Award-winning artist Miya Ando
Miya Ando, the renowned New York artist, has created a special series of paintings that will be auctioned off to raise funds for the Tibetan Nuns Project, a registered charity based in Seattle and India.
All proceeds of the sale of the paintings, after the small fees from the auction house, will be donated by the artist to the Tibetan Nuns Project and will be used to provide food, shelter, education and health care to over 700 Tibetan Buddhist nuns living in seven nunneries in northern India.
Her five prayer flag paintings on metal will be auctioned over a two-week period from March 8-23 2015. The launch of the auction will coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8th.
The online auction where the paintings may be viewed is at http://paddle8.com/auction/tibetan The auction opens on March 8 and closes on March 23 2015.
This is the second time that the award-winning artist has created a series of paintings in support of the Tibetan Nuns Project. As one journalist has noted, Ando works in cold steel, but her heart is warm and compassionate.
Prayer flags are an iconic symbol of Tibet. Traditionally, prayer flags come in sets of five, arranged from left to right in a specific order: blue, white, red, green, and yellow. The five colors represent the elements and the Five Pure Lights.
Prayer Flag Blue by Miya Ando for the Tibetan Nuns Project. 12x12inches, urethane pigment, mineral dust, dye, resin, 2014. Blue symbolizes sky and space and exemplifies the awakened mind.
Traditionally, prayer flags are used to promote peace, compassion, strength, and wisdom. Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread the good will and compassion into all pervading space, bringing benefit to all.
Miya Ando is a descendant of Japanese Bizen sword makers and was raised among swordsmiths and Buddhist priests in a temple in Okayama, Japan. Using the traditional techniques of her ancestry, she skillfully transforms sheets of burnished industrial steel into sublime metal canvases, using heat and chemicals.
Prayer Flag Green by Miya Ando for the Tibetan Nuns Project. 12x12inches, urethane pigment, mineral dust, dye, resin, 2014. The color green represents water and stands for meaningful action.
Miya Ando’s sublime metal canvases use traditional techniques of her ancestry. She skillfully transforms sheets of burnished industrial steel, using heat and chemicals, into ephemeral abstractions suffused with subtle gradations of color.
“I have a deep appreciation for the dynamic properties of metal and its ability to reflect light,” says Miya Ando.
Prayer Flag Red by Miya Ando for the Tibetan Nuns Project. 12x12inches, urethane pigment, mineral dust, dye, resin, 2014. Red symbolizes fire and love and compassion.
“Metal simultaneously conveys strength and permanence and yet in the same instant can appear delicate, fragile, luminous, soft, ethereal. The medium becomes both a contradiction and juxtaposition for expressing notions of evanescence, including ideas such as the transitory and ephemeral nature of all things, quietude and the underlying impermanence of everything.”
Here is a video about Miya Ando produced by the Tricycle Foundation.
After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in East Asian Studies, Ando attended Yale University to study Buddhist iconography and imagery before apprenticing at the Hattori Studio in Japan.
She apprenticed at the master metalsmith Hattori Studio in Japan, followed by a residency at Northern California’s Public Art Academy in 2009.
Prayer Flag Yellow by Miya Ando for the Tibetan Nuns Project. 12x12inches, urethane pigment, mineral dust, dye, resin, 2014. Yellow symbolizes earth and the qualities of equanimity and generosity.
Ando is the recipient of many awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2012. Her work has been exhibited extensively all over the world, including a recent show curated by Nat Trotman of the Guggenheim Museum.
Miya Ando has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot tall commemorative sculpture in London built from World Trade Center steel to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to own a Miya Ando original and help the nuns at the same time. Visit the auction site and also please spread the word widely.
Prayer Flag White by Miya Ando for the Tibetan Nuns Project. 12x12inches, urethane pigment, mineral dust, dye, resin, 2014. The color white symbolizes the air and wind and represents the transcendent quality of diamond clarity.