Our goal in creating our artwork and evolutionary services is to catalyze the awakening of global being. In 1993, after twenty years of intensive spiritual practice, we found ourselves drawn into life-changing embrace with the Earth. Everything we were as spirit began melding with its matter-partner. We left our previous work and moved into rural Mendocino County, California. There we were able to drop into a period of deep retreat and transformation. In order to comprehend the process we were going through, we began making art. Working with close-up photographs of Nature, both via collage and later with computer software, we created images that conveyed the alchemical fusion of heavenly and earthly elements into a new self-luminous reality. We called this lit-up world the GaiaStar.

Bonnie Gold Bell and David Sun Todd

We didn't know going into the retreat that we would come out as artists. David was formerly the publisher and editor of a small publishing house and co-founder of a software company. Bonnie was a spiritual educator, midwife, and alchemical mix-mistress. She also founded the non-profit Center for Sacred Arts. So while we had been connected with visual arts, our personal work had been more with words than images. However, our creative vocabulary expanded radically when we began working with photographs. By capturing and re-mixing pictures of Nature we could tap into whole reservoirs of vibrant information.

"We thought of ourselves as translators; people who decipher a message in one language and encode it into another. We had the experience of making contact at a core level with our planet and finding it full of spirit-light and presence. Our immediate mission was to find a way to "notate", in the form of visual (photographic) information, the vibrational essences we drew from that contact. When we selected a portion of a photograph, it became a bit of source code which we reassembled into mandala images. The images could then speak in the Earth's visual voice about the emergence of a new global possibility."

—from GaiaStar Mandalas: Ecstatic Visions of the Living Earth by Bonnie Bell and David Todd (Pomegranate Communications, 2001)

To read the entire story of how we came to create our art, click here.

Three of Bonnie’s illustrated magazine articles on art and healing are accessible through the links below:

Click here to read “In Search of the Goddess” (Common Ground magazine), the story of how creating and working with thirteen goddess mandalas were key support in Bonnie’s recovery from advanced cancer.

Click here to read “Becoming New: Using Your Six Senses to Empower Your Progress” (soulfulliving.com magazine), which explores many ways to engage with natural beauty for the sake of wellness.

Click here to read “Mandala Blessings: Art that Heals and Transforms” (soulfulliving.com magazine), which shares insights into how contemplating sacred art supports personal and global healing.