Our world has gone mad since the 2016 US elections and we are all terrified. We are shellshocked with betrayal. We are filled with fear for our brothers and sisters who can not defend themselves and the violations of a Constitution that threaten all our ancestors gave their lives for. We fear for our planet. I get it. My heart hurts, it’s hard to breathe.

I am a person that holds creativity as one of the highest forms of enlightenment. It is easy to want to give up my daily sharing of artwork and its impact in this time of chaos. Without beauty, empathy and manners we will never survive this.

Without art, we have no modern world.

Artists design our clothes, the packaging our food comes in, the tools in our kitchens and in the garage. Artists design our furniture, and our homes (architecture is one of the fine arts).

Artists design toys and the silly costumes people dress their pets in for Halloween or when its cold. Artists design our video games and the look of the movies we watch. Artists design special effects.

Do not think the tools of the artist can replace the artist.

These are just a few of the jobs that come from fine art training. Art schools (legitimate ones) teach structure, perspective, the chemistry of color, design, composition but most of all develop the area of the brain associated with problem solving and constructive reasoning.


Featured Image: Handcrafted crayons made from Beeswax


Uriél Danā on a film shoot with Walter Greenbird

Uriél Danā has been a Professional Fine Artist 38 years specializing in oils, gouache, and bronze, and is a Contemporary Figurative Art Curator.

She is an Air Force Veteran and former USIA (State Department) Ambassador to the Arts. She is a graduate of the 2016 Writers Guild of the West (Los Angeles, CA) Veterans Writing Project.

A Contributing Editor on the Arts, Buddhism and Culture, Uriél contributes regularly to online and print magazines in addition to international journals. She has won many awards for her poetry and has been included in two anthologies. For National Poetry Month, April 2020, her poems were  featured on San Francisco’s public radio station, KPFA.

A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Uri has lived on three continents and visited 44 countries.



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