My idea for this artwork was to honor Ithaca as the home of a large, vibrant Tibetan community as well as the location of the original American Brahman Bookstore. The bookstore was founded in 1967 and ultimately led to the building of Wisdom’s Goldenrod in Hector. The Wisdom’s Goldennrod community has had a special relationship with the Dalai Lama through Anthony Damiani, its founder.
I began this artwork with a sketch I had made on the grounds of Wisdom’s Goldenrod of the Buddhist Bodhisattva/Goddess of Compassion and photos of the Namgyal Monastery (including a mandala), Buddhist prayer flags, Cayuga Lake and the American Brahman Bookstore, After creating a collage with these photos that I had digitally retouched, and my sketched statue (repeated to form a semicircle of three), also digitally retouched to add color, I uploaded the work to the AI program DALL-E-2 to create a variation of my image. This process rendered a more abstract version with the three statues. I then reinserted the photos and made additional artistic changes in Procreate.