11 Monday Oct 2010
Posted in digital art, gallery, mandala
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Dr. Carl Sagan quotes
The act of creating mandalas inspires my sense of wonder. An apple is such an easy thing to take for granted, and yet, it is also a miracle.
The source photo was taken today of an apple we ‘picked’ last weekend, because I couldn’t leave the apple theme without looking inside.
Apple Core Mandala - source photo
Apple Core Mandala - detail
08 Friday Oct 2010
Posted in digital art, gallery, mandala
06 Wednesday Oct 2010
Posted in digital art, gallery, mandala
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“With an apple I will astonish Paris.”
Paul Cézanne, French Artist (1839-1906)
“To me apples are fruit. To Cezanne they were mountains.”
David Smith, artist, sculptor. (1906-1965)
This mandala was made with an photo taken of a bin of apples at Thiessen’s Orchard, where we went to pick apples on Sunday. Expect to see more apple mandalas in the next few days. With all the appleness in our house lately, we got wondering where in the world apples originated. I thought the answer was fascinating.
Stolen shamelessly directly from Wikipedia, here it is,
The center of diversity of the genus Malus is in eastern Turkey. The apple tree was perhaps the earliest tree to be cultivated,[9] and its fruits have been improved through selection over thousands of years. Alexander the Great is credited with finding dwarfed apples in Asia Minor in 300 BCE;[4] those he brought back to Macedonia might have been the progenitors of dwarfing root stocks. Winter apples, picked in late autumn and stored just above freezing, have been an important food in Asia and Europe for millennia, as well as in Argentina and in the United States since the arrival of Europeans.[9] Apples were brought to North America with colonists in the 17th century,[4] and the first apple orchard on the North American continent was said to be near Boston in 1625. In the 20th century, irrigation projects in Washington state began and allowed the development of the multibillion dollar fruit industry, of which the apple is the leading species.[4]
The wild ancestors of Malus domestica are Malus sieversii, found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang, China,[5] and possibly also Malus sylvestris.[6]
In 2010, an Italian-led consortium announced they had decoded the complete genome of the apple (Golden delicious variety).[7] It had about 57,000 genes, the highest number of any plant genome studied to date and more genes than the human genome (about 30,000).[8]
Apple Mandala - detail
Apple Mandala - source
