There is surely some deep connection between my love of whirling like a dervish and my enjoyment of making mandalas. Both are centring techniques, and a whirling skirt is as circular as a mandala is. Whirling is the wild, active, Sufi approach, while mandalas are the calm, quiet, Buddhist approach to the same search, to find the eye of the chaotic whirlwind within our minds, the silent centre that is the seat of the being.

I initially discovered both mandala-making and whirling in Pune, India, in 1999, when I visited the 20th-century Indian mystic Osho’s former commune (now called Osho International meditation resort), for the first time. These two meditation techniques enabled me to indulge my aesthetic sense  – always the source of my deepest joys – at the same time as they enhanced my centring and awareness. So, although my enjoyment of the sensations of spinning like a top, and of playing with form and colour, engages me at least as much as any conscious idea of meditation, whirling and mandala-making have certainly played a part in my journey towards a deeper relationship with existence. This inner journey was given shape and inspiration by Osho’s magnificent vision, which I also first came across in Pune in 1999.

I realised some years ago that many elements and aspects of this vision are encoded within the designs of my mandalas, although I am quite unaware of this echo when I am creating them. This is the magic of the mandala form and its universalising structure, which makes it a natural vehicle for the expression of mystic concepts. For the same reason perhaps, although I have no particular interest in traditional symbols or imagery, and make no conscious reference to them in my work, these, too, may seem to appear from time to time.

Just as this esoteric content is never a deliberate intention on my part, I do not create the mandalas with any intentionally mystical or healing purpose in mind. I always work only from a place of simple joy in the play of forms and colours, and wonder at the complex and decorative patterns that emerge from the lines I draw, as it were, blindly, without planning and without much concern for the end result. Yet it has been made clear to me that these mandalas are nonetheless strongly active forces for healing and awakening the consciousness. They are expressing much more than I as an artist consciously put into them.

In fact they don’t contain much of me at all. They are also wholly unrelated to my personality or my life experiences. Aside from my enjoyment of beauty and colour, they have nothing to do with me as a psychological being. Neither are they inspired or influenced by anything I may see in the world outside me  – I do not need or seek any inspiration as such at all. They are coming from beyond the personality who writes these words. So these personal details about me and my life will not give much insight into the art that I create. I am not in that sense a typical Western artist. I feel more kinship with the anonymous artists of ancient and non-Westernised cultures, or with medium artists.

The only aspects of my personality that seem relevant perhaps are my lifelong preference for non-Western arts and worldviews, and my passionate love of India. From early childhood, the one thing I knew for certain was that I needed and deeply desired to be in India, although I had no idea why, and ignored this clear message for many years. I grew up in a lush and leafy part of southern England, with a link to the subcontinent through my mother, who had spent her childhood here. The few Indian mementoes in my grandparents’ house always attracted me, and I remember feeling very at home with their reminiscences of life in India.

I also felt that I wanted to be an artist, but not in the Western tradition. As a child, I was drawn to the arts of the Orient – from Persian miniatures and Islamic ceramic work to Indian temples and silk paintings, to Chinese ivories and Japanese prints – all of them characterised by a strong sense of design, rhythmical patterns, frequently brilliant colours and an abundance of decorative detail.

I did not find much space for this aesthetic preference on the foundation course at what is now known as University College of the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey, however. Unwilling to be processed into a mainstream avant-garde ’artist’ working to values I had no feeling for, I left the course after a few months and, somewhat ironically, ended up studying Western art history (there wasn’t much non-Western art history available in those days) at the Courtauld Insititute of Art in London. This at least enabled me to focus on those artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose work was influenced by the arts and worldviews of non-Western cultures.