Psychedelic Art

Psychedelic experience might be described briefly as the experiencing of states of awareness or consciousness profoundly different from the usual waking consciousness, from dreams and from familiar intoxication states.

The psychedelic artist is an artist whose work has been significantly influenced by psychedelic experience and who acknowledges the impact of the experience on his work. 

Most of the artists whose works are included in this book have used one or more psychochemicals on one or more occasions. LSD-25 was the substance used most often, but such similar psychedelics as mescaline, peyote, psilocybin, and others have been employed in many cases. 

A few of the artists claim similar experience resulting from the practice of Zen, yoga, sensory deprivation, and other induction procedures.

The artists (and the authors of this book) are under no illusion that alteration of consciousness confers the ability to create works of art. The artist, not the chemical, has to provide the intelligence, feeling, imagination, and talent. 

The psychedelic experience is experience, not injected talent or ingested inspiration, although the artist may draw inspiration from any thought or perception, whatever the situation of its occurrence.

Psychedelic artists of today arc using the discoveries of modern chemistry to provide themselves with extraordinary experiences. Where artists of the past traveled to the ends of the earth, these new artists travel inward, to what Aldous Huxley called the antipodes of the mind - the world of visionary experience.

The result is psychedelic art: works of art attempting in some sense to communicate psychedelic experience, or to induce psychedelic experience, or at least to alter consciousness so as to approximate aspects of the chemically induced state.