In 1938, while researching derivatives of the fungus ergot in search of pharmaceutical applications in the treatment of migraines, Swiss scientist Dr. Albert Hoffman synthesized a chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide-25, which came into common parlance, and common use, in the early and mid-1960’s as LSD. It was a few years later before Hoffman, reportedly accidentally, discovered that the chemical had remarkable psychoactive properties.

Hoffman died on Thursday, at the age of 102, and though his legacy includes a number of other useful pharmaceuticals, it is the synthesis of LSD, and it’s impact on the culture, for which he will be remembered.

There is no doubt that the explosion of frenetic creative activity in music and the visual arts that occurred in the 1960’s owes much of its impetus, directly or indirectly, to the influence of LSD and related psychotropic compounds on the artists and musicians active at the time; an influence that continues to this day and has been absorbed into the fabric of mainstream art and entertainment.

There are a number of artists who are associated with the array of visual art styles that came to be called “psychedelic art”; for some examples, see my articles on Rick Griffin, Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Alex Grey, Andrew Gonzales and Peter Max. (For a clearer perspective on the influence of consciousness altering chemicals on artistic pursuits, separate from both the overreaching hype and anti-drug hysteria that ensued, see Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.)

Though he stated that it was not his primary source of inspiration, one of the prominent artists most often associated with the visionary and spiritual aspects of that style is the German painter Mati Klarwein.

Klarwein had been established as a gallery artist for some time, but he entered the popular consciousness when several of his hallucinatory paintings graced the covers of popular progressive rock and jazz albums in the mid-60’s. His painting Annunciation, reproduced on the cover of Santana’s Abraxas LP, and his commissioned cover for Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew became cultural icons of the time.

Born Matias Klarwein, and reportedly named for German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, himself something of a visionary painter, Klarwein studied with Fernand Leger and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, before encountering the influential fantastic realist painter Ernst Fuchs, who would have a dramatic impact on his path as an artist.

Klarwein’s paintings also show the influence of the Surrealists, notably Salvador Dali, with whom he studied at one time, and share the ability to reinforce fantastic visions with startlingly precise realist painting technique.

His sometimes complex panoramas of bizarre imagery, reinforced with patterns of intense colors (often juxtaposing high-chroma colors with their compliments for the added intensity produced by optical effect), are rich with intricate detail, often carried to extreme levels. His circular composition Grain of Sand is particularly striking in that respect.

Less well known are his sometimes straightforward landscapes and still life paintings.

There are several collections of his work, some of them out of print but often available used, God Jokes: The Art of Abdul Mati Klarwein, Inscapes Real-Estate Paintings by Mati Klarwein, Milk n’ Honey, and a very nice volume that I particularly like, Mati Klarwein: Collected Works 1959-1975.

[Note: the sites linked here contain images that should be considered NSFW.]

Kris Kuksi is an artist of seeming contradictions.

One moment he’ll be fascinating you with his grotesque, darkly themed “Mixed-media Assemblages”, or disconcerting you with his jarringly electric fantastic realist visions; and the next moment he’ll surprise you with classical portraiture, traditional figure drawing or a delicate, naturalistic rendering of a freshly opened orchid or a dew spattered iris.

I first encountered Kuski’s work at a gallery here in Philadelphia where one of his assemblages was attracting a lot of attention on a “First Friday” gallery walk in the Old City gallery district.

These sculptural objects (image at left top, with detail, below) are wonderfully intricate constructions of pop culture effluvia like plastic model kits, injection molded toys, dolls, plastic skulls, knick-knack figurines, miniature fencing, toy animals, mechanical parts and ornate frames or furniture parts; assembled into grotesque tableaux that look a bit like an explosion in Hieronymus Bosch’s attic or H.R. Giger’s dollar store.

These constructions are usually given a patina of light grey that pulls them together and gives them a nice fake antique look that makes them perfect for that alcove in the dark hallway in your Victorian mansion that leads to the Room that None Must Enter.

I can say from seeing these close up that the photos on Kuksi’s site (in the gallery section labeled “the grotesque”) don’t do them justice. There are better photos, with details, along with an interview, on Dark Roasted Blend. There is a short time-lapse video of the assembly of one of his constructions on MySpace.

When I looked up Kuksi’s web site on returning from the gallery walk, I found more of these assemblages, along with some of his “fantastic realism” paintings and drawings, that range from Art Nouveau meets H.P. Lovecraft to psychedelic visionary paintings that lean into Alex Grey territory (image at left, bottom left).

Continuing to the “portraiture” section, I was surprised to see a portrait that I had come across elsewhere and made mental note to look up, not realizing at all that it was by the same artist who did these constructions (Portrait of George Gillaume, image at left, middle with detail). I was further surprised to see, in Kuksi’s “naturalism” section, detailed, contemplative paintings of flowers and images of animals.

Kuksi paints in acrylic on Gessobord. Most of the images in his galleries are accompanied by highrer-resolution versions accessed from a link in the description text. Don’t miss the fact that many of his galleries have more than one page, accessed by small links at page bottom. There are numerous images from the many sides of this multi-faceted artist.

In my research I stumbled across this listing for a Drawing Workshop with Kuksi in Germany in the summer. Please note that I’m not certain if this is current.

On his deviantArt page, Kuksi lists some of his favorite artists as Alphonse Mucha, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Venosa, Alex Grey, and Andrew Gonzales. Hs also lists his “interests” as Art, Music, Science, Philosophy and Maritime Cannibalism.

Andy Paiko is a glass artist who creates glass sculpture as well as sculptural vesselware and traditional vesselware.

I suppose “gothic” might be a term applied to his fascinating constructions of ornately crafted glass that often incorporate the skulls of small animals, spine-like constructions and other natural elements in ways that are slightly creepy but also fascinating in a pre-20th Century bizarre-object-in-a-bell-jar kind of way.

Paiko does, in fact, create bell jars, among his other nouveau arcana, such as an absinthe fountain and the “Lube Rack“, meant to “enhance one’s friction-free environment” with art glass “spice jars” full of everything from motor oil to lard to burbon.

His glass sculptures are usually constructions that are a sculptural variation on some object that would normally not be composed of glass, like a seismograph, a hammer and nails, a balance, a picture frame, or a spinning wheel; and occasionally are odd takes on objects that are normally made of glass, like a five foot long syringe or his hourglass filled with black sand.

When viewing Paiko’s online galleries be sure to be aware of the options near the top, either text links of small squares, that allow you to click through multiple views of the object, or multiple objects in a series.

The piece shown here, simply titled “The Glass Chair“, is a collaboration with Douglas Little and is owned by Conde Nast Publications, which, inexplicably, didn’t use it in the final spread of the “Gothic Splendor” article in House and Garden for which it was photographed. The piece is chair-size, about 50″ (126cm) tall, and is composed of about 250 separate parts, including a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat and the skulls of a rhesus monkey and a mountain lion. Just the thing for that empty alcove in the hall.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Leah Palmer Preiss (see also my post on Leah Palmer Preiss)]

In 1934 Max Ernst published a Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness), a Surrealist novel in collage. Ernst created his work, which I think is one of the earliest works that could be called a “graphic novel”, by painstakingly cutting out images from engraved catalog and periodical illustrations and arranging them in fascinating, sometimes jarring scenes that reel out into a dreamlike, subconscious narrative.

Modern computer technology makes the process of image based or photo-collage considerably simpler (as I can attest from my forays into X-acto knife and rubber cement collage as a teenager), but creating good, effective collage is still a challenge to the creative eye and imagination. (See my post on the remarkable photo-collages of Emily Allchurch).

Stephen Rothwell, about whom I can find little other information on the web, has created a modern collage story in a similar spirit to Ernst called Dark House Quarter. Rothwell draws on archival photographs rather then engravings, but with a similar tone of staid images from former years rendered asunder by their dream state juxtapositions.

Rothwell, like Ernst, matches his source imagery in a way that produces pictures that feel consistent and whole within themselves. Rothwell’s compostions are sometimes in sepia tones and sometimes in color that has been added to black and white images.

Also like his Surrealist predecessors, Rothwell intends for his images to provoke and disturb, but I never get the feeling he’s going for the cheap shock value present in some of the lowbrow art and so-called “Pop Surrealism” that is currently popular.

The narrative, such as it is, is more subconscious than overt. Apparently something bad has happened, or is happening, perhaps war. The images, though, are fascinating, each one a tableaux of disparate components that fit together with emotive effect.

[Link via BoingBoing]

Julian Beever is perhaps the best known “pavement painter”. He uses colored chalk to create complex drawings on sidewalks in public spaces. Like those of his contemporary Kurt Wenner, these sometimes are giant reproductions of old master paintings. The most interesting, though, take the form of large scale anamorphoses, images distorted in such a way that only assume their proper form when seen from a particular viewpoint (or, in the case of mirror anamorphoses, when viewed in reflection on a curved surface).

Anamorphosis has a long history in art, since the time of Leonardo having been used to startle or amuse, or even to hide the subject of an image from casual view. One of the most famous is the anamorphic apparition of a skull in The Ambassadors, a famous double-portrait by Hans Holbien the Younger.

In the case of the sidewalk artists like Beever, the purpose is still to startle and amuse, notably with anamorphic images that form striking three dimensional illusions when viewed from a certain angle, as in the image above.

Beever often poses for photographs, interacting in some way with his three dimensional illusions, in this case, mirrored by a self-portrait in the “foreground”.

Beever’s web site has a number of his images, but in only a couple of cases does he show you the image from other angles, as you would see it in life, to understand the process (see his globe image in my post on Optical Illusion Sites for an example).

Beever most often does his sidewalk art in European cities, where there may be a higher tolerance for impromptu art in public spaces, but he occasionally does do his trompe l’oiel illusions here in the U.S., where they, unsurprisingly, are simetimes in the form of advertising.

Beever’s site doesn’t seem to be updated often, but other mentions of him continue to pop up. Here is a post on Mighty Optical Illusions that features some of his recent work. There are also some videos of his work (and here) and his working process (and here).

See also my previous post on Julian Beever. That post has a attracted a number of comments requesting contact information for Beever. Those wishing to purchase his paintings on canvas or hire him for corporate events can contact him through his web site.

I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes be a little intimidated by my own sketchbooks, specifically in cases where I’ve made some drawings that I feel were particularly successful, and become reluctant to add to them, either from worry about carrying a sketchbook with drawings I like in it around and losing it, or simply feeling like I have to be confident I’m going to make a comparably good drawing with my next entry.

This is completely silly, of course, and counter-productive for an artist, but I venture to think some of you can identify.

How much more intimidating would it be, though, if the sketchbook in which you were drawing were full of wonderful drawings by other artists? Daunting? Perhaps, but how inspiring might it be as well? This is the situation facing the artists participating in Sketchtravel.

Sketchtravel is a project jointly managed by Daisuke Tsutsumi, a multifaceted artist who I profiled on lines and colors last May, and Gérald Guerlais, a French illustrator and background designer, who informed me about the project.

Sketchtravel revolves around a single sketchbook to which 50 artists will make contributions at it travels around the world.

Each artist contributes a single page of art, be it drawing or painting, though the rules suggest that care must be taken not to damage previous or subsequent pages with invasive tools or techniques. The drawings are scanned, both as a precaution in the event of the worst case scenario of the book being lost or stolen, and also so the virtual version of the physical sketchbook can be updated on the project’s web site.

The theme of the works varies widely, though it often focuses on the book itself and its travels.

One of the more interesting aspects of the process is that the sketchbook is making its zig-zag journey around the curve of the horizon not by post or package service, but carried by hand. It travels in a custom made, felt lined, oak case with brass hardware.

Each invited artist receives the sketchbook from the previous contributor in person, adds their contribution, and, in turn, hands it off to the next artist; though I found no mention of how the artists are selected or how the logistics of travel were determined. The site has a map marking the book’s recent travels and current location (as of this writing, the west coast of the U.S.).

The project was started in 2006 and the sketchbook currently has 24 artists represented in the virtual version on the site. You can view the contributions to date, along with photos of the book and pictures of the hand-offs from artist to artist. There is also a list of the participating artists with links to their individual web sites or blogs.

Guerlais also maintains a blog for the project, with more details about the sketchbook’s travels, the hand-offs and related news. The blog and the web site have content in both French and English.

As each artist adds to the book, presumably more inspired than intimidated by the work of those who have added their drawings before them, the book will grow organically into its final state as a collaborative artwork. When finished, the original sketchbook will be exhibited at the Arludik Gallery in Paris, after which it will be auctioned off to a charity association selected by the artists.

(Images at left, from top: Gérald Guerlais, Dominique Louis, Claude William Trebutien, Ronnie Del Carmen, Nash Dunnigan, Benoit le Pennec.)

I’ve long maintained that both men and women have only one erogenous zone. (Got your attention, didn’t I?)

I’ll further maintain that this single erogenous zone is located in the same physical location for both sexes, directly between… the ears. Nothing is sexy unless you think it’s sexy.

Which is why life drawing sessions are set up to maintain a professional or academic atmosphere and the sexual element is almost non-existant. This is generally a Good Thing, but it’s nice to know that there are exceptions to every rule.

Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School is a series of drawing sessions that looks to put the “arrrrrr” back into art classes, with racy costumes, provocative poses and a generally anti-academic atmosphere.

For more background, see my previous post on Dr. Sketchy’s.

At the time, I mentioned that submissions were being taken for the first Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art Show.

Dr. Sketchy’s founder, illustrator Molly Crabapple, has written to say that the show is now assembled and will hang at Rapture, 200 Avenue A in NYC, from November 21 to December 20, 2007. The opening party will be November 27th.

There is a gallery online for those of us not in the area, that features work by some of the participants, as well as photographs from the sessions.

Note: The Dr. Sketchy’s site should be considered delightfully NSFW and politically incorrect.

(Image above: Jim Hoover)

For the benefit of those in other parts of the world, I’ll mention that today is Veterans Day here in the U.S., a day set aside to remember and honor those who have served in the military over the history of the country; though particular attention is given, as it should be, to those involved in conflicts within the memory of living persons.

This past Memorial Day (a U.S. holiday in observance of those who have died in military service) I wrote a post about the PBS series They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of World War II, in which I mentioned this often neglected function of art.

Art as reportage in general, and combat art in particular, gets looked down on by the art establishment as irrelevant, and often “not art”; but then the art establishment has always attempted to elevate itself at the cost of narrowing its vision. The fact is that visual arts like drawing and painting are very different from photography, and reporting a time, place or event through that process gives insight into life and human experience unlike any other. If the purpose of art is to communicate, here is that communication at its most raw and direct.

Artists have been painting their visions of war for centuries, but combat artists have a unique role, that of soldier and artist, participant and reporter, subject and observer. They are able to give us the reality of war in a way that carries the undeniable weight of personal experience.

Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art From the Revolution through the Twentieth Century is a collection that puts together artwork depicting war at the level of those who experienced it, both from artists in combat and outside observers who were adapt at capturing some of the same reality.

The book, by combat artist Avery Chenoweth, includes art by a few names you will recognize, John Singer Sargent and Edouard Manet among them, but is mostly of names known only to those familiar with combat art. Some were artist/correspondents for magazines, who also went to the front lines, but most are actual combat artists, soldiers who did double duty as artists.

This is not the “military art” of glorified war machines, sleek warplanes, dramatic fighting ships and cool tanks (though I have to admit here that the 12 year boy in the back of my brain still has a fascination with such things), nor is it an anti-war treatise; it is work by artists who tried to portray war as they saw it, directly, immediately and without filter or apology.

I think it would be hard for those with direct experience of combat to glorify war, leave that to the video game companies and movie makers; combat artists need to convey their experience as honestly as possible.

I haven’t read Art of War, I’m basing my comments on the book on information from those who have, as well as articles and reviews, particularly an excellent article on combat art from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that includes information about Marine Staff Sargent Michael Fay, a contemporary combat artist assigned in Iraq.

I think it’s important that collections like this exist. Here is a role for art that isn’t emphasized and discussed enough. Not only is it a visceral example of the power of art to communicate; but it serves as a reminder, even for those of us who are vehemently anti-war, that the sacrifices of those who have served their nation by putting on a uniform and stepping into the inferno deserve our recognition.

[Images above: "Gassed" by John Singer Sargent (WW I), "Mortarburst" (field sketch) and "The Price" (final painting) by Tom Lea (WW II), "Trip flares" by Michael Fay (Iraq II)]

Ephemera is defined as printed or written material that isn’t intended to be preserved. Magazines and newspapers, for example, are meant to be transitory, disposed of once read (the pile of National Geographics in your grandfather’s attic notwithstanding.)

Even many books are meant to be ephemeral; computer instruction manuals, for example, are out of date the instant the ink is dry because the next version of whatever it is has jut gone into beta.

Ephemera has a long history (ironically enough), as one person’s transient junk is another’s lasting treasure (witness baseball cards and comic books).

For literally hundreds of years, printed matter has been produced that was quickly made irrelevant by new events. Often this material is accompanied by illustrations, images that are as varied, weird and bizarre as anything intentionally created by fantasy artists.

It used to be that this material was relegated to dusty libraries and second hand book shops, where diligent curiosity seekers would occasionally turn up forgotten gems of oddness and wonder. But everything, it seems, whether ephemeral or significant, is being scanned and put online at some point, as our entire civilization is squeezed through the digital cheesecloth of the internet and filtered into archival bits.

“PK” (or “peacay”) is an individual who has a knack for finding particularly fascinating bits of treasure amid the cultural detritus as it settles into the great Sargasso Sea of internet archives. He collects the most bizarre and interesting pieces of visual ephemera and displays then for our delight on his long running blog, BibliOddysey, which I’ve written about before.

Now, in some kind of poetic circle of weirdness, some of this material has been collected and printed as a book, BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, in which some of the best and strangest of PK’s finds are collected and annotated by PK for our edification, amusement and delighted bewilderment.

The book is part of a nascent publishing venture by the Fuel design group, a well known design firm in the U.K. In his description, PK points out that “With pre-production topping out at somewhere over 500 years, BibliOdyssey might well be the slowest book ever published.”

You can read about the book on the Fuel site, or on the BibliOdyssey site, where you can also, of course, get lost in the online display of ephemera. There’s something special and different, though, about the way images appear in print; and in this case the bits of ephemera are being re-released back into their natural element, at home once again in the sea of printed pages.

Let me see if I’ve got this right now, this is a book about visual material from the web that was archived from books, but I’m telling you about it on the web, and pointing you to online sources from which you could order the book…

As I mentioned in my article about Peter Max, there were several less widely known artists who were actually much more instrumental in the creation of that unique blend of Op, Pop, Surrealism, Dada and Art Nouveau that came to be known as Psychedelic Art in the 1960’s.

Rick Griffin was one of the major contributors to this style, and is considered one of the “big five” along with Alton Kelley, Stanley “Mouse” Miller, Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso.

The canvases of the psychedelic artists were concert posters, record album covers and comix (underground comics). Griffin was a standout in all three areas.

Griffin came out of the California surfer culture and created an influential comic strip character called Murphy, whose adventures he chronicled in Surfer magazine.

In Los Angeles he fell in with a group of artists and musicians called the Jook Savages, and was a participant in the legendary Watts Acid Test held by writer and psychedelic pioneer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

At the time LSD was legal, and the influence of psychedelic (meaning “mind manifesting”) drugs was integral to the explosion of artistic and musical experimentation and creativity that marked the era. (To separate the impact of consciousness altering chemicals on creative individuals from the anti-drug hysteria that followed, see Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.)

Influenced by the radical new poster art of Wilson and, in particular, Kelley and Mouse, Griffin moved to San Francisco and joined them in creating posters for the burgeoning rock concert scene, working for promoters like Chet Helms and Bill Graham.

Wilson and Kelly created their poster designs largely with typography and collage, but Mouse and Griffin could draw like gangbusters and sparked the art of the poster, which was undergoing a revival in America in the 1960’s that rivaled its impact in the Europe before the turn of the 20th Century, to new levels of experimentation and dazzle. Like his contemporaries, Griffin was influenced by Victorian and Art Nouveau typography and took the styles to wonderful graphic extremes. The type in psychedelic posters was deliberately exclusionary; if you didn’t “get it”, you didn’t need to read it.

Griffin became associated with the Grateful Dead and created some of their most recognized posters and album covers. The image above was used both for posters and for the cover of their palindrome-titled Aoxomoxoa LP. Griffin’s art rewards close inspection. The image above, despite the overt skull and crossed bones, is full of symbols of fertility, conception and birth (or re-birth). Take a close look at the “sun”.

Griffin was also a major presence in the underground comix scene, appearing in early issues of Robert Crumb’s ground-breaking Zap Comix, which set the standard for a subsequent wave of outside-the-box experimentation and wild abandon that expanded the boundaries of the medium (and laid the groundwork for the web comics of the 90’s). Griffin also created his own Tales from the Tube psychedelic surfer comix.

For several years the main presence on the web for Griffin’s art has been the Rick Griffin Galleries maintained by Tim Stephenson. The site has recently been redesigned and improved and features galleries of Griffin’s posters, album covers, comix, early surfer art and the Christian art that marked his devotion to Christianity in the 1970’s. There is also an excellent bio, page of remembrances, and list of links to other web resources about Griffin.

There is now an “official” site maintained by Griffin’s family, that also has galleries arranged by topic, a short bio and list of links.

There is an extensive selection of actual posters from Wolfgang’s Vault.

I’m remiss in not timing this post better, in that an exhibition of Griffin’s work, titled Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence has just ended at the Laguna Art Museum. There is a MySpace blog created to accompany the exhibit.

Additionally published to accompany the exhibit is a beautiful new large format book, also titled Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence, written by Doug Harvey. An earlier, and also excellent book, simply titled Rick Griffin, by Gordon McClelland has been republished. You can also find his work in Psychedelia: The Classic Poster Book by John Platt and Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco from Thames and Hudson; and, of course, in reprints of Zap Comix, and, if you can find it, Tales from the Tube.

Griffin designed the poster for the “Human Be-in”, a watershed counterculture event in January of 1967. The brilliant colors and mandala-like repetition of elements in his poster and album cover art were influential on many artists of the time and in later generations. The psychedelic artists of the 1960’s had a profound influence not only on subsequent visionary artists and the recent wave of so-called “Pop Surrealism”, but on the digital artists of the 1990’s and beyond.

(”…if six turned out to be nine, I don’t mind…“)