Psychedelic art

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Santana's Abraxas (album) cover by Mati Klarwein

Psychedelic art is art inspired by the psychedelic experience induced by drugs such as LSD, Mescaline, and Psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist Humphrey Osmond) means "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic". However, in common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above all to the art movement of the 1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.

1 Psychedelic art and society
2 Features of psychedelic art
3 Psychedelic art in prehistory
4 Psychedelic artists
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Psychedelic art and society

Leading proponents of the Psychedelic Art movement were San Francisco poster artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art. Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering, strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, and bizarre iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art style. The style flourished from about 1966 - 1972. Their work was immediately influential to album cover art, and indeed all of the aforementioned artists also created album covers.

Yet psychedelic album cover art was more international: Majorca based painter Mati Klarwein created psychedelic masterpieces for Miles Davis' Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for Carlos Santana Latin Rock. Pink Floyd worked extensively with London based designers, Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums.

Psychedelic light-shows were a new art-form developed for rock concerts. Using oil and dye in an emulsion that was set between large convex lenses upon overhead projectors the lightshow artists created bubbling liquid visuals that pulsed in rhythm to the music. This was mixed with slideshows and film loops to create an improvisational motion picture art form to give visual representation to the improvisational jams of the rock bands and create a completely "trippy" atmosphere for the audience. The Brotherhood of Light were responsible for many of the light-shows in San Francisco psychedelic rock concerts.

Out of the psychedelic counterculture also arose a new genre of comic books: underground comix. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground comics, and featured the work of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Robert Williams among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Gilbert Shelton created perhaps the most enduring of underground cartoon characters, "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers", whose drugged out exploits held a hilarious mirror up to the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s.

Psychedelic art was also applied to the LSD itself. LSD began to be put on blotter paper in the early 1970s and this gave rise to a specialized art form of decorating the blotter paper. Often the blotter paper was decorated with tiny insignia on each perforated square tab, but by the 1990s this had progressed to complete four color designs often involving an entire page of 900 or more tabs. Mark McCloud is a recognized authority on the history of LSD blotter art.

The fact that LSD blotter art kept evolving over decades shows that the Psychedelic Art movement did not end with the '60's, and if considered more deeply it did not begin in that decade either. The use of drugs by artists is nothing new - the Roman poet Ovid said, "There is no poetry among water drinkers." However, since drugs have always been taboo, the drug use of artists has not always entered the historical record. It was part of the youth rebellion of the 1960s to openly use drugs, but the psychedelic drugs were also seen in a different light from more traditional inebriants such as opiates, cocaine and alcohol. LSD was a new invention that had shown wondrous promise as a psychiatric medicine. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe LSD research and its various results, but importantly to the counterculture movement of the 1960s it had been strongly demonstrated to be an enhancer of creativity and a gateway to mystical experience. These aspects drew artists and intellectuals to experiment with LSD and other psychedelic drugs.

Early artistic experimentation with LSD was conducted in a clinical context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Janiger had a group of 50 different artists each do a painting from life of a subject of the artist's choosing. Then they were asked to do the same painting while under the influence of LSD. The two paintings were compared by Janiger and also the artist. The artist's almost unanimously reported LSD to be an enhancement to their creativity.

Beatnik poets such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs were certainly aware of LSD and other psychedelics during the 1950s. The beatniks understood the role of psychedelics as sacred inebriants in native american cultures, and also had an understanding of the philosophy of the surrealist and symbolist poets who called for a "complete disorientation of the senses" (to paraphrase Arthur Rimbaud). They knew of the altered states of consciousness that were essential to Eastern Mysticism. LSD was the perfect catalyst to electrify the eclectic mix of ideas assembled by the beatniks into a cathartic panacea for the succeeding generation.

While LSD and the other psychedelics were criminalized in 1966, and psychedelics research was brought to a halt, psychedelia entered the popular culture and for decades to come influenced Hollywood, Madison Ave, and perhaps even more consequentially Silicon Valley.

Computer Arts have allowed for an even greater and more profuse expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal generating software gives an accurate depiction of psychedelic hallucinatory patterns, but even more importantly 2D and 3D graphics software allow for unparalleled freedom of image manipulation. Much of the graphics software seems to enable a direct translation of the psychedelic vision. The "digital revolution" was indeed heralded early on as the "New LSD" by none other than Timothy Leary.

The Rave movement of the 1990s was a psychedelic renaissance fueled by the advent of newly available digital technologies. The rave movement developed a new graphic art style partially influenced by 1960s psychedelic poster art, but also strongly influenced by graffiti art, and by 1970s advertising art, yet clearly defined by what computer graphics software and home computers had to offer at the time of creation.

Concurrent to the rave movement, and in key respects integral to it, are the development of new mind altering drugs, most notably, MDMA (Ecstasy). Ecstasy, like LSD, has had a tangible influence on culture and aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of Rave Culture. But MDMA is (arguably) not a real psychedelic, but is described by psychologists as an "empathogen". Development of new psychedelics such as "2CB" and related compounds (developed primarily by chemist Alexander Shulgin) are truly psychedelic, and these novel psychedelics are fertile ground for artistic exploration since many of the new psychedelics possess their own unique properties that will affect the artist's vision accordingly.

Perhaps the future of psychedelic art will be defined by those artists who have practiced it most purely. That is to say by those artists who have sought to record the visions derived from the psychedelic drug experience into works of art. Even as fashions have changed, and art and culture movements have come and gone certain artists have steadfastly devoted themselves to psychedelia. Well known examples are Alex Grey and Robert Venosa. These artists have developed unique and distinct styles that while containing elements that are obviously "psychedelic", are clearly artistic expression that transcend simple categorization. While it is not necessary to use psychedelics to arrive at such a stage of artistic development, serious psychedelic artists are demonstrating that there is tangible technique to obtaining visions, and that technique is the creative use of psychedelic drugs.

$Land of Psychedelic Illuminations (©Brian Exton): example of fractal influence$

Land of Psychedelic Illuminations (©Brian Exton): example of fractal influence

[edit] Features of psychedelic art

Kaleidoscopic, fractal or paisley patterns
Bright and/or highly contrasting colors
Extreme depth of detail or stylization of detail.
Morphing of objects and/or themes and sometimes collage
Inclusion of phosphenes and other entoptic motifs
Repetition of motifs

[edit] Psychedelic art in prehistory

Using altered states of consciousness as a source for artistic expression is not a new concept and has been practised throughout human history. Where this art occurs in the past it is often called 'psychedelic art' to conceptually link it to the well-known modern movement. This linkage is contentious and the difficulty in proving the psychedelic origins of prehistoric artwork has led many people to refer to it as entoptic art or subjective visual art. 'Entoptic art' emphasises the fact that evidence for its hallucinatory origins comes mainly from identification of motifs related to entoptic phenomena.