THE GOLDEN WHEEL
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Golden Wheel was a picture that grew beyond the drawing paper on which I began. It started with someone telling me they’d seen a Celtic stone in Ireland on which were carved four figures whose legs interlaced in a curious swastika pattern. So that’s what I drew just from that verbal description. As with the picture Rebirth it is a Quaternity of balanced opposites. But then I ran out of space at the page edges so I mounted the picture on white board, drew the four roundels separately and pasted them in place; and finished off the picture by drawing directly onto the board. The four figures, going clockwise from the top, are human avatars representing the abstract principles of Spirituality, Physicality, Emotionality and Intellectuality. The roundels above each one's head presents each principle in a different symbolic language. This colourful, counter-spinning, Celtic-ish yin-yang logo came about largely as a matter of chance. It was an experiment. All I was aiming for was to get the roundel spinning in one direction, which is in fact what it does. That the central and outer rings appear to be rotating in opposite directions is purely an illusion that was an accidental bonus. Serendipity is the word . . . As you can see, the roundel is taken from the picture above. The idea behind it was to take the basic yin-yang motif of opposed but complemantary opposites - black and white - but then further break them down into the opposed but equally complementary colours pictured in the Golden Wheel. So within the black half you have red and blue - action and spirituality - and within the white half you have yellow and green - thought and feeling.