About Dave Youngman - Artist
The Inspiration
The inspiration for my artwork comes from a fascination with the ancient stone works throughout the world, earth energies, a respect and interest with indigenous medicine wheels, and the spiritual significance surrounding them.
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Often situated on beautiful rolling grasslands overlooking grand vistas added to their allure for me. Back-dropped by the stars, showing their alignment and calibration with them, Is simply amazing. Perhaps a better term for them would be prairie temples.
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Re-creating them in artwork, both in existing and fictitious variety has been something I've wanted to do for some time. The crop circle designs were a natural extension from the medicine wheel format, given my interest in them as well. Most crop circle designs are quite complex, but I continue to come up with new methods of recreating them.
Please revisit the site as I continually do new designs in this type of format, and I am always coming up with other types of original artworks as well.
The Construction
Tiny stones in black, natural, and rainbow rock, as well as various vegetation placed individually into a pulp and plaster substrate topped with either latex and white paint for a snowdrift effect, sand or hobby turf. After curing, the artwork is glued to a backboard and mounted in aged and distressed rough-cut cedar frames, behind glass with frosted borders. The sacred OM symbol and Pythagorean symbol for well-being are done in the 3 colors of rock, as well as white rock on the white textured background, and also brown or black sand.
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The rustic wood frames are hand-made, rough cut cedar that I artificially age,distress, and stain.
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About Medicine Wheels
The Medicine Wheel was a term first used by European settlers who came to Wyoming. This term was used in reference to an 80 foot diameter stone wheel pattern that sits atop Medicine Mountain in the Wyoming Big Horn Range.
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Medicine Wheels were known by some Native American tribes as a sacred hoop. For many of these tribes the medicine wheels are known as metaphors for many spiritual concepts, sometimes with astronomical and/or territorial values.
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Each medicine wheel is unique in form, some of which have been added to by the generations that followed in the footsteps of their original builders.
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There are numerous variations of design, however, it is believed that there are 8 main types.
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The oldest known Medicine Wheel is near Majorville Alberta, named "Old Big Arrangement". Carbon dating of a bone fragment found in it's central cairn dates to around 2500 BC. There are 46 known medicine wheels in Alberta which comprises 66% of all known medicine wheels.
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The Majorville formation is the only one known of it's type in Alberta - and interestingly, lies less than one half of a degree latitude from Stonehenge. "Old big arrangement" (left photo), Bighorn medicine wheel (right photo)
