Psychedelic art
Encyclopedia
Psychedelic art is any kind of visual artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences induced by drugs such as LSD, mescaline
Mescaline
Mescaline or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class used mainly as an entheogen....
, and psilocybin
Psilocybin
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug, with mind-altering effects similar to those of LSD and mescaline, after it is converted to psilocin. The effects can include altered thinking processes, perceptual distortions, an altered sense of time, and spiritual experiences, as well as...
. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist Humphry Osmond
Humphry Osmond
Humphry Fortescue Osmond was a British psychiatrist known for inventing the word psychedelic and for using psychedelic drugs in medical research...
) "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 1960s counterculture
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
. 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.
Features
- Fantastic, metaphysical and surrealistic subject matter
- KaleidoscopicKaleidoscopeA kaleidoscope is a circle of mirrors containing loose, colored objects such as beads or pebbles and bits of glass. As the viewer looks into one end, light entering the other end creates a colorful pattern, due to the reflection off the mirrors...
, fractalFractalA fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...
or paisleyPaisley (design)Paisley or Paisley pattern is a droplet-shaped vegetable motif of Indian, Pakistani and Persian origin. The pattern is sometimes called "Persian pickles" by American traditionalists, especially quiltmakers,The Persian Pickle Club, Sandra Dallas. St. Martin's Press,...
patterns - Bright and/or highly contrasting colors
- Extreme depth of detail or stylization of detail. Also so called Horror vacuiHorror vacuithumb|Many paintings by [[Outsider Art]]ist [[Adolf Wölfli]] contain space filled with writing or musical notationIn visual art, horror vacui is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with detail....
style. - Morphing of objects and/or themes and sometimes collageCollageA collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
- Phosphenes, spirals, concentric circles, diffractionDiffractionDiffraction refers to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle. Italian scientist Francesco Maria Grimaldi coined the word "diffraction" and was the first to record accurate observations of the phenomenon in 1665...
patterns, and other entopticEntoptic phenomenonEntoptic phenomena are visual effects whose source is within the eye itself. In Helmholtz's words:...
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 HofmannAlbert Hofmann
Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide . He authored more than 100 scientific articles and a number of books, including LSD: My Problem Child...
'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
Remedios Varo
Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Varo Uranga in Anglès, Girona, Spain in 1908. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement...
and André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...
. It should also be noted that these came from writers involved in the Surrealist movement. Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
writes of his Peyote experience in "Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara" (1937). Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...
wrote "Miserable Miracle" (1956), to describe his experiments with Mescaline
Mescaline
Mescaline or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class used mainly as an entheogen....
and also hashish
Hashish
Hashish is a cannabis preparation composed of compressed stalked resin glands, called trichomes, collected from the unfertilized buds of the cannabis plant. It contains the same active ingredients but in higher concentrations than unsifted buds or leaves...
.
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
'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 poet, Ernst Junger's psychedelic experiments.
Early artistic experimentation with LSD was conducted in a clinical context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist Oscar Janiger
Oscar Janiger
Oscar Janiger was a University of California Irvine Psychiatrist who was best known for his LSD research, which lasted from 1954 to 1962....
. 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
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
became fascinated by psychedelic drugs as early as the 1950s as evidenced by The Yage Letters (1963)
The Yage Letters
The Yage Letters, first published in 1963, is a collection of correspondence and other writings by Beat Generation authors William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg...
. 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
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
). 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 GriffinRick Griffin
Richard Alden Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best known...
, Victor Moscoso
Victor Moscoso
Victor Moscoso is an artist best known for producing psychedelic rock posters/advertisements and underground comix in San Francisco during the 1960s and '70s....
, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse
Stanley Mouse
Stanley George Miller , better known as Mouse and Stanley Mouse, is an American artist, notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and Grateful Dead album cover art.-Early life:...
& Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson
Wes Wilson
Wes Wilson is an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters. Most well known for designing posters for Bill Graham of the The Fillmore in San Francisco, he invented a style that is now synonymous with the peace movement, psychedelic era and the 1960s...
. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
, Victoriana, Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, and Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine 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 - 1972. Their work was immediately influential to 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
Bridget Riley
Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of Op art.-Early life:...
became famous for her op-art paintings of psychedlic patterns creating optical illusions. Mati Klarwein
Mati Klarwein
Abdul Mati Klarwein was a painter best known for his works used on the covers of music albums.-Biography:...
created psychedelic masterpieces for Miles Davis'
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz,...
Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for Carlos Santana
Carlos Santana
Carlos Augusto Alves Santana is a Mexican rock guitarist. Santana became famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his band, Santana, which pioneered rock, salsa and jazz fusion...
Latin Rock. Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
worked extensively with London based designers, Hipgnosis
Hipgnosis
Hipgnosis was a British art design group that specialized in creating cover art for the albums of rock musicians and bands, most notably Pink Floyd, T.Rex, The Pretty Things, UFO, 10cc, Bad Company, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Scorpions, Yes, The Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, ELO and XTC...
to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums. Los Angeles area artists such as John Van Hamersveld
John Van Hamersveld
John Van Hamersveld is an American graphic artist and illustrator who designed record jackets for pop and psychedelic bands, since the 1960s...
, Warren Dayton
Warren Dayton
Warren Dayton is an American illustrator, artist and graphic designer best known for his posters from psychedelic art era, a pioneer of the use of T-shirts as an art medium, creator of corporate branding & logos such as Thomas Kinkade’s Lightpost Publishing, and internationally award-winning book,...
and Art Bevacqua and New York artists Peter Max
Peter Max
Peter Max is a German-born Jewish American artist. At first, works in this style appeared on posters and were seen on the walls of college dorms all across America. Max then became fascinated with new printing techniques that allowed for four-color reproduction on product merchandise...
and Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser is a graphic designer, best known for the I Love New York logo, his "Bob Dylan" poster, the "DC bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the "Brooklyn Brewery" logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968.-Biography:Glaser was born into a Hungarian...
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
Summer of Love
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, creating a cultural and political rebellion...
focused on the explosion of psychedelic art on posters and the artists as leaders in the hippie
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
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
Underground comix
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...
. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground comics, and featured the work of Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
, S. Clay Wilson
S. Clay Wilson
S. Clay Wilson is an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson is known for aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of "lowlife," often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. He was an early contributor to Zap Comix,...
, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin
Rick Griffin
Richard Alden Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best known...
, and Robert Williams
Robert Williams (artist)
Robert Williams is an American painter, cartoonist, and founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.Williams was part of the Zap Collective, along with other underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton...
among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Gilbert Shelton
Gilbert Shelton
Gilbert Shelton is an American cartoonist and underground comix artist. He is the creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, Wonder Wart-Hog, Philbert Desanex, Not Quite Dead, and the cover art to The Grateful Dead's 1978 album Shakedown Street.He graduated from Lamar High...
created perhaps the most enduring of underground cartoon characters, "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are a trio of underground comic strip characters created by the U.S. artist Gilbert Shelton. The Freak Brothers first appeared in The Rag, an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas, beginning in May 1968; and were regularly reprinted in underground papers...
", 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.
The digital age
Computer artComputer art
Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, videogame, web site, algorithm, performance or gallery installation...
has allowed for an even greater and more profuse expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal
Fractal
A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...
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
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...
.
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
Digital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
and computer graphics
Computer graphics
Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....
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
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
, particularly the aesthetics of Rave Culture
Rave
Rave, rave dance, and rave party are parties that originated mostly from acid house parties, which featured fast-paced electronic music and light shows. At these parties people dance and socialize to dance music played by disc jockeys and occasionally live performers...
. 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
Alexander Shulgin
Alexander "Sasha" Theodore Shulgin is an American pharmacologist, chemist, artist, and drug developer.Shulgin is credited with the popularization of MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially for psychopharmaceutical use and the treatment of depression and...
) 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
Amanda Sage
Amanda Sage is primarily a painter based in Vienna. She trained and worked with the Fuchs dynasty of artists, being one of the more notable students.-Life and artwork:...
, Alex Grey
Alex Grey
Alex Grey is an American artist specializing in spiritual and psychedelic art that is sometimes associated with the New Age movement. Grey is a Vajrayana practitioner. His body of work spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and...
and Robert Venosa
Robert Venosa
Robert Venosa was an American artist residing in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He studied with what are termed the New Masters. His artworks reside in collections around the world. -Life and works:...
. 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.
Psychedelic artists
- Pablo AmaringoPablo AmaringoPablo Cesar Amaringo was an acclaimed Peruvian artist, renowned for his intricate, colourful depictions of his visions from drinking the entheogenic plant brew, ayahuasca. He was first brought to the West's attention by Dennis McKenna and Luis Eduardo Luna, who met Pablo in Pucallpa while...
- BrummbaerBrummbaerBrummbaer is a German digital artist who has done work as an art director, designer, graphic artist, and 3D modeler. As an actor he has appeared in various German TV movies, and also produced and directed...
- Roger DeanRoger DeanRoger Dean is an English artist, designer, architect, and publisher. He is best known for his work on posters and album covers for musicians, which he began painting in the late 1960s. The covers often feature exotic, fantasy landscapes...
- Warren DaytonWarren DaytonWarren Dayton is an American illustrator, artist and graphic designer best known for his posters from psychedelic art era, a pioneer of the use of T-shirts as an art medium, creator of corporate branding & logos such as Thomas Kinkade’s Lightpost Publishing, and internationally award-winning book,...
- Scott DravesScott DravesScott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms...
- Ernst FuchsErnst Fuchs (artist)Ernst Fuchs is an Austrian painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, singer and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In 1972 he acquired the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in Hütteldorf, which he restored and transformed...
- H. R. GigerH. R. GigerHans Rudolf "Ruedi" Giger is a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer. He won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for his design work on the film Alien.-Early life:...
- Alex GreyAlex GreyAlex Grey is an American artist specializing in spiritual and psychedelic art that is sometimes associated with the New Age movement. Grey is a Vajrayana practitioner. His body of work spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and...
- Rick GriffinRick GriffinRichard Alden Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best known...
- John HurfordJohn HurfordJohn Hurford is a prolific English psychedelic artist.He produced for Oz , Gandalf's Garden and International Times , he is one of the few psychedelic artists of his...
- Alton KelleyAlton KellyAlton Kelley was an American artist best known for his psychedelic art, in particular his designs for 1960s rock concerts and albums...
- Mati KlarweinMati KlarweinAbdul Mati Klarwein was a painter best known for his works used on the covers of music albums.-Biography:...
- Isaac Abrams
- Peter MaxPeter MaxPeter Max is a German-born Jewish American artist. At first, works in this style appeared on posters and were seen on the walls of college dorms all across America. Max then became fascinated with new printing techniques that allowed for four-color reproduction on product merchandise...
- Stanley "Mouse" MillerStanley MouseStanley George Miller , better known as Mouse and Stanley Mouse, is an American artist, notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and Grateful Dead album cover art.-Early life:...
- Victor MoscosoVictor MoscosoVictor Moscoso is an artist best known for producing psychedelic rock posters/advertisements and underground comix in San Francisco during the 1960s and '70s....
- Gilbert SheltonGilbert SheltonGilbert Shelton is an American cartoonist and underground comix artist. He is the creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, Wonder Wart-Hog, Philbert Desanex, Not Quite Dead, and the cover art to The Grateful Dead's 1978 album Shakedown Street.He graduated from Lamar High...
- John Van HamersveldJohn Van HamersveldJohn Van Hamersveld is an American graphic artist and illustrator who designed record jackets for pop and psychedelic bands, since the 1960s...
- Robert WilliamsRobert Williams (artist)Robert Williams is an American painter, cartoonist, and founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.Williams was part of the Zap Collective, along with other underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton...
- Wes WilsonWes WilsonWes Wilson is an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters. Most well known for designing posters for Bill Graham of the The Fillmore in San Francisco, he invented a style that is now synonymous with the peace movement, psychedelic era and the 1960s...
- Oleg A. KorolevOleg A. KorolevOleg A. Korolev is Russian artist whose paintings have beenexhibited and represented in the private and corporate art collections of Russia, Europe, North America, and Australia.- Education :...
- Karl FerrisKarl FerrisKarl Ferris is an English photographer/designer, best known as one of the principal innovators of "psychedelic" photography. A photographer to the “British Rock Elite” - Eric Clapton, Cream, Donovan, The Hollies and Jimi Hendrix - Ferris was invited - as a style consultant and their personal...
- The Fool (design collective)The Fool (design collective)The Fool were a Dutch design collective and band who were influential in the psychedelic style of art in British popular music in the late 1960s. The colourful art draws on many fantastical and mystical themes...
See also
- Visionary artVisionary artVisionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences.-Definition:...
- Entoptic phenomena (archaeology)Entoptic phenomena (archaeology)For a medical definition please see Entoptic phenomenonIn archaeology, the term entoptic phenomena relates to visual experiences derived from within the eye or brain . In this respect they differ slightly from the medical definition, which defines entoptic phenomena as only applying to sources...
- PsychedelicPsychedelicThe term psychedelic is derived from the Greek words ψυχή and δηλοῦν , translating to "soul-manifesting". A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly...
- Psychedelic musicPsychedelic musicPsychedelic music covers a range of popular music styles and genres, which are inspired by or influenced by psychedelic culture and which attempt to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues-rock bands in the...
- Psychedelic literaturePsychedelic literature-The science of psychedelic drugs:*Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved: A Chemical Love Story by Alexander Shulgin and wife Ann Shulgin*Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved: The Continuation by Alexander Shulgin and wife Ann Shulgin...
Further reading
- Rubin, David S. Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s MIT Press (April 2010)
- Masters, Robert E.L. and Houston, Jean Psychedelic Art New York:1968 A Balance House book—printed by Grove Press, Inc.