AN INTERVIEW WITH VISIONARY ARTISTS:
GAGE TAYLOR & URIEL DANA
by Jon Keeyes
Since 1984, Visionary Artists Gage Taylor and Uriel Dana have been delivering a spiritual message to people around the world. Using vivid landscapes, mystical imagery and detailed colors, these two masters have crafted some of the most entrancing art the world has seen. One simply has to glance at their paintings to feel themselves being wrapped in the loving arms of the universe, while their soul opens to the profound metaphysical undercurrent that traverses the realms of memory, lives and history. Their artwork is an open door to the ethereal dimensions of self discovery.
Having studied art his entire life, Gage found his passion in the late 1960’s when his spirit awoke to the soul of the land. It was here that he discovered the seeds of spiritual landscape painting. By 1972, his artwork was being distributed as cards and posters, and he had showings at museums around the world. He had found his niche, his desire, and he revolutionized the art world with his new style now known as visionary art. In his own right, Gage had become an established artist of profound impact.
Uriel Dana came from a Rosicrucian family, having been weaned on the occult, Edgar Cayce and the other mystery studies. As a child, she undertook her own sacred studies, and had fully delved into the metaphysical world by her teenage years. In truth, Uriel didn’t begin painting until she was 27, and by 1983 had established herself as an artist, curator, and lecturer through an exhibit called, “Crystal Energy” at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. It was in 1984 that the two artists met and felt a connection spanning many levels. Gage took Uriel as his apprentice and before long the two had become full-fledged partners.
Since 1984, their collaborative artwork (as well as their solo work) has been sold around the world, capturing both international awards as well as the attention of many private collectors. Visit nearly any metaphysical bookstore or spiritual gift shop and you will undoubtedly find their artwork on cards, calendars, CD covers, and more. Together, and individually, Gage Taylor and Uriel Dana have shaped lives and delivered strong spiritual messages through their art.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Gage and Uriel about their art, their spiritual philosophies and the development of their own potential. Here’s what they shared:
Spirit:
How did your childhood influence the future of your art?
Uriel:
I can think of three positive and one negative influence off the top of my head. The first influence would have to be a sleeping disorder that would lead me to over a 25 year path of Tibetan Dream Yoga. Surrealism is about combining two realities not usually found together. This is how I have lived my life, combining the waking and the sleeping dream.
The second would have to be my Rosicrucian background. I was weaned on the secret doctrines and by first grade, I was pretty well initiated. When my peers were reading Little House On The Prairie, I was reading about Edgar Cayce, the Hopi Indians, with a little Think and Grow Rich thrown in for balance. I had a very strict bedtime, 7:30 p.m. There was, however, a loophole: I could stay awake in bed as long as I wanted if I was reading a book. I think it was the illustrations in children’s books that inspired me to do art, but it was the paintings in religious books that caught my souls attention. I also read every mythology and mystery of life book I could get my hands on… which was a lot in our household! I also loved Jules Verne.
The third influence would have to be the mother and grandmother of a friend who were both artists. Her grandmother was also a magician. We’d watch her paint, and she’d pull a quarter or a piece of chocolate out from behind our ears! I still associate art with magic and joy.
The negative influence on my art career would be my family’s discouragement of the arts. I am of half Ukraine and half German descent. My immigrant grandparents really wanted to make it in America which to them meant a formal education and career. “Art, oi! Do it as a hobby!” I spent many miserable years as a purchasing engineer for a huge international construction company. I didn’t start painting till I was 27 years old.
Gage:
My grandmother, bless her soul, realized early in my life that I had an ability which needed to be nourished. She was what was called a Sunday painter, meaning art was one of her hobbies, and my parents had no eye for art themselves. She sat them down one evening after I was supposed to be asleep and told them, łThat boy has talent! I think you should always make sure he has plenty of paper to draw on. She thought for a moment and added as an afterthought, “and never make him draw on the back.” My father sold shoes at a downtown department store. He parked the car in a garage at the other end of the block and walked past a printer’s shop on his way to work every day. He went in, started talking to the printers about how his son liked to draw, they said they just threw away the paper left over after trimming, and he ended up bringing home a stack of paper a foot high for me. This happened once a week for years afterward until I was old enough to ask printers to save scrap paper myself. As a result of my grandmothers advice, I drew every day all through childhood.
Spirit:
Did your interest in metaphysics begin in childhood, and how did your own spirituality develop here?
Uriel:
My metaphysical dharma was established by the family I chose to come through. My own spiritual path evolved out of need to understand what was happening to me during my 15 years of parasomic nightmares. My path of studying all the worlds religions, however, came from Saturday afternoon old “B” horror movies. I loved the Dracula type films but was enormously concerned whether or not a Star of David would ward off a vampire instead of a cross! I was so concerned that all of my spiritual protection bases were covered, so to speak, that I secretly started going to a Methodist Church and had myself baptized when I was 11! My family was stunned when they found out. That was the beginning of a long history of my visiting houses of worship.
Gage:
I guess I’ve always been interested in metaphysics. Even as a child, I fantasized about discovering some arcane knowledge or artifact; a tomb in Egypt, an ancient mystical book, the Secret of Life, or something. For me, metaphysics and spirituality are very closely intertwined. I started studying Buddhism on my own when I was in high school, which my buddies thought was rather odd. I’ve studied the worlds religions looking for the Golden Thread, the truth that runs through the more esoteric aspects of all the religions. Though I am not a member of any particular religion, my spiritual work is and always will be an important part of my life.
Spirit:
How would you define Visionary Art?
Gage:
I’ve used a lot of definitions of Visionary Art through the years. I think I like Uri’s best: Visionary Art is an area of surrealism, which is combining two or more different realities. There is Classical Surrealism (like Salvador Dali), Social Surrealism (like a painting of a kabillion sardine can cars on the freeway as a comment on overpopulation), and Visionary Surrealism, which is spiritual in nature and meant to uplift the viewer.
Spirit:
How did you California Visionary Style first develop?
Gage:
I was not a landscape painter until I first saw Golden Gate Park, with its lushness and strange juxtapositions of exotic and beautiful plants. I wanted to paint it. As I learned to paint landscapes, I found such beauty in nature that I wanted to show the God/Goddess in the painting as well as the trees hills and light. Then I discovered the Hudson River school of landscape painters – Bierstadt, Church, Cole, Moran, Durand. They managed to capture some of the soul of nature in their landscapes, and I respected them for that. But I wanted to break on through to the other side as the Doors’ song said. I wanted to combine reality with glimpses of other planes. To be honest, I would have to say that hallucinogenic drugs may have played a part in the story.
Spirit:
How did Gage and Uriel meet?
Gage:
Uri and I met in January of 1984. She was working in the gallery at the College of Marin. I was included in an exhibition there of artists from a community called the San Geronimo Valley. Uri had volunteered for the unpleasant task of filling out insurance forms and accepting paintings because she wanted to meet me. After an hour of talking, we both knew there was a deep connection. It wasn’t long before she was my painting apprentice and we were lovers. I was being sucked dry by a nasty divorce. The gallery that represented me sold my paintings as soon as they were finished, but I was having trouble keeping up with my obligations. Uri offered to help me. Whenever we both worked on a painting, we both signed it. It’s very unusual for a painter to want to share that very private place with another painter, but painting with Uri seemed so natural that, once the need had passed, we still wanted to do it. But Uri didn’t just want to work on Gage Taylor paintings, and rightly so. If we were to continue collaborating, the work needed to reflect her artistic sensibilities and ideas. We made a list of the qualities and characteristics that would differentiate a Taylor-Dana painting from a Gage Taylor or Uriel Dana painting. The collaborative work evolved from there, and we both continued our solo work.
Spirit:
How would you define what you both bring to your collaborative artwork?
Uriel:
Gage has a profound, innate understanding of sacred geometry… the language of light. I believe Bob Frisselle referred to it as “the morphogenic structure of reality itself, even beyond mathematics.” Gage is able to transcribe his landscape perceptions of spirit of place into the sacred space found in the Taylor & Dana paintings. He astounds me with his ability to know what to add or contour that will bring the viewers inner sight to the 3rd eye, or even activate their chakras.
Gage:
Uri has a strong sense of color and drama. She also has a knack for keeping a painting simple and uncluttered. So most of our collaborative work is simple (only a few elements) yet intricately detailed, with very dramatic light and rich color. Even the palette of a Taylor-Dana is different from the way we use color in our solo work.
Spirit:
Do you see your art as spiritual messages to your audience?
Uriel:
I see our paintings as more of a spiritual resonance than a message. The energy and intention the artist holds while working on a piece stays in that piece forever. Very much like the intention of making puja to a Hindu sculpture, the piece itself becomes the embodiment of that sacrament. We have seen this over and over in artists careers. We’ll see very talented artists unable to sell their work, and very amateurish art selling like crazy. The explanation always presents itself upon meeting the artists. Without fail, regardless of style, technique, or skill, the art that sells is done by the person with love and heart for what they create, and the artist that doesn’t is usually pretty angry at the world, ungrateful, or feels the world owes him a living. People feel that energy in the artist’s work for centuries, and they respond accordingly.
Spirit:
How has your artwork, on a spiritual level, changed over the years?
Uriel:
Each of us represented either male or female energy that when combined, became very symbiotic. Now, the male and female within ourselves is complete unto itself so the work is more synergistic.
Gage:
In the beginning, I did two types of paintings – very realistic and totally visionary. I knew that to paint something that doesn’t really exist, I needed to be able to paint what does exist convincingly. (When painting a rock floating above the ground, the rock and the ground should look real.) Now, I seem to combine the realistic with the visionary in every painting. The underlying spiritual message of my work hasn’t really changed, but I’m better now at painting what doesn’t exist more convincingly.
Spirit:
How have you used your art for spiritual healing and work with others?
Uriel:
We use the power of color quite extensively in our work. Color is a vibration that affects blind people in the same way it affects sighted people. Gage and I used to joke that if you put Steve Wonder and Ray Charles in a red room, they’d be fighting in an hour. Gage currently has a student, in fact, that is partially color blind. He’s a wonderful painter because he is so in tune with the vibrations of the colors. A group of healing centers in Japan bought 900 reproductions of an early Taylor Dana painting for its palettes healing quality.
Spirit:
What would you consider to be the height of your career on a personal level?
Uriel:
My first fan letter. For someone to buy a card of one of my/our paintings touches me deeply to begin with, but for that person to be so moved as to sit down and write a letter about that experience is such a blessing. Artists live a very isolated existence in many ways. We do the work, and it will go to one agent, or one client, or to a gallery. We rarely have direct contact with the client after a piece is done, so we rarely know what people responded to positively or negatively. In a society where digital images are bombarded at them constantly, it takes someone really special that will honor the human that serves as the vehicle for spirit. I’ve often thought how hip it would be to have tip boxes next to paintings in an exhibit, especially for young artists. People who couldn’t afford a painting but wanted to encourage the artist, or show his or her favorite piece, could leave what they could.
Gage:
On a personal level, the height of my career isn’t a single event. It’s something that happens every time someone really connects with a painting. It happens when someone who owns a painting tells me the piece is the focal point of their meditation, or someone tells me looking at my posters in their dorm room years ago helped trigger the start on their spiritual path, or that looking at a painting helps them get to a place they can’t get to on their own yet. These moments are confirmation to me that I’m doing what I’m here to do.
Spirit:
What would you consider to be your best or favored paintings?
Uriel:
This is like asking a mother which child is her favorite. Excluding work in progress, I’d say for Taylor Dana it would be one of our hooded figures… probably the painting Gateway. The hooded figures in our paintings represent the unseen guides in our lives. When we are on the right path, the path of our hearts, there are currents much like invisible hands, that gently guide and direct us. We paint these figures hooded because everyone’s guides are different. In Gateway, the figure is in emerald green, the color of the heart chakra, and is standing on a prayer rug in a corridor of Cordoba high above the physical plane. For many centuries, the great libraries of Cordoba kept books of all the great knowledge acquired through the travels of a cultured and civilized people. There were more books in Cordoba then than in all of France. It’s discovery was the beginning of the Renaissance. This painting hints that aligning ourselves with our hearts is the beginning of our own spiritual renaissance.
Of my Shringara Rasas, my favorite is “Together Again” which is a lion licking the Goddess Durga, who is also an aspect of Tara and honored in both the Hindu/Buddhist lexicon. Durga is recognized by being portrayed with a lion in her direct connection to the tejas in the yogic tradition. The Rig Veda Parishishthani refers to her as “the twice born gentle goddess who has the color of fire.” Like Tara, she takes those who worship her from this world to the next as “a ship across the sea”. The flying carpet is a metaphor for the ship, the dream/inner space worlds a metaphor for spirit. It conveys exactly what I wanted to say. The Arabic writing in the carpet says, “look to my borders, all are covered with flowers….return to me my beloved, my colors glow for you.”
Gage:
One of my favorite paintings is Holy Grove. It’s a large painting with a view straight up into a grove of redwoods. It was meant to take a winter to complete, but it ended up taking over a year. It has the quality of drawing us out of ourselves, up through the trees and beyond. Another favorite of mine is Valley of Light. It’s a tropical landscape in which the central part is bathed in light that seems so brilliant that one can hardly look into it. Of all the many paintings that Uri and I have collaborated on, my favorite is Nocturne. It shows a cheetah sitting in the window of an ancient stone building, looking serenely out onto a nighttime landscape. I found the painting so evocative that it inspired my first novel.
Spirit:
What haven’t you done, in regards to your art, that you want to do?
Uriel:
I’m in the process right now of fulfilling that ambition. I have referred to my painting as a form of sadhana, or spiritual practice. I have been wanting to create what Tantrik scholar Dr. David Frawley refers to as a more dharma oriented artistic tradition to bring back the use of image, icon, and a way of sacred art. Art already holds the energy and intention of its creator, but I want it to be more. I’m being assisted in this process by a Melchizedek priest who is a master of sacred oils. He has been creating custom formula oils with real ground gemstones for me to add to my oil paints. I am also working with another healer that is a master of aromatherapy. By using her customized oils in addition to the gemstoneblends, I am able to activate the olfactories of the viewer on a subtlelevel. I find doing this brings into effect an icon quality to the work. So that collectors will know which paintings contain these elements, I have signed them “Udana”, instead of Uriel Dana. For those who are unfamiliar with Tantra, the Udana Vayu is the ascending breath through the sacred channels of the body. It gives the power of perception and the ability to ascend in consciousness. I feel this change of signature greatly fits the nature of the new work.
Gage:
I once wrote a short story called Magnum Opus in which an artist (who turns out to be from another planet) creates a painting that has a certain vibration and harmony that literally changes the world. After anyone sees the painting, even a reproduction, he or she is incapable of lying or cheating or hurting anyone else. All anger and resentment dissolves, everyone’s hearts fill with love for every other living thing, even the concept of “other” disappears, and everyone understands that we are all part of the same being. Lawyers become obsolete, armies cease fighting and use their might to build bridges, schools, and libraries. I’d like to create a painting that had anywhere near that kind of spiritual encoding.
Many thanks to Gage Taylor and Uriel Dana for their great interview.
These two individuals are truly special people.
Jon Keeyes, Editor.
Jon Keeyes is the editor of several magazines in Texas.
© 1998-2023 Uriél Dana. All Rights Reserved.
All images and text remain the property of the artist and may not be used without her written permission.
Featured Image: Photo of Uriél Dana and the late Gage Taylor (d. 2000)
Uriél Danā has been a Professional Artist, Curator & Arts Writer since 1983 in addition to being an invitational Arts Ambassador for the US State Department. She became a Master of Tibetan Dream Yoga from age 9 to overcome a sleeping disorder under the training of a Mongolian monk on the North side of Chicago. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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