Australian artist Sheba Blitz brings hand-painted mandalas, virtual art and photography into Second Life.
One of the pleasures of having artists exhibit at Cloud Galleries is discovering that what appears on the gallery walls is often only one part of their creative story.
That is certainly true of Sheba Blitz.
Sheba is an Australian artist who has been exhibiting in Second Life since 2008. Although she has explored many forms of art over the years, one form continually draws her back.
The circle.
Finding Order in the Circle
Sheba describes herself as a mandala artist working with symmetrical geometric designs and sacred, mystical symbols of the universe.
For Sheba, there is purpose behind all that symmetry. She describes creating mandalas as a way of centering oneself and “transforming inner chaos to order.”
That idea becomes much easier to understand when standing in front of her work.
The mandalas currently exhibited at Cloud Galleries are extraordinarily detailed.
Circles within circles combine repeating patterns, symbols, color and geometry around a carefully balanced center. Some hang traditionally as framed artwork, while smaller circular pieces descend vertically through the gallery space.
There is something else worth knowing about them: the original mandalas are created by hand in the physical world.
According to Sheba’s information at Cloud, the works are hand-painted and designed in RL, with no computer or digital input used in their creation.
In a 2016 interview, Sheba Blitz described working in mixed media on canvas and paper, painting with gouache, acrylics and metallic paints.
Her finished RL mandalas were then scanned and brought into Second Life.
Art Between Two Worlds
That is where Sheba’s work becomes particularly interesting to me.
Second Life isn’t simply another wall on which to hang a reproduction of a physical painting. Once an artwork enters a virtual world, it can become something else.
In Second Life, Sheba has taken her artwork beyond the traditional framed image, creating virtual pieces that include dream catchers, sculpture and mixed-media work. Her Second Life art stretches back many years, including participation in exhibitions and virtual-world art competitions.
There is a wonderful circularity to that.
Something meticulously created by hand in Australia can become a virtual object in Second Life.
It can then be exhibited in a gallery that exists only in a digital world and experienced by someone almost anywhere on Earth.
The physical and virtual don’t cancel one another out. They become different parts of the same artistic practice.
In brief: Sheba Blitz is an Australian artist who has exhibited in Second Life since 2008. Best known for her hand-painted geometric mandalas, she also creates virtual artwork and Second Life photography. Her work can currently be seen at Cloud Galleries and Kultivate Galleries.
Sheba Blitz: Art in Second Life
And then there is another side of her work.
Alongside the mandalas at Cloud are several pieces of Second Life photography. When I went looking for more of Sheba’s work, I found more photography at her gallery space at Kultivate Galleries.
Landscapes, trees, flowers and fantastical scenes appear alongside her mandalas there.
I like seeing the two together.
The mandalas begin with Sheba’s hands in the physical world and travel into Second Life. Her photographs make the opposite journey: they begin with places that exist inside Second Life and emerge as finished images that can be viewed outside it.
Together, they make the distinction between RL artist and SL artist feel rather unnecessary.
Sheba is simply an artist working with the tools and worlds available to her.
Finding Sheba Blitz in Second Life
You can currently find Sheba’s work in at least two places in Second Life.
At Cloud Galleries in Novatron, you can see the exhibition that first sent me looking more closely at Sheba’s work. The glass-walled gallery opens onto the gardens outside, allowing her intensely patterned mandalas to sit against a much quieter landscape.
Visit Sheba Blitz at Cloud Galleries.
Sheba also has work exhibited at Kultivate Galleries in Water Haven, where I found another collection of her mandalas alongside a larger selection of her Second Life photography.
Visit Sheba Blitz at Kultivate Galleries.
What began for me as a closer look at the newest artist at Cloud turned into something considerably more interesting: an artist who has spent years allowing creativity to move back and forth between two worlds.
And perhaps that suits the mandala rather well.
A circle, after all, doesn’t really have a beginning or an end.
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