargo train, a picture that a child has created, a lovely flowerbed, the mountains, a sunset... For me, everything is a creation of art if I just pay attention to it; made by animals, children, people, and God.