At the beginning of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a young sailor, the sole survivor of a mad quest to kill a white whale, invites us to call him by the name of another survivor, a young man, sent out into the desert to die, who lives because he and his mother are saved by an angel. Two Ishmaels, two survivors, who looked into the eye of death, that messenger from another world, and returned to life to tell us about what they saw, though perhaps merely two of many: the world is filled with survivors, though not all are up to the task of telling us the tale of what they saw.

Wayne Taylor was a survivor. Born in Idaho, he grew up loving the outdoors and wanting to do more than just to hike and fish in it: he wanted to capture what it meant to him in his art, to capture as well the feeling of making art from nature. He wanted to tell us what he saw and what he made of what he saw. Sometimes that meant looking closely at the landscape, even if the piece of it he looked at was so small a piece that what he came back to tell us about may have seemed something not of nature but rather an abstraction of nature had he not drawn us to look again and still again. Over a long and successful career as an artist (exhibiting at galleries and museums, including a show circulated by the Whitney Museum of American Art) and an educator (including a long spell as chairman of the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison), Wayne Taylor taught us much about nature and how we might see it and seeing it, what we might make of it.

Then Wayne Taylor died. Almost. In the hospital after a heart attack, his heart stopped and he stopped breathing. Twice. Then he started again. And recovered. And went home. And started making art again. The monotypes and watercolors of the Mandala Series were made during the last months of 1989 and the beginning of 1990. In them, one can see without any difficulty their continuity with the works of this man who has loved the land and the landscape all of his life. But one can see more. In these works, Taylor is moving away from the dictum of William Blake that one should strive to see the universe in a grain of sand. In these works, rather, he gives us a taste of the universe as something that contains the grain of sand upon which we live, of a universe that enfolds our world and draws it out of its isolation into the larger entity in which, whether we are ever conscious of it or not, we as well as our world live. According to the dictionary, a mandala is a design symbolic of the universe. These works do not so much symbolize the universe as present its attractiveness, its willingness to draw us into spaces larger than we can conceive, into a life different, perhaps, but at least as rich and full as the one we now live.

N. Wayne Taylor was Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work has been widely shown in U.S. galleries and museums. A sculptor, painter, and printmaker, he was included in one of the early shows of POP art at the Whitney. These works are a testimony, a witnessing of a world that we can only dream about, that we can only see in visions or in works of art.