Visions and the art of Nick Hyde
Cover painting: Holy Grove by Gage Taylor (1975).
Book purchase of the week was this American collection of what we have to call “hippy art” (or “California Visionary Art”, as its creators preferred) published by Pomegranate Publications in 1977. I’d seen this circa 1979 and many of the pictures inside were used by Omni Magazine to decorate the science fiction stories in their early issues. After that it vanished from view completely which leads me to believe that UK distributors Big O didn’t sell as many as they would have liked. The white cover design made me remember it for a long time as being part of the David Larkin series which I discussed in May but it isn’t, although the Larkin books were quite probably the model for the book’s presentation.
Finally acquiring a copy was something of a disappointment since it transpires I remembered the decent painters and forgot the terrible ones who comprise at least half the book. Cliff McReynolds is one of the better artists (Omni thought so too) and by coincidence I posted one of his Visions paintings, Landscape with Grenade, almost a year ago to the day.
BethAnn (1970).
Best of the bunch for me is Nick Hyde whose fantastically detailed works blend the fractal filigree of psychedelic art with the kind of dreamscapes and tableaux one sees in Surrealism. The print reproductions do little justice to his detail and the web degrades his work even further (see Abraxas for a good example). Happily there are posters available.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
9 comments or trackbacks
#1 posted by The Other Andrew
Nov 20th, 2007
For years I bought every issue of Omni magazine, and used to love to read the short fiction. I remember the speculative cover art and the pics they tied in with the short fiction very fondly. Thanks for the nostaglic reminder!
#2 posted by John
Nov 20th, 2007
I was the same, Andrew, and later chopped the pictures out of many of them to decorate walls of flats. Omni seems now like quite an extraordinary endeavour yet I rather took it for granted at the time.
#3 posted by the other andrew
Nov 20th, 2007
I think we all did sadly. I kept the mags for years, but then ditched them a number of years back during a house move. I wish I hadn’t now, they would make for an interesting time capsule as well.
#4 posted by James McCarthy
Nov 21st, 2007
I have the book “Visions” as well as some of those old Omni magazines.Was there ever a “Visions Vol.2″?
#5 posted by John
Nov 21st, 2007
Hi James. Visions is labelled as “volume 1″ but I’ve never seen any mention of there being a volume 2. I’d guess not since the book was almost ten years too late by the time it appeared and more pictures of romping flower children was the last thing people were looking for in the materialistic Eighties.
#6 posted by James McCarthy
Dec 9th, 2007
Thank you for your reply. I rather regret what happened during the 1980’s.Everyone seemed to drift back to materialism and the art reflected that.Music became more commercial and all people wanted to do was dance.I miss escapist art and escapist music but only if they are created with originality.
#7 posted by Tom
Mar 13th, 2008
There was a similar book from Pomegranate(1979) featuring the work of Bill Martin.
http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Martin-Paintings-Sixty-Nine-Seventy-Nine/dp/0517538954
#8 posted by Brice Buchanan
May 8th, 2008
I bought a copy of this book in 1979, and still own it. The Harvard Coop sold Pomegranate posters, too, and I had a number of pieces by Bill Martin, Gage Taylor, Joseph Parker and Cliff McReynolds adorning my aparment and rehearsal space in the early ’80s.
Hyde’s work is amazing (see: “Estate of Man”) but a little too intense for what I was after, and not necessarily what I wanted to encounter on the way to the bathroom at 3:00 a.m. ;-)
Other artists featured in the book are Thomas Akawie and Shiela Rose.
I, too, kept waiting for Vol 2, but I think John’s comment above nails it. This collection would have done very well indeed circa 1970.
Ah well. I always was a late-blooming closet hippie anyways. :-)
#9 posted by Malcolm Lawrie
Nov 15th, 2009
I have a copy of the Visions calendar for 1979 & think it probably contains some of the same pictures. Some verge on what I would call Hippy Kitsch but Bill Martin, Nick Hyde & Joseph Parker I particularly like. I don’t see it as necessarily escapist, after all materialism is a way of escaping from thinking too deeply about ourselves & what our role is in this amazing universe.
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