||| FROM DAVE KOSIUR for ORCAS ISLAND LIBRARY ||
This month, the Orcas Island Library features work by Michael Armenia, a multidisciplinary artist. As Michael has said: “I live every moment as an artist whether I am composing music, writing prose or poetry, painting, creating digital works, or washing the dishes in my kitchen. All that I think needs to be said is this: “to be a fully actualized human, one must be a whole-hearted and steadfast artist. And to be a great artist, one must be a skilled alchemist. I constantly endeavor to hone those skills.”
His exhibit, Mandala Alchemy, stems from the digital transformation of imagery into the form of mandalas. Regardless of subject matter or medium, a visual image is distilled to an essence Michael calls the ‘seed’. That seed (which may be naturally colored by the palette of the source or intelligently colorized) is replicated with transformations (such as reflection, rotation, and scaling according to sacred geometry) applied at each stage, until finally layered symmetrically into a composite mandala. What began as an analysis of audio waveforms for video became a meditative exercise in alchemy which he performs at least once daily on an arbitrary image inspired by another artist, typically a nature photograph or an abstract painting.
