Psychedelic art

Psychedelic art is any art or visual displays inspired by psychedelic experiences and hallucinations known to follow the ingestion of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and psilocybin. The word “psychedelic” (coined by British psychologist Humphry Osmond) means “mind manifesting”. By that definition, all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered “psychedelic”. In common parlance “psychedelic art” refers above all to the art movement of the late 1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, liquid light shows, liquid light art, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling colour patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.

Psychedelic art has been given in literature, music and the visual arts.

All artistic efforts to project the inner world of the psyche can be considered “psychedelic”; but in the habitual use, as well as in the specialized bibliography, the expressions “psychedelic art” or “lysergic” refer concretely to the artistic movement of the counterculture of the sixties of the twentieth century. Later there was a revitalization of the use of drugs for artistic purposes by the rave movement, aided by new computer technologies, in the last decade of the century.

The psychedelic visual arts were parallel and, to a certain extent, subordinated to psychedelic music, especially pop music, which was the most widespread socially. Concert posters, album covers, light shows, murals, comics, fanzines (underground newspapers) and similar media were used to reflect the kaleidoscopic patterns of lysergic hallucinations, which received all kinds of key interpretations of social, political and Revolutionary spirituals inspired by those altered states of consciousness.

The cinema also experimented with the images disseminated by psychedelia, even in widely disseminated productions, such as 2001, an odyssey in space (1968), where there is a scene of several minutes in which only colored lights are projected radially; or the curious credit titles of the beginning of the James Bond movies.

Features
Fantastic, metaphysical and surrealistic subject matter
Kaleidoscopic, fractal or paisley patterns
Bright and/or highly contrasting colors
Extreme depth of detail or stylization of detail. Also so called Horror vacui style.
Morphing of objects or themes and sometimes collage
Phosphenes, spirals, concentric circles, diffraction patterns, and other entoptic motifs
Repetition of motifs
Innovative typography and hand-lettering, including warping and transposition of positive and negative spaces

Origins
Psychedelic art is informed by the notion that altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are a source of artistic inspiration. The psychedelic art movement is similar to the surrealist movement in that it prescribes a mechanism for obtaining inspiration. Whereas the mechanism for surrealism is the observance of dreams, a psychedelic artist turns to drug induced hallucinations. Both movements have strong ties to important developments in science. Whereas the surrealist was fascinated by Freud’s theory of the unconscious, the psychedelic artist has been literally “turned on” by Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD.

The early examples of “psychedelic art” are literary rather than visual, although there are some examples in the Surrealist art movement, such as Remedios Varo and André Masson. It should also be noted that these came from writers involved in the Surrealist movement. Antonin Artaud writes of his peyote experience in Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara (1937). Henri Michaux wrote Misérable Miracle (1956), to describe his experiments with mescaline and also hashish.

Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) remain definitive statements on the psychedelic experience.

Albert Hofmann and his colleagues at Sandoz Laboratories were convinced immediately after its discovery in 1943 of the power and promise of LSD. For two decades following its discovery LSD was marketed by Sandoz as an important drug for psychological and neurological research. Hofmann saw the drug’s potential for poets and artists as well, and took great interest in the German writer Ernst Jünger’s psychedelic experiments.

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

Ultimately it seems that psychedelics would be most warmly embraced by the American counterculture. Beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs became fascinated by psychedelic drugs as early as the 1950s as evidenced by The Yage Letters (1963). The Beatniks recognized the role of psychedelics as sacred inebriants in Native American religious ritual, 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 that altered states of consciousness played a role in Eastern Mysticism. They were hip to psychedelics as psychiatric medicine. LSD was the perfect catalyst to electrify the eclectic mix of ideas assembled by the Beats into a cathartic, mass-distributed panacea for the soul of the succeeding generation.

In 1960s counterculture
Leading proponents of the 1960s psychedelic art movement were San Francisco poster artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson. Their psychedelic rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art. The “Fillmore Posters” were among the most notable of the time. Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering, strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, rubber-like distortions, and bizarre iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art style. The style flourished from about 1966 to 1972. Their work was immediately influential to vinyl record album cover art, and indeed all of the aforementioned artists also created album covers.

Although San Francisco remained the hub of psychedelic art into the early 1970s, the style also developed internationally: British artist Bridget Riley became famous for her op-art paintings of psychedelic patterns creating optical illusions. 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. Willem de Ridder created cover art for Van Morrison. Los Angeles area artists such as John Van Hamersveld, Warren Dayton and Art Bevacqua and New York artists Peter Max and Milton Glaser all produced posters for concerts or social commentary (such as the anti-war movement) that were highly collected during this time. Life Magazine’s cover and lead article for the September 1, 1967 issue at the height of the Summer of Love focused on the explosion of psychedelic art on posters and the artists as leaders in the hippie counterculture community.

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.

In corporate advertising
By the late 1960s, the commercial potential of psychedelic art had become hard to ignore. General Electric, for instance, promoted clocks with designs by New York artist Peter Max. A caption explains that each of Max’s clocks “transposes time into multi-fantasy colors.” In this and many other corporate advertisements of the late 1960s featuring psychedelic themes, the psychedelic product was often kept at arm’s length from the corporate image: while advertisements may have reflected the swirls and colors of an LSD trip, the black-and-white company logo maintained a healthy visual distance. Several companies, however, more explicitly associated themselves with psychedelica: CBS, Neiman Marcus, and NBC all featured thoroughly psychedelic advertisements between 1968 and 1969. In 1968, Campbell’s soup ran a poster promotion that promised to “Turn your wall souper-delic!”

The early years of the 1970s saw advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful acts of pseudo-rebellion. The Chelsea National Bank commissioned a psychedelic landscape by Peter Max, and neon green, pink, and blue monkeys inhabited advertisements for a zoo. A fantasy land of colorful, swirling, psychedelic bubbles provided the perfect backdrop for a Clearasil ad. As Brian Wells explains, “The psychedelic movement has, through the work of artists, designers, and writers, achieved an astonishing degree of cultural diffusion… but, though a great deal of diffusion has taken place, so, too, has a great deal of dilution and distortion.” Even the term “psychedelic” itself underwent a semantic shift, and soon came to mean “anything in youth culture which is colorful, or unusual, or fashionable.” Puns using the concept of “tripping” abounded: as an advertisement for London Britches declared, their product was “great on trips!” By the mid-1970s, the psychedelic art movement had been largely co-opted by mainstream commercial forces, incorporated into the very system of capitalism that the hippies had struggled so hard to change.

Psychedelic Light Shows
In the context of rock music developed from the mid-1960s, the light show as the latest form of psychedelic art. Pink Floyd were the first to use complex colored spotlights at their live concerts. In the underground clubs of New York’s artists and scene Greenwich Village, the precursors of today’s discos emerged: slide, film or overhead projectors, whose lenses were treated in part with an emulsion of colorful oil films, threw – according to the principle of a lava lampmoved by the heat – colorful, constantly changing bubbles and bubbling drops to the rhythm of the music on the dancing audience; This was combined with films that ran at different speeds on endless loops. Everything was reinforced by reflecting mirror balls, stroboscopes or pulsating light tubes. The walls of these light shows were usually painted with fluorescent colors that glowed brightly using black light. Andy Warhol took up this trend for the Eastside and used the idea first for his own party events in the legendary “Silver Factory” and later as a light show for the live performances of his protégé rock band The Velvet Underground and the singer Nico, Warhol called these happenings Exploding Plastic Inevitable. At the Californian West Coast were primarily the Brotherhood of Light responsible for many light shows of psychedelic rock concerts u. a. from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin or Grateful Dead. See also: psychedelic music visualization

Psychedelic Underground Comix
Psychedelic publications of counterculture with sociocritical, political or sexual-pornographic statements were found above all in a new genre of comics: The Underground Comix. Among the most important representatives is Robert Crumb, who had great success with the series ” Fritz the Cat ” for Zap Comix (later filmed by Ralph Bakshi), as well as Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, Robert Williams or S. Clay Wilson. For the most part, the comics were drug-buying and drug use and all kinds of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, In a comic Crumb drew the LSD guru Timothy Leary even as a cartoon character.

“LSD Art” and “Blotter Art”
Also in the design of the LSD trips themselves, the so-called “tickets” soon developed creative potential. The drug was initially applied to simple unprinted blotter paper or sugar cubes, but soon found a more decorative and professional way of designing the LSD was simply applied to perforated stamp sheets or “printed”. On the one hand, the quantity, strength and commercial value of the trips could be better calculated, on the other hand, the area offered a lot of freedom for the design of the so-called LSD blotter (German blotting paper), the LSD-coated mosaic-like square cells. A sheet Blotterpaper usually consists of perforated rows of squares 15 (squares) with 4Tickets. Over time, simple drug kitchens turned into more and more complex LSD printers that eventually worked with four-color printing and flavored gum. Meanwhile, numerous poster shops offer drug-free “Blotter Art” as wall decoration. Psychedelic subjects are also found in batik (Tie-dye) or on quilts. The motifs range from cheesy colorful animal and science fiction fantasy figures with elements of Far Eastern or Indian mysticism to complex graphic patterns, which, in turn, take advantage of the mathematical framework of fractals, whether in quadratic form.

Other material
Examples of other psychedelic art material are tapestry, curtains and stickers, clothing, canvas and other printed artefacts and furniture.

Digital age
Computer art has 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 permit 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 digital art and computer graphics software and home computers had to offer at the time of creation. Conversely, the convolutional neural network DeepDream finds and enhance patterns in images purely via algorithmic pareidolia.

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 entactogen. Development of new psychedelics such as 2C-B 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.

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 Amanda Sage, Alex Grey, and Robert Venosa. These artists have developed unique and distinct styles that while containing elements that are “psychedelic”, are clearly artistic expressions 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.

Psychedelic artists
Pablo Amaringo
Chris Dyer (artist)
David Barnes
Doug Binder
Brummbaer
Mark Boyle and Joan Hills
Laurence Caruana
James Clifford
Lee Conklin
Robert Crumb
Roger Dean
Warren Dayton
Scott Draves
Donald Dunbar
M. C. Escher
Karl Ferris
William Finn
The Fool (design collective)
Ernst Fuchs
Bob Gibson
H. R. Giger
Terry Gilliam
Alex Grey
Rick Griffin
Gary Grimshaw
Leif Podhajsky
John Hurford
Alton Kelley
Mati Klarwein
Oleg A. Korolev
Abby Martin
Bob Masse
Peter Max
Stanley “Mouse” Miller
Victor Moscoso
Vali Myers
Martin Sharp
Gilbert Shelton
Grace Slick
Harold Thornton
Vernon Treweeke
John Van Hamersveld
David Vaughan
Louis Wain
Robert Williams
Wes Wilson

Role in music
The main supporters of the 1960 psychedelic art movement were artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson. These for the posters of their concerts used psychedelic art: saturated colors in evident contrast, richly ornate text, strong symmetrical composition, collage elements, rubber-like distortions, and bizarre iconographies, all distinctive features of the style of art posters psychedelic. Although San Francisco remained the focus of psychedelic art in the early 1970s, the style also developed internationally: the English artist Bridget Rileyshe became famous for her paintings inspired by psychedelic models; Mati Klarwein created masterpieces for the albums of Miles Davis; The Pink Floyd worked extensively with designers based in London, Hipgnosis, to create a graphic to support the concepts in their albums, and so many other artists such as Jefferson Airplane, John Van Hamersveld, Warren Dayton and Peter Max.

Source from Wikipedia