with thanks to Allyson Grey
On the evening of May 30, 1975, I took my first dose of LSD in Allyson's apartment. The experience was so rich and profound, coupled as it was with the meeting of my future wife, Allyson, that there seemed nothing more important than this revelation of infinite love and unity. As an artist, this became the only subject worth my time and attention. Spiritual and visionary consciousness assumed primary importance as the focal point of my life and art. My creative process was transformed by my experience with psychedelics, also called entheogens, because of their uncanny ability to reveal the God within.
Due to its visionary power and richness, the psychedelic experience has played a tremendous role in fueling an artistic and cultural renaissance. Offering artists access to deeper and higher aspects of their soul, the psychonaut is given a subject worth making art about. The transformative vision is a critically important discovery, a magnetic passion that burns in their souls and artworks. A worthy subject is an artist's most important discovery and can impact whether their work will evoke the deepest and highest resonance with their viewers.
Oscar Janiger's studies of LSD and creativity showed that many artists felt the work done while tripping or post-tripping was more inventive and inspired work than their previous work. Keith Haring, one of the most celebrated artists of the 1980s, credited LSD with stylistic breakthroughs that brought him to his own unique work. Sacramental substances in every culture have been treasured by certain members and not recommended for all. It seems a crime against cognitive liberty, however, to punish self-discovery through sacraments that can empower our spiritual and creative lives.
“How can we bring the insights of the entheogenic state into our lives?” For the visionary artist, their work is a translation of a mystical state and represents, to the best of their ability, the depth of feeling and perception in subtle inner worlds they experienced in that state. Utterly unique to each individual, the entheogenic state is yet characterized by archetypal states of being reported by scores of psychonauts, some through art. Stages of the psychedelic experience can be translated into works of art.
Next come transpersonal stages:
Each of these stages or structures of higher consciousness and the subtle inner worlds can be evoked in our art. As with sacred art traditions in a multitude of cultures gone by, the Integrative Entheogenic Vision in art brings together the opposites of dark and light, reason and intuition, the known and the believed, male and female, life and death, matter and spirit.
Heinrich Kluver studied the effects of mescaline on normal subjects and found visual and perceptual “form constants” that recur in psychedelic voyages. Particularly relevant to developing our entheogenic artistic vision, these form constants include the spiral, the lattice or fretwork, tunnels, funnels, and passageways. There is a perception of “greater dimensionality,” both visual multidimensionality and ontological dimensions of meaning. Iridescent and finely filigreed organic and complex geometric shapes evolve and dissolve, referencing both nature and sacred architecture. Colors appear more radiant and overwhelming. Light itself takes on a palpable character. The white light is everywhere present, the “glue” of creation.
An experience of such overwhelming power can influence an artist's approach. In order to bring forth the deepest work, an artist needs to be sensitive and courageous toward their own process. There are many stages in realizing a work of art and the mysterious phases of creativity:
The most important question for any artist is, what is my subject? The formulation of a problem arises from the artist's worldview and, if the problem is sufficiently broad, the stage may be set for an entire life's journey. The problem is the “well” dug to reveal the Source, the Vision, the creative matrix of questions and obsessions that drive you. Solving your aesthetic problem becomes your mission.
The journey of creating the painting Transfiguration clearly illuminates the evolution of an artwork and the stages in my creative process. The subject of the body/mind has long been my passion and making visible multiple dimensions of reality among my greatest challenges. Initial experiences on LSD compelled me to make mystical consciousness itself the subject of my art. The subject of consciousness and the artistic problem of how to portray it became my life's work.
In the stage of saturation, I immersed myself in the subject, researching and scouring many libraries for tracts on transpersonal psychology and the art of diverse cultures. Transfiguration became the subject of an illustrated lecture with artistic representations of transcendental light or energy in relation to the body, created by artists all over the world today and in cultures throughout human history. The painting Transfiguration had not yet been envisioned.
In the incubation stage, the vast womb of the unconscious takes over, gestating the problem. The embryonic artwork grows effortlessly at its own pace. For the painting Transfiguration, this phase took about half a year.
Then, in a dream, I had been painting a piece called Transfiguration. The painting had a simple composition, two opposing spherical curves connected by a figure. Floating above the earth sphere, a human, fleshly at the feet, became gradually translucent as the figure rose between the globes. At about groin level, the figure “popped” into a bright hallucinogenic crystal sphere. The dream revealed a unique solution to my simmering aesthetic problem.
This illumination, or inspiration phase, my aha! moment provided by the dream, was underscored later that week when I smoked DMT for the first time. As I inhaled the immediately active and extremely potent psychedelic, I experienced the transfigured subject of my painting firsthand. In my vision, my feet were the foundation of the material world. As I inhaled, the material density of my body seemed to dissolve, and I “popped” into the bright world of living geometry and infinite spirit. Strange jewel-like chakra centers glowed within my wire-frame spirit body. Spectral colors appeared that had been absent from my dream painting. Fully inside my future painting, this image was clarified in order to better create a work of art.
After two visionary encounters of the same painting, I began drawing my inspired impression in a sketchbook. This started the translation phase. Bringing the inner solution of my artistic problem to an outward form, I drew the body and computer-plotted an accurate texture map of the electric grid around the hypermindsphere. Assembling the various elements, I stretched a 60 x 90 inch canvas to create a life-sized figure centered between two large spheres. After a long period of drawing and refining, I started painting. After months of painting the figure and the spheres, Allyson, my partner in all things, continued to ask about the unconsidered area of the painting, the blue negative spaces around the lower body below the hypermindsphere and above the earth. This was a dark area that went unnoticed in my previous visions.
When we are aesthetically “stumped” and need to see our work with fresh and creative eyes, Allyson and I, studio mates for most of our lives, smoke cannabis together and gaze at the work of art (or blank canvas) in question. Suggestions of what should appear in the empty space of Transfiguration did coalesce. Stars obviously, but this was not just outer space—this was inner space, the place of numinous angels or demons, of Terence's “self-dribbling basketballs,” beings with skin like a Fabergé egg, the oddly glowing mindspheres anticipating the transformative megasphere above. The painting took almost a year to complete.
Integrating the inspired moment by creating an artifact and bringing that artifact into the world outside the studio is a prime function of the creative process. I sculpted an elaborate 104 x 156 inch frame to honor this life-altering vision. A poster was published, the work has been widely exhibited, and it was reproduced in my book titled Transfigurations. Allyson and I have decided to retain the original framed painting to share at CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a sanctuary of visionary art.
Although entheogens have played a crucial role in the creative process of many artists, including Allyson and me, we cannot responsibly advocate the use of these sacraments for everyone and certainly do not promote a constant haze of chemically altered consciousness for anyone. Some—and they often know who they are—should completely steer clear of psychoactive substances without guidance from a qualified physician. Vision drugs catalyze our inherently visionary and potentially mystical dimensions of consciousness. May they be recognized and honored for the powerful and sacred substances they are, proof of the importance and infinite vastness of the subtle inner worlds of imagination and illumination, and may they open an endless source of inspiration for new universal sacred art.
Since writing this essay nearly fifteen years ago, a tribe of visionary artists has emerged, developing and refining the subject of altered and higher states of awareness. The visionary art movement is largely underground, appearing at transformational festivals worldwide, and the resulting visionary artworks form a body of evidence that testifies to the recurring motifs of the inner worlds and beings that dwell there. Allyson and I believe this is a new sacred art pointing to the emergence of a planetary civilization.