{"id":16812,"date":"2015-05-22T02:31:58","date_gmt":"2015-05-22T01:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=16812"},"modified":"2015-05-22T05:37:32","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T04:37:32","slug":"art-that-transcends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2015\/05\/22\/art-that-transcends\/","title":{"rendered":"Art that transcends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"ca56.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/ca56.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Late last year, US design magazine <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commarts.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Communication Arts<\/em><\/a> asked me to write a piece about psychedelic art, past and present. The resulting feature has been out for a couple of weeks in the <a href=\"https:\/\/store.commarts.com\/shop\/detail.asp?prod=ISS201505\" target=\"_blank\">May\/June issue<\/a> (no. 56) but I hadn&#8217;t seen it in print until a copy turned up today. Attempting to wrangle discussion of a very wide-ranging and amorphous field into 1500 words isn&#8217;t an easy task but I managed to sketch a history of psychedelic art beginning with Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond&#8217;s mescaline experiments in the 1950s. Art that can be considered psychedelic goes back into prehistory but Huxley&#8217;s <em>The Doors of Perception<\/em> (1954) is the first book that considered art in general from a psychedelic viewpoint. That book, and the later <em>Heaven and Hell<\/em> (1956), are still valuable for their aesthetic meditations however much Huxley&#8217;s optimism may have been tainted by the ferment of the 1960s.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"earth.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/earth.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>Primitive And Deadly (2014) by Earth. Art by Samantha Muljat.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The psychedelic art of the 60s isn&#8217;t exactly overlooked so I paid more attention to tracing the influence of the psychedelic style, and also mentioning painters such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ernstfuchs-zentrum.com\/html\/galde3eng.html\" target=\"_blank\">Ernst Fuchs<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/alexgrey.com\/art\/paintings\/\" target=\"_blank\">Alex Grey<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.martinahoffmann.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Martina Hoffmann<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.matiklarweinart.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mati Klarwein<\/a>. Among the more recent artists, I was pleased that <a href=\"http:\/\/bldbnkdsgn.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Samantha Muljat<\/a>&#8216;s album cover for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thronesanddominions.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Earth<\/a> was featured. I&#8217;ve been listening to this album a great deal over the past few months, and loved that cover as soon as I saw it. One of the other contemporary names, Brazilian artist <a href=\"http:\/\/dudalanna.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Duda Lanna<\/a>, works in a very different style: bold, vivid, and often abstract. There seems to be a lot of this kind of work around at the moment, so much so that I kept spotting new examples after the article had been delivered. It&#8217;s difficult to say whether this is a developing trend or simply a case of there being more of <em>everything<\/em> around these days. I&#8217;ll play safe and suggest it&#8217;s probably a bit of both although, as I say at the end of the article, if the movement to legalise drugs gains momentum we can expect to see a lot more psychedelic art.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dudalanna.com\/Garden-of-psychedelic-delights\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"lanna.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/lanna.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Garden of Psychedelic Delights by Duda Lanna.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Late last year, US design magazine Communication Arts asked me to write a piece about psychedelic art, past and present. The resulting feature has been out for a couple of weeks in the May\/June issue (no. 56) but I hadn&#8217;t seen it in print until a copy turned up today. Attempting to wrangle discussion of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2015\/05\/22\/art-that-transcends\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Art that transcends&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,4,851,43,3,44,17,23],"tags":[329,7332,7331,4572,3316,724,327,7333,295,6444,6935],"class_list":["post-16812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-design","category-drugs","category-magazines","category-music","category-painting","category-psychedelia","category-work","tag-aldous-huxley","tag-alex-grey","tag-communication-arts","tag-duda-lanna","tag-earth-group","tag-ernst-fuchs","tag-humphrey-osmond","tag-martina-hoffmann","tag-mati-klarwein","tag-samantha-muljat","tag-the-doors-group"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-4na","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}