beautiful images.

A : I feel a sense of peace and passion as I work on them. As though

I'm fulfilling my destiny in an act of great love.

Q : Why do you do it and when?

Q : I'm looking for something of beauty and spiritual depth.

A world more numinous and pure than this one.

I work on these things when my head is clear and or working

in that direction. It helps to focus my energy and create clarity

by doing it as well.

Q : How do you do it?

A : On the technical side I use a Mac-mini G4, with Photoshop

Elements as the main software program.

I also use a Wacom Tablet with an Intuos Pen to create the air-brush 

 and other visual effects. I started out by scanning in existing paintings

and then finishing them in the computer. i now do them almost entirely

in the virtual environment.

Q : Do you have visions while your working?

A : When I'm working I'm usually just following an intuition of where the

image wants to do. This may be considered a continuous low-level vision.

Sometimes as I wake up I  have what I call a flash-vision. It happens  

very fast, and so sometimes I need to write it down, or sketch it on

some paper before I  get up to more fully remember it.

On occasion I'll see a big scene that's very powerful and detailed.

It's not like seeing it with my physical eyes, but my third eye which 

sees within.

These larger Visions can be staggering in their ability move me  

emotionally and spiritually. They can bring me to tears or a state

 of ecstasy.

Q : When is your birthday, and where do you live?

A : My birthday is June 28, 1955.

I live in Malibu California in a slightly converted barn. I'm on a hill-side 

and can see and hear the ocean in the distance.

Q : Have you always done this type of work, and when did you start?

A : I started 

drawing when I was about 3 years old. My grandmother used  

to supply me with paper, and put squiggles on them for me to finish.

They were my first  lessons in using my imagination. The early work

was pretty usual really until I became more and more influenced by

comic books and fantasy and sci-fi artists. I recall at 11 years old doing

a copy of a painting by the fantasy artist Frank Frazetta.

It wasn't until my twenties and thirties that my studies into metaphysics

and spirituality began to show up seriously in my work. After that a series of

Vision Quests ushered me into the destiny that's carried me along ever since.

Q : Where can people see and buy your pictures.

A: My art is on view in several places on the web, most notably in these

two on-line galleries:  http://www.erial.us   -   http://iasos.com/artists/erial/

INTERVIEW BY UFO RESEARCHER PAOLA HARRIS:

 PH: I noticed in a lot of your artwork, there are women who look like priestesses.

Erial: Yeah, I think higher beings appear in most of my work.That’s probably, in a sense, part of the transition we’re in, going from a male-dominated cultural model to a more balanced model. I tend to gravitate to the female personality.

PH: I’m seeing chakras in here, but I’m also seeing another whole being in there. (Paola looking at an angel painting)

Erial: I hadn’t noticed that, but you might be right. I try to be open to other influences, and sometimes things come through that people tell me about. I hadn’t planned for another being to be in there.

PH: It’s almost like the birth of another being. You’re a visionary, because your art is called Visionary Art. So you had the vision before you painted it. Where do a lot of these ideas come from?

Erial: I have dreams, some I call dream visions. They seem to go beyond being just a dream. Some are very powerful, like seeing a part of Heaven. I call it the Divine Imagination. I’ve been stunned to tears at times at some of these places that seem to come out of nowhere at a certain moment when I’m asleep. Years previously, I had some extended Visions, but that’s a different story. But generally, these will come at times through prayer, through asking for it, or just having had the right input during the day. (Erial points to the large angel painting) 

This is The Guardian Angel. In a sense, it’s my guardian angel. In times of crisis, or trouble, I’ll have these moments where I want to visualize something for myself and for my friends. It has a positive vibrational quality. It’s very healing to do, and as well as healing to see.

PH: Yes, it has a visual impact. When you’re having your visions, how do you hold it there and actually capture it on canvas? How do you hold it? Is it so powerful that it remains there?

Erial: I think part of it is because I’ve been drawing since I was three years old, and I’ve been painting since I was about ten. So I’m always doing it, I’m always in the process of drawing or painting, so to hold a vision is easier. If I see it, I’ll bring it into the next day’s work with my tools. And it’s not hard to have a memory for things that I love, as most of us do. I have memories that really strike deep into me, in my soul maybe, and those come easier to me the next day or the next week. I have this sort of visual memory of these archetypal realms, or these beings from the imagination.

PH: Some of the beings here are not from you imagination, they’re from actual star cultures that could possibly exist. They’re like what we call light beings. Is that a possibility, that we have a whole different body group of beings that interact with us, that people used to call angels, but could be light beings that have their own ethical society?

Erial: I think it’s true.  One thing I want to say about how I use the word imagination, and I usually call it Divine Imagination, is that I see it more as a doorway or a window onto places that I think exist in higher dimensional realms that come through me, through the window of my mind and my imagination, and I get to depict them. I think you’re right, and I think you’re onto something.  

PH: The music that I’m hearing is all part of your creation, the music and the vibration and everything. Would you like to say something about that?

Erial: It’s true, it’s very important to me to have vibrationally kindred kinds of energies in my environment. Music does that for me. There’s a station called Pandora on the web that has music that you choose, and the radio station is created by saying yes or no to a piece of music, and then another piece of music is brought in that sounds very similar to the one you chose. Smart radio. In the studio, I tend to choose oceanic, synthesizer, new-agey kinds of music because it has this calming effect and I can work for many hours. It has this kind of vibration that inspires me.

PH: I think, in talking to you, that you are very idealistic, like I am. What is your idea of the perfect Utopian society? How would you describe it?

Erial: In a way, the pictures do describe it for me. A picture is worth a thousand philosophies, as far as I’m concerned. I have a story that I’m writing about Utopia. It happens in stages, in human beings coming to points of awakening throughout history. In those points, they choose different kinds of roads to go down. To me, it’s moving from a planetary view of violence and destruction to one of wonder and exploration. I’m not sure that we’ll ever get past wars, per se, but as a species if we could be intelligent enough to use that energy of conflict for creation, art, higher philosophy…there are all kinds of ways of using our innate abilities as aggressive, always-leaning-forward people, trying to find something, trying to do something, always at something. It’s a hard question to answer.

PH: The reason I asked it really is that you told me a story about being three years old, and you just mentioned that childlike wonder. At that age you don’t have all the negativity, you don’t have all the game-playing you have as an adult. So what almost happened, is that you stayed in that state of childlike wonder. And what you’re seeing is what a child would be seeing, the colors, the smells, the sensuality of a three year old or a six year old. When you began painting around age ten, you were using color to express this childlike wonder. It means in part that Utopia is genuine for a child.

Erial: I think there’s something to be said for that. In a sense, throughout my thirties and forties it was about, not returning to a child’s point of view necessarily, but to allow my mind to free itself from cultural constraints, from political constraints, all the abstractions that humans get into. They can be positive as well, but there’s something that a mind wants to do. A mind wants to be free, and if a mind is free to see the world through whatever glasses they want to put on…an artist has the freedom, there’s something about being an artist that creates this total freedom. I found at a certain point that dark, self-absorbing images only lasted a while until I sort of cleared that baggage away. Then I began to see what happens when you keep going with these visions of wonder and beauty. Do they keep opening up into larger and larger visions of wonder and beauty? Is it some kind of ascending, never-ending doorway that keeps opening? And I found that that’s what the human mind is, a gateway for love. So that’s been my quest, to keep my mind in that state of innocence.

PH: That’s amazing, because I’ve looked at your resume and you’ve got the whole schooling, the whole college thing, the whole entire thing that artists claim condition your style. You did the whole entire gamut, and maintained your own style. How did you stay this pure?

Erial: Well, I didn’t actually go to an art school. I think it can be very valuable for many people, but if you’re an artist and you have something that’s very personal to say, and you don’t see it in the world, you can’t actually be taught by anyone else. I was seeing things in my visions that I saw nowhere else in the world. I had to learn it myself in a sense. I did take art classes in college, and I had some good teachers. But it was just a process over the years of just doing it, making mistakes, doing it again…I saw things that I wanted to bring through, but I had to invent my own style.

PH: Am I right in saying that you didn’t do it with the commercial conditions, that you did it with more of a self-development? You didn’t do this to fit into any commercial molds?

Erial: No, and that is one of the rough parts of being an artist, that isn’t trying to fit into a mold, but trying to create a mold itself. That in a sense is what a visionary is supposed to be doing. In a way, you have to let the cards fall where they may. But I found that there was something that I needed to do that I wasn’t seeing out there, and so I had to create it myself. 

PH: The commercial part is very difficult, you start painting what people want. Instead, it’s the other way around, and as a journalist, I’m saying that I’m not looking at your paintings that people want. It’s the people who want what you’re painting. We want more of what you’re painting, because it resonates. But it wasn’t out there before. 

Erial: No, it’s true, I was always pleasing myself first. It’s kind of a spiritual quest. You begin to talk about my personal spiritual quest, which always needed to open up new doorways, always needed to have new information come in. And it’s not about me personally, it’s about my place in the culture, my place as a bringer of light, a sharer, sharing these places and these possibilities with my culture. I felt a real need to give back something because I felt freedom from doing these that was just astonishing. Personal freedom. And so I felt the need to give that back to the culture in some form. And with stories and images, I’m able to start to do that.

PH: And you’re writing now as well.

Erial: If you look at almost any picture that you see in my studio, there’s a story that goes along with it. They’re a part of a huge cosmic drama that I’m writing in order to illustrate where these beings might be from, what they’re doing here now at this point in history, and how we might interact with them.

PH: That’s amazing because now you’re doing all of it, and you mentioned the music too. Put this together and we could be talking about film, creating a total experience. Is that where you’re going with this, giving people the experience?

Erial: I think so, in a sense, the experience that I’ve had and that I continue to have with my interactions, can be an experience from a show in a gallery to a 3D virtual reality experience where you actually interact with the beings themselves. In fact, I was talking with someone the other day, a sound healer who has a virtual reality system where he can create bodies that you put on in this virtual reality environment. So I was talking to him about having this angelic body in this virtual reality environment that a person can actually put on and see themselves as a being of light. They can see their chakras as centers of energy. This is a whole new field that I’m trying to get into.

PH: Well, it’s fascinating. I need to thank you for talking with me because you’ve been influential in my life and serendipitously I was asking for an enlightening angel for one of my conferences and googled you and ever since, you’ve done a lot for me. The posters and the images that I’ve been able to convey, because even though I hadn’t met you I wanted to convey that you give another kind of experience, a more complete view of the world and what’s out there. We live in a multidimensional world and we have a lot of positive energy around us, a lot more than what we usually think we have right now. So thank you.

Erial: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.