Dana Lynne Andersen is known for her breathtaking cosmic, visionary paintings that have appeared on book covers, cd’s and magazines. Dana is not only a painter but also an illustrator, writer, playwright, philosopher and teacher. Dana teaches art & creativity classes at the Ananda Institute of Alternative Living. She has just recently finished illustrating the trilogy “The Universe Tells Our Evolution Story” by Jennifer Morgan. For her undergrad, Dana went to Colorado College majoring in philosophy followed by a masters degree in art and consciousness studies received from the John F Kennedy University.
Dana is a resident of Ananda Village, a Yoga Community in the Sierra Nevada of California. She is currently artist in resident at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. (IONS)

How did you get into painting?
I basically started doing a lot of painting in 1997 after I came back from India. I had been writing a book on the Chacras and I wanted to convey in pictures what I was writing about. I started to get more and more involved in my art so I would have pictures and images that would convey the concepts and ended up moving more and more in that direction. When I went to India I was very inspired. I came back and painted the Himalayan Triptic that was 15 feet high. I’ve been doing painting ever since.

How much has your education helped you with your art?
I’d say that the consciousness studies really did. I took a lot of classes in the art and consciousness department that were based on the ancient ways of using art to access the divine, sacred art and then also contemporary art therapy practices were all very, very influential. I suppose philosophy, just in the sense that in my artwork I am usually working with both– ideas words and images.

How hard was it to make the transition form being a painter to working as an illustrator?
It was kind of hard, because illustration demands that you get it right for conveying of clear ideas. Book one was easy because it was cosmological. Book two got harder because there were all those animals and things I had never done before. I actually had to learn how to do realistic painting because I hadn’t really used realistic painting in any of my work. My paintings had evolved from deep within, from processes that came from ancient sacred art. I wasn’t interested in realism when I studied art because I had a very definite idea what I wanted to convey, which was more cosmological and interior. That book was the first time I had really done that kind of work. It was really fun and has helped me a lot. Having done that book 2 and 3 animals and then humans which are even harder than animals I feel like I grew a lot as an artist and can convey my ideas better now in other things that I want to do and in fact I actually really want now to learn even more and more so I can practice and get even better and convey my ideas better.

Can you briefly outline your creative process when starting on a new piece?
I have to clear the space, clear the studio and usually try to pray or meditate or something that helps me to get centered deeply. I like to start like Jackson Pollack with a lot of wildness, fluidity and freedom. Then I end like a neurotic person working on the details. As I am working I am trying to maintain the freshness of beginning as it gets more elaborate and detailed.

Most of your paintings are very large. Why do you prefer to work in such a format?
The subject matter is cosmos and consciousness to begin with. With a large format I am meeting the subject at the right level. There are two more answers. One is that at one point a very talented arts friend of mine who was staying with me while recovering from a cocaine addiction, had a relapse and took my credit card spending a lot of my money. When he went into recovery and got back on the wagon he didn’t have any money to give me but he had those huge 8foot by 8 foot paintings he was doing and he gave them to me. I would have never bought them but I felt like the universe providing a gift for me and it influenced my life a lot.
The other is that one time, I had a professional art critique look at my work and he just told me you need to paint bigger that’s how it got started.

You are also teaching workshops on creativity. How does one learn to be creative?
I think every human being is born to be highly creative. It is part of what it means to be a human being. In most people it is being killed in education systems or through their families. By the time they grow up they have it cut off and so it is really an active recovery. I am not trying to create something that is not there. I am uncovering something that got covered up. I find that once people tap into their creativity there are enormous life changes that happen because your creativity is your vitality. It is your life force and when you are not tapped into it you are not having the kind of vibrancy of life, joy and depth of experience that is possible.

What advantages does the emergence of digital art have? What is its downside?
I am a Photoshop queen and I love to play with my artwork in it. Creating a painting, taking a picture of it, I can then use Photoshop to transform it into something else. Photoshop helps me visualize ideas much more quickly. It is the typewriter of the artist. In the renaissance you would have to paint very hard to convey ideas. In digital art, it is instantaneous. I think it is fantastic. It also opens up many people that would have a hard time learning painting otherwise.

The downside is twofold. It is an interesting issue around copyright and ownership, respect and honoring other peoples work. I have used a lot of images in collages and I can’t actually sell them because they are collage images that come from other photographers. I myself am on the learning curve of how you properly honor the sources of your art.

What projects are you currently involved in?
I have been writing an awe full lot about “Zeitgeist” recently.(”Zeitgeist” is a German word and means spirit of the times) “Zeitgeist” is an exhibition including the creation of a new 8×8 ft painting as well as a number other 4×5 & 3×4 paintings. It refers to the spirit that can be seen in the cultural climate of an era and in the music, literature and arts. It really makes sense to me that “Gaia”, the earth, being a living organism a whole system and I think that “Zeitgeist” is the whole pulse of that system it is a dynamic that is also greater then the sum of the parts because in a whole sense it draws from each and every one of the human beings on this planet their minds, their hearts and their thoughts are streaming into the “Zeitgeist” to create it. Yet there are dynamics that arouse that are greater than any individual and greater then the aggregate of the parts. That dynamic is the living pulse of “Zeitgeist” and that’s what I wanted to explore. I ended up painting things that are dealing with reaching out to each other like fiber-optics and the internet, sort of the neurons growing in the global brain of “Gaia” and then also the sort of tumultuous tides that we are experiencing from hurricanes to tsunamis to volcanoes and different natural phenomenon and just sort of the chaos of the other spirits as well. What is the relationship between the current events and the deeper ocean that is beneath the wave?

You can check out more of Dana’s work by going to her website:
http://www.awakeningarts.com/

You can find out more about Dana’s upcoming exhibition “Zeitgeist” (August 21-October 13) at the Institute of Integral Studies below:
http://www.ciis.edu/news/anderson.html

Interview Conducted by Ingmar Zahorsky

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.