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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART

PREFACE
"What is Visionary Art?" a friend of mine asked me during a
late-night conversation at the Abbey Bookshop in Paris.
My interlocutor, Guy Livingston, was a contemporary
musician, seriously dedicated to his art, and his question
deserved a seriously considered response. It was then
that I realized how, despite having painted visionary
works all my life, I couldn't easily articulate what I did.
The need for this manifesto was born.
In between working on my paintings, I began
researching and translating the writings of other
Visionary artists - finding that they too had struggled to
define what they did, though no simple formula readily
appeared. Usually, at three or four in the morning, I
would wake up with certain phrases going through my
mind - 'seeing the unseen','le sur-visuel'. And, terrible
insomniac that I am, I would not sleep again until I had
written them down. (Indeed, as I write this, it is again
three o'clock in the morning...) Such phrases, definitions,
and even 'a history' of Visionary Art were recorded in
my journals, awaiting the day when they would finally be
arranged as a manifesto.
Then, quite by surprise, I found myself in the south
of France, studying under Prof. Ernst Fuchs, the eldest
and perhaps greatest practitioner of our art. (If I had
properly interpreted certain omens in my dreams, I
would have seen that all of this was forthcoming...). And
it was here, in his studio on the 'Quai des Artistes'in
Monaco that the manifesto finally took shape, inspired in
part by conversations with him.
Nevertheless, I have left the words 'a first draft'
above the title, because I don't believe this work to be
definitive in any way. In fact, I invite other practitioners
of our art to contribute where possible - amending what
is lacking, advancing what is dated, and creating
together a statement that could be definitive and
complete.
If, in the end, this is not possible, and I have only
succeeded in sparking controversy, discussion, and
debate, then this too would fulfill my original intentions.

L. Caruana
Monaco 2001
 _______________________________________

First Draft of

A MANIFESTO
OF VISIONARY ART

One makes oneself a visionary

by a long, immense, and reasoned
disordering of the senses.
- RIMBAUD(1)

PART I:
WHAT IS VISIONARY ART?
Where Surrealists tried to elevate the dream-state into a
higher reality (and opposed the use of narcotics) the
Visionary artist uses all means at his disposal - even at
great risk to himself - to access different states of
consciousness and expose the resulting vision. Art of the
Visionary attempts to show what lies beyond the
boundary of our sight. Through dream, trance, or other
altered states, the artist attempts to see the unseen -
attaining a visionary state that transcends our regular
modes of perception. The task awaiting him, thereafter,
is to communicate his vision in a form recognizable to
'everyday sight'.
The history of Visionary art is characterized by the
attempt to find a new visual language - a language that
may overcome the inherent contradiction (of seeing what
cannot be seen) and express in visual form the 'supra-
visual' or, as we might say in French, le 'sur-visuel'. In
such a language, the images of art, myth, and dream
interfuse, different cultural symbols combine, and new
forms are found so as to express the resulting vision -- be
that sacred, psychedelic, esoteric, oneiric, occult,
alternative, archetypal, primitive, transpersonal,
fantastic or - as it sometimes happens - surreal.
All visionary artists are united by this spirit of on-
going experimentation. And their works bear testimony
to those mind-altering, soul-shattering but potentially
enlightening experiences which may transpire over the
course of each experiment.
The aim of these experiments is to bring alternative
states of consciousness to reality. Or rather, to bear
witness to other realites which are made evident in
alternative states of consciousness. Hence, the images,
colours, reflections, modes of perceiving and indeed the
insights which the artist himself has witnessed in a
dream, vision, trance, revelation, mediumistic or drug-
induced state are what he seeks to reproduce in a plastic
medium, so as to give it a more or less permanent reality
'here', in the world of our shared perceptions and spoken
dialogues.
The artist on such a 'vision quest' is not seeking
images for their own sake. Rather, the images uprise
during his life-long journey to the Sacred, offering him
entrance to a higher, spiritual realm. These images offer
a gradual awakening to life's underlying holiness - what
Aldous Huxley called 'the sacramental vision of reality'(2)
The God appearing in such momentary visions is not the
'Our Father' of traditional religions, but a metanoic
(literally, 'mind-altering') experience of the Sacred,
threatening to blast apart the very vessel into which it is
being poured.
Unprepared though endowed with this strange gift
for 'seeing', the visionary artist finds himself isolated - an
outcast prone to unusual insights. He is, by nature, an
outsider, a wanderer, a derelict. And yet, for a few brief
moments between the Genesis and Apocalypse, he may
enter into union with the Creator, bear witness to the
timeless and eternal Unity that holds it all together. By
recording such a momentary awakening in a work of art,
he fixes, indeed 'freezes' that singular epiphany into an
image for all to share.
Such an image then stands as a doorway, which other
similarily-inclined individuals may once more attempt to
'enter through'.
To enter through the image is to momentarily regain
the vision which the artist experienced at the outset.
What is more, the beholder may re-enter the state of
mind, even the state of being, which the artist first
experienced. Such a 'mystic participation' is possible
because the inscape underlying the artist's experience is
not imagined, but real - only hidden, altered, even
obstructed from our view."Man has closed himself up,"
Blake says, "till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of
his cavern." But - as his well-known phrase adjoins -"If
the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would
appear to man as it is, infinite."(3) In another re-phrasing
of this stirring declaration, Blake says that "Five
 windows light the cavern'd Man" - that is, the five senses,
which he refers to elsewhere as"inlets of the soul" (4) But
- "thro' one (he) can look and see small portions of the
eternal world..." (5) Painting offers us a doorway into
that hidden realm. It stills our wandering eye,
concentrates it onto an image, offers it a more timeless
way of seeing. Once the original vision is regained - and
the threshold of the image is crossed - we find ourselves
standing once more on the shared, timeless ground of the
visionary experience.
As such, the images and fragments of texts gathered
here are nothing more than sketches - drawn from
different angles and over various points in time - of an
'invisible landscape' which we, as visionary artists, have
crossed countless times over the course of our shared
journeys.

THE TRACKLESS WAY

Among the eldest of the Visionaries still alive and practising

his art today is Ernst Fuchs."I have always been drawn
towards things which man cannot see from the exterior,"
he has written."And I have always practiced a kind of art
which depicts things that, otherwise, man only sees in his
dreams or hallucinations. For me, the threshold has to be
crossed from inner images to their expression in wakeful
being - the transformation of dreams and fantasy into the
world of reality and its plane of visual imagery." (6)
With dark penetrating eyes and a long flowing beard,
Fuchs stands like a desert prophet to the wandering
tribes of our times. He has crossed the Sinai of burning
visions many times, and left there marks and signs for
others to follow.
A second generation of Visionaries has set out,
following the trackless way through desert solitude. For
Mati Klarwein, a visionary piece of art is like a journey
into uncharted territory. This "no man's land is the area
where no word has trodden yet, no symbol imposed its
footprint upon the sands of the memory desert. No man's
land is the distance from behind my eyes to eternity." (7)
Meanwhile, for Alex Grey, the journey has a
purpose; there is a definite 'mission of art'. "In order to
produce their finest works," he has written, "the artists
lose themselves in the flow of creation from their inner
world, becomes possessed by an art spirit. Every work of
art embodies the vision of it's creator and simultaneously
reveals a facet of the collective mind. Art history shows
each successive wave of vision flowing through the world's
artists. ...The history of art is a vast record of tens of
thousands of artists and their acts of disciplined passion
 bringing vision to form."(8)
This sense of shared vision, this unaccountable
feeling of kinship, is encountered by many solitary
walkers on the desert path. Throughout history, from
different lands and cultures, there has emerged 'the
invisible tribe'(9), as one artist put it. Or, according to
Fuchs, 'the secret lodge': "I entered ever more deeply into
the realm of hermetic motifs... Its adherents were to be
found only in the obscure groups of outsiders... Scattered
through many countries, they were members, as I
understood it, of a secret lodge: the Masonic Order of
Visionaries." (10)
Though many such artists have appeared over the
course of time, each bearing the marks of his epoch and
cultural style, their works have also betrayed the traces
of something hidden, something far more deeply incised:
the timeless style of the archetypes; the primordial style
that first manifest itself 'at the beginning'.
For De Es Schwertberger, another second generation
Visionary, "Reading the story of the universe backwards
is our method of reaching the beginning. We encounter all
the images which form and direct our wants, needs, and
urges imprinted on the core of our mind. We discover
pictures there, as if carved from stone, prevailing through
time and revealing what powers are holding the world
together. If we could read these pictures, our vision would
grow clear. We would find ourselves at the bottom of
everything - holding it all together."(11)
In a similar manner, Ernst Fuchs realized that,
behind all temperal and cultural manifestations of the
Sacred, there lies'ein verschollener Stil' - a 'hidden prime
of styles': "A secret art whose traces I have discovered
with almost all people and cultures, but also in nature
itself Ð there where the prim*val world appears... like a
notion, a memory of the submersed culture of a long
passed, unmeasured time which preceded history."(12)
As such, while the history of Visionary Art may be
traced throughout different lands, epochs, and cultures,
a more ancient, primordial, indeed eternal style of
rendering silently underlies all periods of its
development. Visionary art seeks to return us, in our
visions, to the primordial world that preceded history:
like hieroglyphs etched on the walls of a long-lost
civilization, leading us to a paradise of lost imagery or
forgotten dream-symbols.

THE VISIONARY LINEAGE

The proper subjects of a Visionary work include: the

Creation, Paradise, the Fall, the Flood, the Triumph of
Death, the Apocalypse, Heaven and Hell, the after-life
journey, illumination, death and rebirth, the heiros
gamos, ancient heros, mythic beings, monsters, cyclopes
and gargoyles, androgynes and hermaphrodites,
madness, dreams, the distant future, the remote past,
ideal cities, ancient ruins, lost civilizations, buildings
never to be built, buildings built with no purpose but the
sheer triumph of architecture over matter, towers,
temples, pyramids, all manners of Gods and demons,
angels and elementals, the cosmos and its many
diagrams, models, and means of representation, the
zodiac, the animal world in its primordial state of being,
animals imagined as well as real, unicorns, basilisks,
chimeras, sphinxes, bizarre but harmonious
combinations of existing objects or qualities, melting
pocket-watches, burning giraffes, the chance encounter
of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting
table, esoterica of all sorts, allegories, false anatomies,
fantastic inventions and machines, alchemical retorts,
tarot cards, arcane symbols, sacred geometries, light-
reflecting jewels, passages, refractions of light, spirals,
labyrinths, mandalas, portraits of the artist in light of his
memories and dreams, inner landscapes, the interior of
the mind and, above all, those invisibles not yet
recognizable in our visual language - what Blake
called"the Unnam'd forms" (13).
Visionary art is as ancient as the shaman's first
etchings on cavern walls or the mysterious spirals carved
on megalithic stones. Our art manifest itself among the
Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Minoans, and ancient
Greeks. In Middle America, it uprose among the Aztecs,
Mayans and Toltecs. Indeed, in these earlier cultures, it
acquired an almost 'pure' form of expression, as the
depiction of the Creation, the Cosmos and its Gods, the
sacred hero and his death and rebirth - all of these
appeared spontaneously and alive in a unique cultural
style, whose visual language was near-perfect in its
expressiveness.
Each of these cultural styles seemed to emerge 'fully-
formed' in history, with a complete symbolic vocabulary
and complex pictorial expression. Each manifest, at one
and the same time, a distinctively epic or monumental
quality and, transcending this, a more universal and
timeless quality. As Fuchs noted, "A work of art is simply
a monument to the temporal within eternity. Art alone can
confer and transmit to other ages an enduring validity of
what is trapped within its own era." (14) In our ancient,
more epic works of art, a momentary vision was seen,
then seized, and finally set into time-resistent stone,
which has preserved its hidden message into our present
 times. The task awaiting us, while beholding such a
work, is to open ourselves up to its forgotten spiritual
message, thus broadening our vision beyond its own
cultural horizon and spiritual inheritance.
As European culture moved into 'the Dark Ages', the
Visionary experience could still be detected in Viking
gold and Nordic woodwork, in the scant remains of
objects carved by the Celts: their animal heraldry,
horned gods, and rich interweaving of serpentine motifs.
And in North America as well, Native tribes were
developing their complex animal mythologies through
totems, weavings, and carvings.
Bible covers encrusted with precious gemstones and
gold, their contents illumined with arabesques and
beastiaries - this was the early expression of the
visionary in Christianity. Then, in the stone and stained-
glass facades of Gothic cathedrals and the egg-tempera
icons of the Byzantines, a new Visionary trend emerged
in Christian art - rich in its symbolic translation of the
Holy Writ. These were soon followed by the frescos of
the Italians, and the oil and resin altarpieces of the
Netherlandish painters.
The cult of the artist had begun. The greatest of the
early Visionary painters was, of course, Hieronymus
Bosch. Even unto our own day, his works continue to
bear hidden messages. So many of his images offer a
doorway to a lost paradise (and meanwhile, each era
possesses a different key...)
If names must be named, then the list runs as follows:
TRUE NEAR FALSE
VISIONARIES VISIONARIES VISIONARIES*
Bosch Van Eyck
Schongauer Van der Weyden
Grünewald Van der Goes
Altdörfer Memling Van Leyden
H. Baldung Grien Dürer Cranach
Bruegel J. Gossart F. Clouet
Signorelli P. d. Francesca Fra F. Lippi
Da Vinci Botticelli Raphael
Michelangelo Cellini Tintoretto
Arcimbaldo Bronzino Caravaggio
Master of theTarot de Marseille
Master of Rosarium Philosophorum
Master of the Splendor Solis series
Goya Rembrandt Rubens
John Martin Vermeer Fantin-Latour
Blake El Greco
C.D Friedrich C.G. Carus Turner
 Rossetti David Ingres
Burne-Jones Bourguereau Poussin
Moreau Gericault Delacroix
Doré Rodin Courbet
Redon Van Gogh Bonnard
Delville Gaugain Vuillard
Khnoff Monet Rouault
Klinger Ensor Seurat
Klimt Munch Renoir
Dali Picasso Chagall
*Artists who, despite an excellency of technique, have failed to manifest unique visionary qualities when
confronted by a subject that requires them.

Meanwhile, some Visionaries eluded the currents and

fashions of painting in their own times, giving rise to
such anachronistic 'Adam figures' as Goya - his
solipsistic murals painted onto the walls of 'the house of
the deaf man'; the unending vistas and landscapes of
John Martin; Böcklin's Isle of the Dead; Fuseli's
theatrical compositions; the light-infused etchings of
Gustave Doré and - towering above them all - William
Blake with his watercolours or etchings of the Ancient of
Days, the Book of Job, the Last Judgement, and more - all
accomplished with little or no recognition.
Under the broader heading of Mannerist art, many
Visionaries after the Renaissance may be numbered,
though their names are little known today:
Bartholomäus Spranger, Wendel Dieterlin, Jacques
Callot, Antoine Caron, Monsú Desiderio, and Giovanni
Battista Piranesi among others.
In the last two hundred years, there emerged the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, and the Symbolist
and Decadent Movements of France and Belgium. From
the former, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-
Jones; from the latter, Fernand Khnoff, Felicien Rops,
Carlos Schwabe, and the still-unrecognized masterpieces
of Jean Delville. Our art has also been enriched by the
later Symbolists - Odilon Redon, Frantisek Kupka (his
early works), Alfred Kubin, Giovanni Segantini, and
Max Klinger. These were followed close behind by the
Secessionist visionaries - Gustav Klimt, Franz Von
Stuck, Viteslaw Masek, and Jan Toorop. But, singular
amongst all of these stands the timeless, transcendent
and visionary art of Gustave Moreau.
A more recent lineage can be traced with greater
precision. Surrealism must undoubtedly be identified as
a direct influence upon Visionary art, but two strains
within this movement must be separated and identified.
The one, Automatist Surrealism, tended more toward
form and abstraction - Miro, Arp, Tanguy, and Matta,
for example. These inspired movements towards
Abstract Expressionism and Action painting in America.
Of these, Visionary art has less in common. The other,
Figurative Surrealism, tended more toward the accurate,
plastic representation of dreams and their imagery in
paint. Here, Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Delvaux, Bellmer,
Fini, and particularly Dali must be recognized as the
modern forefathers of contemporary Visionary art.
In Vienna, after the second World War, it was their
misinterpretation of Surrealism and led a group of
academy painters to eventually create the movement
now recognized as Fantastic Realism. Hausner and
Hutter, Lehmden and Brauer, and particularly Ernst
Fuchs sought to revive old master's techniques of
painting, combine it with Impressionist color theories,
and dedicate this new finesse and precision to fantastic
subjects. As many of these painters are still alive today,
they have become recognized as 'first generation'
Visionaries.
Included among this generation of painters, but
working more independently, are also Kurt Regschek,
Ernst Steiner, Werner Tübke, Peter Proksch, Le
Marechal, Paul Verlinde, Jean-Pierre Alaux, and
Wolfgang Grasse. Special mention must be given to the
Netherlandish painter Johfra, who brought his esoteric
studies to rich fruition in such canvases as the Zodiac
Series and his triptych of the Unio Mystica.
Under the spiritual guidance of Fuchs, a second
generation emerged in the sixties, seventies, and eighties,
practising (what Max Doerner called) the Mischtechnik,
as taught to them by Fuchs. Now, a direct link could be
traced from Fuchs to Mati Klarwein, De Es
Schwertberger, and Robert Venosa. Other students of
Fuchs, meanwhile, organized movements and became
teachers of the technique: Brigid Marlin (member of
Inscape and founder of The Society of Art of the
Imagination), Philip Rubinov-Jacobson (member of the
New York Visionaries and organizer of the Old Masters /
New Visions seminars), as well as Fuchs' own son,
Michael Fuchs.
Of the same generation, but working more
independently is Alex Grey, gradually constructing his
series of Sacred Mirrors in light of transpersonal
philosophy. And at the same time, in Switzerland, H. R.
Giger brought the technique of airbrushing to new
heights through his darkened visions of aliens, bio-
mechaniods, and the occult. Unexpectedly, the magazine
Omni introduced many European Visionaries - Fuchs,
Hausner, Giger, De Es, Venosa, et al - to a broader
American audience by including their works among its
pages.
Contemporary with this development was the
rediscovery of l'Art Brut, 'naïf' or outsider art -
untrained artists, some mediums, others bordering on
the edge of insanity - who developed styles and
vocabularies of imagery amazingly similar to the more
calculated works of Visionary artists. Now, the forgotten
watercolors of Heinrich Nüssbaum, the fairy-filled
landscapes of Richard Dadd, the simple crayon drawings
of Minnie Evans, and such architectural achievements as
the Palais Ideal of le facteur Cheval had to be added to
the catalogue of Visionary art. Many of these works have
been documented lately through the thirty or more issues
of Raw Vision magazine.
In a similar vein, the popular art form of the
American 'comic book' produced many unexpected
visionaries, some more heroic - Frank Frazetta, Micheal
Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith; and some more macabre
- Berni Wrightson, Clive Barker. Parallel to this were
the Underground comix of California, with their later
expression in Juxtapoz magazine. In Europe, particularly
in France, comics developed into the finer graphic
illustrations of les Bandes Dessinées, with Moebius,
Druillet, and others
Already, though, the borders defining the genre were
becoming hazy. Do we consider American Sword and
Sorcery, Sci-Fi, and Fairy art to be visionary? And what
of New Age art, with its interest in dolphin
consciousness, alien abduction, crystal channeling etc?
Each must make his own decision here (though the
author of the present manifesto says - adamantly - no).
The number of exhibitions are mounting. Among
them: du Fantastique au Visionnaire (Venice 1994,
Maurizio Albarelli), Der Faden der Ariadne (Mussbach
1998 Otfried Culmann), 100 Sacred Visions (Payerbach
2000, Rubinov-Jacobson), Art of the Imagination
(London 2000, Brigid Marlin), Fantastic Art (Australia
2001, Damian Micheals), Parfum de femme(Paris 2002,
Claude Cussac). Meanwhile, the Centre international de
l'Art fantastique organizes on-going and permanent
exhibitions in the Chateau de Gruyères. TheSociété des
Arts Fantastique, de l'Imaginaire et du Reve has already
organized a number of exhibitions near Paris. And, in
1996 there was the founding of the Zentrum der
Phantastischen Künste (www.labyrinthe.com) in
Germany.
Through the publications of Galerie Morpheus
(James Cowan), the founding of Art Visionary magazine
 (Damian Micheals), and the creation of The Fantastic Art
Centre on the web (Christian de Boeck), more and more
Visionary Artists have come together, detecting strange,
unaccountable, but undeniable harmonies in each other's
works. A monastary of sorts is being built in the desert.
Invisible tribes of wanderers are banding together,
coming to shelter, and forming once more the Masonic
Order of Visionaries.
In France and Belgium, there stands at present the
works of Dado, Di Maccio, Jean-Pierre Ugarte, Roland
Cat, Lucas Kandl, Erik Heyninck, Michel Henricot,
Francois Schlesser, Christophe Vacher, Jean-Yves
Kervevan, Patrick Delorme, and Gregoire Massineau. In
Germany and Austria, Ohlhauser, Peter Gric, Daniel
Friedemann, Heinz Zander, Karl Kaefer, Mannfred
Ebster, Manfred Sillner, Michael Maschka, and Otfried
Culmann. In Norway, Odd Nerdrum. In Poland,
Beksinski, Yerka, and Banach. In England, Alan Senior,
Brigid Marlin, Laurie Lipton. In Australia, Damian
Micheals and Paul Freeman. In Italy, Bruno di Maio,
Benedetto Fellin, and Paolo Grimaldi. In America,
Weber, Judson Huss, Martina Hoffmann, Ann McMoy,
Cynthia de Robbins, Anton Brink, Andrew Gonzalez,
and Voke.
This list is by no means definitive or complete. There
are many practising visionaries today who remain
unrecognized. Others prefer to work in solitude. But
without a doubt a strange phenomenon is occuring: a
wave of artists, struggling to bring their vision to light, is
growing larger with each generation.
And so, the signatories to this Manifesto may number
themselves among the latest generation of Visionary
artists practising today. Tired of the academicism,
elitism, shock value, gallery politics, and huge financial
speculations surrounding modernist and post-modernist
art, the practitioners of Visionary art have made a
genuine, sincere, and authentic attempt to revive
something eternal within the contemporary experience of
art. Each of them pursues, in the words of Ernst Fuchs,
"a special authenticity of imagery born of the visionary
experience"(15)

VISIONS OF DARKNESS

The visionary artist does not hesitate to record images of

shock, horror, pain, degradation, demons, monsters, and
and all manner of underworld tortures. He explores the
darker side of his imagination, and liberates many of his
impulses by giving them tangible form. All that is taboo
must be transcended.
In the pursuit of such art-making, light often
acquires a symbolic property and, as illumination,
signifies something more Sacred: the one light behind all
images and shining through them. Darkness and
shadows, by contrast, portend all that is hidden,
forbidden, obscured, and unknown.
In the works of Alex Grey, the human form is
refracted (like light through a prism) into multiple
'ekstases' of being - these ascending from the biological
to the personal to the ultimately transpersonal. For the
beholder, the effect, in the end, is like gazing into a series
of 'Sacred Mirrors'. Before engaging himself on this life-
task, Grey worked for many years as an undertaker's
assistant - acquiring an intimate knowledge of our
mortal human anatomy. Then, through his visions, the
artist sought to surpass this finite reflection of life. Not,
however, by evading death's terrible potency. The
method instead was 'to include and then transcend':
"Each artist is a facet of God's unfolding infinite
vision, refracting the light of awareness in their own
particular way. The shallows and shadows and terrors of
life are just as much a part of the Vision Crystal as views
of abstract beauty, spiritual heavens and our precious
endangered planet."(16)
After his many experiments with mescalin and LSD,
Aldous Huxley was also able to confirm that "the
visionary experience is not always blissful. It is sometimes
terrible. There is hell as well as heaven." (17) In his
(appropriately titled) book Heaven and Hell, he describes
in detail "the negative visionary experience,"(18)
comparing it to the after-life journey through a
spiralling, descending inferno: each level of Hell is
replete with its unique form of torture. Many of the
punishments he mentions - "buried in mud, shut up in the
trunks of trees, frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed
beneath stones..."(19) - are also to be found, masterfully
depicted, in Bosch's vision of Hell and Doré's engravings
to Dante's Inferno.
The gates to "the infernal visionary experience."(20)
may suddenly open wide at any unexpected moment.
Due to the traumas inherent in life itself - accidents,
illness, personal loss or sudden separations - temporary
forms of madness, paranoia or psychosis can occur,
accompanied by their uncontrollable visions and
hallucinations. These may take the form of an unwilled
memory regression, in the attempt to unearth the source
of our trauma. The descent into our own earliest
memories brings about the spontaneous recall of
childhood terrors, fantasies, and fears. Dali's first
Surrealist canvases offer a series of such motifs, each
canvas an on-going attempt to unearth his greatest fear,
torment, and forbidden desire.
For H. R. Giger as well, the sudden recollection of
childhood nightmares offered unexpected access to his
own innermost Hell. During 1966, the artist completed a
series of 'Shaft pictures' which, as he later recounted,
"have their origin in my dreams." (21) And he elaborates,
"In the stairwell in my parents' house in Chur is a
secret window, which gave onto the interior of the Three
Kings Hotel, and was always covered with a dingy brown
curtain. In my dreams or nightly wanderings, this window
was open and I saw gigantic bottomless shafts, bathed in
pale yellow light. On the walls, steep and treacherous
wooden stairways without bannisters led down into the
yawning abyss."(22)
"...Another source of fantasies was our cellar.
Approached via an old and musty spiral stone staircase, it
led into a vaulted corridor (which had been walled up). In
my dreams however, these passages were open and led into
a monstrous labyrinth, where all kinds of dangers lay in
wait for me."(23)
Giger's later works render into form the baroque
monstrosities awaiting him in the twisting and turning
cellars of his own mind. A dense mesh of figures -
prodigous, morbid, grotesque - constellate themselves
into the furthermost corners of his compositions.
Meanwhile, in their midsts appear elongated female
figures - ghostly yet alluring - who are trapped in the
torturous contraptions and deathly devices of some evil
but ultimately unknown will. These timeless events
transpire in smoke-filled chambers, darkly-lit, which
seem but part of an infinite and primaeval rusted
machine.
It is not by chance that the artist entitled a collection
of his works, The Necronomicon. As Giger explains,
"The Necronomicon ... supposedly tells of events
which happened in the grey mists of pre-history, and
contains illustrations of the sinister forms of life which
lurk in the depths of the earth and the sea, waiting until
the day when they will destroy humanity and assume
dominion over the world. ...The famous writer H.P
Lovecraft was the first to mention this work."(24)
This is the darker darkness, presently 'occulted'
(literally, hidden) from view - existing before this world
was created and appearing again at its end - the black,
tenebrous world which Visionary art can, for a few brief
moments of terror, make manifest. This is the coiling,
beguiling serpent at the commencement of time, and the
seven-headed beast re-emerging at its end. This is the
Hell of Bosch, which offered a vision of the apocalypse
all-too-imminent to his contemporaries. This, in Gothic
art, is the Angels' trumpet blast, the Resurrection of the
Dead, and the Judgement ever-lasting."This" Huxley
writes, is the "negatively transfigured world... Every event
is charged with a hateful significance; every object
manifests the presence of Indwelling Horror, infinite, all-
powerful, eternal."(25) And yet, Huxley was not talking
here about the Hell of traditional Christian art. Rather,
he was describing the internal Hell that may be revealed
through ingested mescalin or LSD.
Through clinical observation and therapeutic
practice, Dr. Stanislav Grof spent the better part of his
professional life studying the visionary effects of LSD.
He found that repeated use of the hallucinogen leads to a
deepening experience of its effects. The fullest, deepest,
and most enlightening trip has several gradual stages.
Typically, at the onset, one beholds "incredibly colorful
and dynamic visions of geometric designs, architectural
forms, kaleidoscopic displays, magic fountains, or
fantastic fireworks."(26) This experience gradually
deepens into a hallucinatory state, with emergent images
responding both to internal and external stimuli.
Depending on the disposition of the individual, the
psychedelic experience may take a turn for the worse,
causing him to experience (what Grof calls) "cosmic
engulfment" which "...involves overwhelming feelings of
increasing anxiety, and awareness of an imminent vital
threat."(27) What is more, "an important characteristic
of this experiential pattern is the darkness of the visual
field and the ominous and sinister colors of all the
objects." "Further intensification of anxiety typically
results in an experience involving a monstrous gigantic
whirlpool, a Maelstrom sucking...relentlessly towards its
center (or) ...an experience of being swallowed by a
terrible monster (or) ...descent into the underworld and
encounter with various dangerous creatures."(28)The
deepest level is related to various concepts of hell - a
situation of unbearable suffering that will never end"(29)
All the tortures of Hell may now be unwillingly
experienced to the full: shut up, confined, prodded and
tormented by all manner of monsters and demons. As
Huxley writes, "The negative visionary finds himself
associated with a body that seems to grow progressively
more dense... It is worth remarking that many of the
punishements described in the various accounts of hell are
punishments of pressure and constriction." (30) Hence the
Hell envisioned by Bosch; hence the Inferno illustrated
by Doré
As the negative LSD experience deepens,
mythological imagery may appear: "Quite common are
illusions to the Old Testament; images of Christ's
suffering and death on the cross; scenes of worshipping
Moloch, Astarte or Kali, and visions of rituals and
...sacrifice as they were practiced in Aztec and Mayan
religions."(31)
At the nadir of this experience, "physical and
emotional agony culminates in a feeling of utter and total
annihilation on all imaginable levels... usually described
as 'ego-death'"(32)
Such are the 'darkened visions' which may intrude
upon the visionary artist during his on-going
explorations and experiments. Many of the greatest
visionary artists - Bosch, Bruegel, Grunewald, Giger -
have not hesitated to record their visions of torture,
agony, and suffering, even unto death. But, all of this - to
what end?
A clue is offered to us in Grof's on-going analysis of
the psychedelic experience. The negative LSD experience
does not end with 'ego-death', but goes on to reveal
something quite unexpected and unanticipated:
"After the subject has experienced the limits of total
annihilation and 'hit the cosmic bottom', he or she is
struck by visions of blinding white or golden light... the
general atmosphere is one of liberation, salvation,
redemption, love, and forgiveness. The subject feels
unburdoned, cleansed, and purged."(33) In fact, the full
hallucinatory experience culminates in an unequalled
experience of death and rebirth - dying to one's finite self,
and being initiated, recast, or reborn into something far
more infinite. Now, the presence of the Sacred is felt,
transpiring outside of 'clock-time' and more
commensurate with its eternity. Indeed, as a result of
death and rebirth, a 'return to the Father', an 'embrace
with the Mother', or an overwhelming feeling of 'unity
with the Sacred One' may be experienced to the full.
As Grof writes,"The symbolism associated with the
experience of death and rebirth can be drawn from many
different cultural frameworks (and) experienced in full
identification with Christ, Osiris, Adonis, or Dionysus.
Typical symbolism of the moment of rebirth involves
fantastic visions of radiant sources of light experienced as
divine, heavenly blue cosmic spaces, magnificent rainbow
spectra or stylized peacock designs. ...God can appear in
the Christian form as an archetypal wise old man sitting
on a throne surrounded by cherubim and seraphim in
radiant splendor. Also quite common in this context is the
experience of union with the Great Mother... Other visions
involve gigantic halls with richly decorated columns... or
clear lakes and oceans."(34) It is not surprising then
 that many of the Visionary artists just mentioned have
recorded, beyond their dark visions of suffering unto
death, equally fantastic and luminous visions of
Paradise, Heaven and Eden. Grunewald's initial vision of
Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece is contorted,
enthorned, crucified, and plague-ridden. But, the
innermost images of the altarpiece unfold outward to
reveal a blazing Christ resurrected, floating,
transfigured, and enhaloed by luminous circles of yellow
and white light. Bosch recorded in infinite detail the
horrors of Hell, but also rendered the simple, singular
image of a soul's passage into a tunnel of blinding white
light.

VISIONS OF LIGHT

This leads us to images of the Sacred as they appear in

Visionary art. Strangely, it has been forgotten that, for
the greater part of its history, Art has concerned itself
with the making of 'holy objects' - objects that bring the
Sacred before us, before our eyes and into our hearts.
This is true not only of painting (Gothic alterpieces,
Byzantine icons), or even of Western culture as a whole
(cathedrals and monasteries), but of all cultures in all
times. Whether it be art produced by Tlingit natives,
Michelangelo, or prisoners in concentration camps, a
sacred quality unerringly inheres.
And this leads us to wonder - has not the history of
art, particularly the history of Western art, been a
gradual wandering down the wrong path for more than
two or three centuries? The intensive questioning of
Modernism, the ironic stance of Post-Modernism, the
avoidance of images, frameworks, even of art itself in
contemporary art - are not these symptoms indicative of
deep cultural illness?
And yet, it would perhaps be better to diagnose our
affliction as a deep spiritual illness. Christianity has
offered our culture nothing but a prolonged awaiting:
the Hebrew prophecies expecting their Messiah; the
Messiah's own proclamation of his death, resurrection
and expected return in the Apocalypse. In order to
escape this burdening anxiety and anticipation,
generations of artists have sought solace (or distraction)
with color, form, abstraction, simplicity, concept,
environment, happening, and so on. But this is mere
evasion. They have evaded the task borne by artists since
shamanistic times: to interiorize, visualize, and
mythologize.
Or, as Robert Venosa puts it "...to translate in form
and color the roadmap to the source and center of our
being and to the heart of our Divine Creator."(35)
Or again, in the words of Blake:"To open the Eternal
Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes."(36)
This is second nature to most Visionary artists. They
do not question what they do. It comes naturally, as a
part of their being."The artist," Fuchs attests, "is
commanded by nature - when we consider him, as the Old
Masters certainly did, to be born to such an office - to
make the invisible world visible, much like the ancient
ascetics who, through their uninterrupted prayers, brought
about the immersion of the Eternal God into Man's
temporally finite world." (37)
The manner in which the Visionary artist evokes the
Sacred may differ from painter to painter. In fact, it may
differ from one painting to another within one artist's
oeuvre. What matters is the underlying vision. In the
case of many artists, this is a vision of Unity: the Sacred
presents itself as the hidden but solitary source behind
all things. It is an experience of shared oneness - difficult
to describe in words alone, and often finding outlet
instead in images.
For example, De Es writes:"This artist's epiphany
completely prevented me from focusing on a single canvas,
but drove me to work on a sequence of paintings in order
to satisfy my sense of 'wholeness.' All the universal themes
of the yearnings of the human heart for enlightenment
should be integrated into it: the journey to the light, the
dance of joy, goals, ideals, and pathways to the beyond and
to the light of life. ...The wild dynamism of my
transformative method was nurtured by the vision of
'Humanity awakening as a oneness.'" (38)
It is for this reason that many of his 'stone men'
became increasingly aware of and transparent to...
'light'. They became 'heavy light'. And finally, in the
crowning image of his triptych 'The Joining', they
became a many-circled gathering around one light - a
panel which the artist called 'White Light' or 'Vision
One'.
How difficult it is - to describe or depict this vision of
oneness - and yet it underlies all that we are. It is that
which lies beyond the bound of our vision - the supra-
visionary, le sur-visuel. It is that which we seek to reveal
through a new image-language.
Such a language may come about through on-going
experimentation and the use of new technologies. And
yet, the old forms, the symbols and archetypes used since
time immemorial by ancient cultures and even by
Christianity itself - these still possess great hidden
powers. But, as heirs to the Christian tradition, we must
learn to see through the symbols of Christianity to their
underlying archetypes: archetypes Christianity shares
with other sacred traditions, joining itself to them and
participating in their sense of all-encompassing Unity.
As Grey notes in the Mission of Art: "New art forms
emerge through visionary insight, technical innovations
and when cultures collide. Today, the simultaneous impact
of so many technological innovations and divergent world
cultures is spawning a hybrid multicultural art."(39)
This multi-cultural vision of Unity has already
manifest itself in the canvases of Klarwein, Fuchs, and
Grey himself. Meanwhile, many of Johfra's marvellous
paintings from the Zodiac series bring Christian symbols
in combination with their ancient antecedants -
Egyptian, Greek, and Babylonian - while pairing them
simultaneously with a whole slew of Esoteric motifs:
Alchemy, Tarot, and the Kabbala. But, it is particularly
his triptych of the Unio Mystica which offers a vision of
the transcendent One underlying all cultural
manifestations of the Sacred. Here, he has had recourse
to, not only Christian and Hebrew mythologies, but
Egyptian, Buddhist, Taoist, and even his own native
Nordic mythology. Though viewed separately, like so
many vignettes in stained glass, these different
mythological figures also coalesce into one image. And,
as is the case with stained-glass, they may then become
transparent to the single Light shining behind them.
Johfra attempted to reveal 'the ancient One'
underlying different cultural mythologies by bringing
their symbols into combination with one another. As the
painter noted in his writings, "The sphere of influence of
symbols broadens and deepens into infinite Being when
they enter into combination with one another. Then they
have a decisive influence upon one another in a most
illuminating way. In brief: a symbol, for those who can
meditate upon it and lose themselves in it, is like a door
offering entrance into a new spaces and dimensions of
consciousness."(40)
In the works of Ernst Fuchs, we also find this
tendency to combine symbols of different cultural origin.
Witness for example his Moses Before the Burning Bush
or The Triumph of Christ. But, more fascinating still is
his uncanny ability to combine different cultural styles of
representation. Where 'the ancient prime of styles' left its
greatest traces historically in, first of all, the 'pure' or
clearly-defined styles of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and
Greeks, it also re-appeared later in the personal styles of
certain Visionary artists - except the 'pure' cultural
styles of the past now re-appear inextricably mixed with
one another. It is particularly true of the greatest
Visionary artists - Michelangelo, Blake, Moreau, Fuchs -
that the ancient cultural styles resurface - subtly invoked,
turned about, re-asserted, and then merging
harmoniously with one another into a single, personal
style which, though shared, remains unique - revealing
the Sacred with great expressivity and power.
It must not be forgotten that, as an apprentice, Blake
engraved plates for Bryant's New System of Mythology,
which had images and styles from Egyptian, Babylonian,
even Mithraic mythologies. The presence of these epic
styles - their heaviness, monumentality, profound
stillness, and constant profiles - re-appeared time and
again in Blake's works. The artist also had to sketch
gothic figures in Westminster Abbey for plates to
Basire's Archaeologia, giving rise to his long flowing
lines, sweeping drapery, and energetic spirals and swirls
- all in contrast to the stillness and monumentality of the
ancient epic styles. Blake commented appropriately,
"Let them look at Gothic Figures & Gothic Buildings &
not talk of Dark Ages or any Age. Ages are all equal. But
Genius is always above the Age."(41) Most of all, Blake's
style evoked the antiquities of Greece, which he clearly
admitted when he wrote that"the purpose for which
alone I live is... to renew the lost Art of the Greeks."(42)
But, despite these constant echoes and combinations
of Ancient, Gothic, and Antique styles, Blake's manner
was undoubtedly his own. His vision gave him access to
the same timeless world and way-of-seeing which the
ancients had beheld. And, almost unthinkable in the
Puritan England of his time, came the artist's
momentous realization that"the antiquities of every
Nation under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the
Jews... All had originally one language, and one
religion."* Here, perhaps in its most rudimentary form,
is the realization that a lost image-language lay at the
root of all cultural styles - a visionary language which
Fuchs referred to later as 'the ancient prime of styles'.
___________________________________
*However, Blake quickly amends his original insight
with the words, "This was the religion of Jesus, the
everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of
Jesus."(43)
___________________________________
Gustave Moreau also possessed this broadening
awareness of different cultural styles, and the possibility
of uniting them. Among his post-humous writings is the
lament: "If only the great myths of antiquity were
continually translated, not by historians, but by eternal
poets. We must escape that puerile chronology which
forces artists to translate their own times, in all its finitude,
rather than the eternal... To give to myths their full
intensity, we mustn't lock them away in their own epoch -
in the molds and styles of their times..."(44) Instead, a
work of art had to "mirror the great impulses of the soul -
responding to the divine needs of humanity from all
times."(45) And so, this self-proclaimed 'assembleur de
rêves' said of painting and its mythic imagery, "C'est le
language de Dieu." - that it is 'the language of God.'(46)
In the process of beholding the Sacred as a timeless
and eternal Unity, the visionary artist frees himself
momentarily from his inherited spiritual tradition, its
particular symbols and style of expression. During that
momentary epiphany, his vision partakes of the
universal, sans cultural perspective: it acquires a stilled,
more timeless, even eternal way of seeing. Think of the
strange stare manifest in sculpted visages of Babylonian
or Greek gods: their elongated eyes, opened wide,
absorbing a vision without horizon. They are beholding
the eternal. But, the moment the artist attempts to
render this expanded vision, he is caught once more in
the currents of his own time, its style of rendering bound
by perspective and finite perception. The resulting image
betrays his age's fashion, its preference for a certain line,
form, and proportion, while still revealing - above and
beyond it - the timeless shape, the divine symmetry,
briefly glimpsed, from the higher world.
The Book of Revelation tells us that we shall see the
world transformed at the end of time - see it with our
own eyes, but in a more permanent state of vision. This
world 'made anew' is compared to a heavenly city, the
New Jerusalem: "Its radiance like a most rare jewel, like
a jaspar clear as crystal."(Rev 20:11) Its twelve gates are
of sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, topaz, and amethyst.
They shine with the radiance of pearls, pure gold, and
are "transparent as glass."(Rev 21:21) A river "bright as
crystal" (Rev 22:1) flows through it, and at its centre
stands the tree of life, its twelve fruits, each ripening a
different month, offering a balm and a healing.(47)
This is the higher world - visible to all of us once
(before the creation), and to be witnessed again (after the
apocalypse) - a paradise presently hidden, a world which
visionary artists have sought and seen - if only in stolen
glances. Describing his mescalin visions, Huxley relates
that "Everything... is brilliantly illuminated and seems to
shine from within."(48) As a rapid flow of eidetic
imagery passed before him, Huxley reported "vast and
complicated buildings in the midsts of landscapes which
change continuously, passing from richness to more
intensely coloured richness, from grandeur to deepening
grandeur. Heroic figures... fabulous animals..."(49) The
author also mentions heavenly architecture composed of
precious stones, gem-like pigments, glowing gold,
swirling marble and remarks upon "the beauty of curved
reflections, of softly lustrous glazes, of sleek and smooth
surfaces." (50)
In another passage from Heaven and Hell (now with
greater emphasis on 'Heaven') Huxley cites a published
account of a peyote vision: "Buildings now made their
appearance, then landscapes. There was a Gothic tower of
elaborate design with worn statues in the doorways or on
stone brackets. 'As I gazed, every projecting angle,
cornice, and even the faces of the stones at their joinings
were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what
seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut stones, some
being more like masses of transparent fruits.... All seemed
to possess an interior light." (51)
Have not all of these visions, described here in words,
also found pictorial form in the canvases of Bosch, Blake,
Moreau, and Fuchs? In The Chimeras of Moreau, and
his Triumph of Alexander the Great, have we not seen
vast celestial cities rise up with Gothic, Indian, and Aztec
architecture all intermixed? Fuchs himself describes how
"In 1952, in an attic room near boulevard Montparnasse,
I saw architectural visions for the first time. They passed
across the wall, as if painted there in fresco, while I lay
feverous in my bed... This architectural panorama became
clearer and clearer, so that I could distinguish the finest
details. Soon, it was as if I were flying with open arms over
these unending panoramas, while their forms continued to
metamorphose and transform, one after the other..."(52)
In Fuchs' Job and the Judgement of Paris, we behold
not only this architectural complexity, but also 'the
beauty of curved reflections, of sleek and smooth
surfaces' just mentioned by Huxley. Bosch too delighted
in polished stone and metal, and moreover, in their
strange, hybrid forms, such as appears in his fountain
from The Garden of Earthly Delights. Here mineralia,
vegetalia, and animalia - their various textures and
surfaces - are strangely displaced from one to the other.
Plants seem made of stone, while architectural devices
acquire an organic quality. Giger has also commented on
this strange displacement of textures and forms.
Through spontaneous drawings with the airbrush, he
"...established certain connections in the architecture of
the human body on the one hand and in the technological
world on the other. Through them, I also learned to value
more highly the theories put forward by Ernst Fuchs in his
Architectura Caelestis."(53)
Fuchs has commented at length how, after the
ingestion of hashish, he marvelled at "mountains of
shining gorgeous stones with a shimmering light on them.
Everything was translucent and seemed to glow from
within." (54) That same night, he began painting
transparent, jewel-like tear drops over the surface of his
Psalm 69. During this same period, he beheld a colossal
figure in a dream composed of different stone surfaces -
a colossal figure that, in another revelatory dream,
appeared to him as an angel. Thus began his series of
Cherub paintings - each angel composed, variously, of
malachite, amethyst, opel, onyx, etc.
"An angel", Mati Klarwein reminds us, "is a being
whose silhouette, or hands or eyes... can evoke and
impregnate you with a state of utter bliss bordering on
ecstasy." (55)
But it is particularly the art of Robert Venosa which
offers us sidereal visions of angels, seraphs, and cherubs
in flowing crystalline form, all graced with glistening
water drops and semi-precious stones. The artist takes
obvious delight in rendering these swirling forms and
undulating surfaces, which have clearly descended from
a higher world."The paintbrush is the key," Venosa
writes, "that allows entry into the divine mysteries." (56)
It is not mere chance that the Sacred has also been
seen to reside in flowers - those many-petalled unfoldings
of brilliant colour, light, and form. In western mysticism,
there is the Rosa Mystica, the vision of God as a Celestial
Rose described by Dante in the Paradiso. In the East, the
many-petalled lotus, each inscribed with a sacred
syllable, in whose centre lies the mysterious jewel. For
Huxley, a flower appeared to him, in an alternative state,
as "pulsing with indecipherable mystery." (57) For Fuchs,
in his later years an unending series of flower paintings
flowed from within, inspired by child-like joy:"The
peacock's plume of an inexhaustible kaleidoscope,
unbound by mythology or religion, unfolded before my
eyes in a continuing process of change, with every
imaginable combination of colours."(58) And for
Klarwein, the landscapes of Israel, Tunisia, and
Mallorca became a playground of infinitely detailed
vegetation, causing him to exclaim, "Oh sundazed
ecstasies of God-knows-what chemical reaction at the sight
of a motionless palm tree... There are archetypes of
harmony... so intense that I wonder if it is not the palm
tree itself using my nervous system vicariously to
communicate with the creator." (59)
It must not be forgotten that visions of a higher world
are often released through organic compounds found in
certain plants. More recently, Terrence McKenna has
written of the experiences triggered by psychotropic
plants. After ingesting stropharia mushrooms in the
jungles of La Chorrera, he reported how "I immersed
myself in millions of images of humankind in all times and
places, understanding and yet struggling with the
insoluble enigmas of being and human destiny." (60)
Then he adds, "All was myth-making and image-making,
mercurial, multi-leveled, ever-flowing." (61) And he
concludes,"Each of these experiences was... a chilling,
exhilerating plunge into an ocean of noetic images. I
discovered my own mind like a topological manifold, lying
before me, inviting me to rove and scan the reflective knot
of past and future time that is each of us." (62)
At times, the adventure he shared with his brother in
the Colombian jungles resembled a river journey into
'the heart of darkness', complete with shamanic vision-
quests, UFO encounters, and a strange descent into
madness. At a nadir point in the journey, his brother lost
all contact with the world of our shared perception. And
McKenna relates,
As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of
many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point in
his ascent, something that he called 'the vortex' opened
ahead of him - a swirling, enormous doorway into time.
He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of stonehenge and
beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher
plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble
faceted as they have not been since the days of pharonic
Egypt. And yet farther into the turbulent maw of the
vortex, he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the
advent of man... (63)
Such are the 'Visions of Light' which may break
unexpectedly upon the artist during the course of his
experimental journey. Sometimes, the Sacred appears in
its more traditional forms of imagery. As Grof related,
the eternal Mysterium may appear archetypally as the
ancient Father enthroned in palacial mansions and
enhaloed by swirling cherubim. Or again, union with
God may be imagined as a loving embrace with the
Great Mother Goddess of ancient religions - the heiros
gamos. Other times, as in the visions of Johfra, the
symbols of different traditions may combine with one
another, revealing the eternal Unio Mystica at their
shared source.
The architecture of the heavenly realm may reveal
itself in a cascade of jewels, polished surfaces, and semi-
precious stones. Endless vistas may unfold, or all may
become a swirling vortex of ancient architecture.
Seraphs and cherubs may descend in flowing crystalline
form or as multi-surfaced stone. Flowers unfold in
intoxicating arrays of colour.
Finally, the images themselves may give way, leaving
only flashing auras of light: rainbow spectra, peacock
 tails, a rosace of stained glass - all of which may
ultimately dissolve into a singular circle of golden light.

PART II:

SOURCES OF
VISIONARY EXPERIENCE

The Visionary artist explores imagery, not only beforehand in

his dreams, meditations and momentary inspirations, as
well as during, while his pencil or brush moves across
the empty expanse of canvas, but also afterward, when
he looks at his work anew, in mirrors and from new
perspectives, noticing how certain images and lines invite
others to assemble beside them. Drawing, it must not be
forgotten, is a means of 'drawing forth' images from the
depths of the unconscious, and giving them form with the
aid of the imagination - exaggerating their shapes,
elongating their figures, pushing the harmonious relation
of their lines, and even combining images in strange and
unexpected ways.
From the foregoing, one may be easily misled into
thinking that hallucinogens are the visionary's prime
means of image-exploration. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Visionaries have, over centuries, sought
all means of exploration and experimentation. It is true
that, lately, certain psychedelics (such as mescalin, LSD,
mushrooms, and DMT) have played a large role in
image-creation, due mainly to the fact that they are new
to our culture, offering unique and largely unexplored
means to the visionary experience.
But the sources of Visionary experience are many
and varied: dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares,
hypnagogic images, waking dreams, trance states
(brought on by exhaustion, deprivation, or the rhythmic
repitition of prayer or song), hypnotic states, illness,
near-death experiences, shamanic vision-quests,
meditation (whether with eyes closed or focused upon a
sacred image), madness (be it temporarily - due to life's
traumas - or permanent), day-dreaming, fantasy, the
imagination, inspiration, visitation, revelation,
spontaneous visions, psychedelics, reading, and - let us
not forget - the metanoic experiences brought on by
Visionary art itself.

MADNESS & VISION

Since time immemorial, madness has been linked with vision.

In the earliest times, the Shaman on his vision-quest had
to not only endure privation and isolation, but willingly
submit himself to temporary insanity - envisioning his
flesh burned away, his bones scattered and buried. Re-
emerging once more from this ordeal, he became one of
the 'twice-born', now seeing all things 'anew'. Only from
this descent into madness came, for him, the acquisition
of Vision.
Unfortunately, those touched by madness have been,
for most of our history, hunted down like witches,
burned like heretics, or more mercifully, locked away in
asylums. Only in the 20th century was madness
investigated, and subsequently appreciated for its
strange image-language. By comparing madness to
dreams, Freud found unexpected similarities between
the two, particularly in the structure of their imagery.
And, by extending this analysis further, Jung found a
deeper structural similarity with the images of sacred art
and myth.
And it followed, if the myriad imagery of the insane
could plunge their minds into madness, could not the
parallel imagery of sacred art and myth raise them up
again to new-found states of clarity? Jung explored this
very path in his 'confrontation with the unconscious',
finding that the images which emerged from his willing
descent into madness bore the marks of, what he
ultimately recognized as, 'the archetypes' - that is to say,
primordial images appearing in the sacred art of all
times and places. These images had the power to return
their beholder to the source - to the sacred time of the
beginning, before the Fall, before illness, before even the
onset of madness itself. In this way, the images of
madness could become, through images of the sacred, a
kind of healing.
Following Jung, Joseph Campbell analyzed images of
the insane, comparing them now to the imagery of myth.
And he found that the pattern of their emergence during
deepening schizophrenia was nearly identical to the
pattern of the hero's mythic journey - prompting him to
refer to this interior crisis as 'the Inward Journey': "The
imagery of schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of
the mythological hero journey... Very briefly: the usual
pattern is, first, of a break away or departure from the
local social order and context; next, a long, deep, retreat
backward, as it were, in time, and inward, deep into the
psyche; a chaotic series of encounters there, darkly
terrifying experiences and presently (if the victim is
fortunate) encounters of a centering kind, fulfilling,
harmonizing, giving new courage; and then finally, in
such fortunate cases, a return journey of rebirth to life."
(64)
 The 'retreat backward in time' is characterized by
Campbell as "a terrific drop-off or regression... Falling
back into his own past, the psychotic becomes an infant, a
fetus in the womb. One has the frightening experience of
slipping back to animal consciousness." (65)
These regressions may culminate in 'darkly terrifying
experiences' which, paradoxically, may also be
experienced as near-enlightenment. In the case of one
schizophrenic, Campbell relates how "...he felt that he
was more than he had ever imagined himself to be, that he
had existed forever, in all forms of life, and was
experiencing it all again; but also that he had now before
him a great and terrible journey to accomplish, and this
gave him a feeling of deep fear." (66) Because, as the
patient ultimately discovered, the mystic may be able to
dive into these psychological depths and even navigate
their currents, while the schizophrenic is slowly sinking
and even drowning.
Finally, the schizophrenic may have 'encounters of a
centering kind' through the emergence of certain deep
archetypes - healing images that include scenes of death
and rebirth, of embrace with the Goddess, or a return to
the land from whence he once set out.
But, for any of us, this unwilling descent into madness
may occur - sometimes temporary, sometimes more
permanent. This is due to 'the thousand natural shocks
that flesh is hier to' - life's unexpected mishaps, the
shock of the unexpected. Especially, there is the trauma
of sudden separation, be that the death of someone loved,
the break-up with a lover, or the loss of our own
childhood self. As a result, a series of unexpected images
uprise in our imagination, offering us visions of comfort
or release. We imagine the death journey of the
departed, we fantasize endlessly of re-uniting with a lost
lover, we long for the lost joy of earliest childhood. Each
of these spontaneous fantasies find their parallel imagery
in sacred art and myth: the Egyptian After-world
Journey, the Babylonian Sacred Marriage, or the birth
of the Christ child.
For the visionary artist, such journeys into 'the heart
of darkness' offer him, as their reward, amazing images
emerging from his inner depths. And the work of art
that results allows the artist, or anyone else who beholds
it, to re-experience continually its healing and centering
power. It locates the beholder at the very centre of his
existence, in the awareness of life as a gradual awakening
to the Sacred.

DREAMS
Perhaps the oldest sources of imagery - a vast, fascinating
territory that, to this day, remains largely unexplored - is
dreams. The Old Testament tells us how dreams, like
'Jacob's ladder', may offer a series of oneiric images, a
'ladder of vision' leading to the Absolute. Blake rendered
this vision into form as a spiralling staircase, evolving
and revolving into the highest heavens.
From Classical times, such dreams were recognized
and classified into their respective types: the visum or
phantasma, constituting a normal night's dream; the
insomnium or enypnion, offering instead nightmares and
anxiety. Then came the more fascinating somnium or
oneiros, "an enigmatic dream... that conceals with strange
shapes and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the
information being offered, and requires an interpretation
for its understanding." (67) Greater still came the visio or
horama - a prophetic vision verified by subsequent
events. And finally, at the highest level, appeared the
oraculum or chrematismos, in which a sacred person, or
even the Sacred itself, broke upon the dreamer in a
momentary epiphany.
As the visionary artist opens himself gradually to the
presence of the Sacred in his life, his dreams too may
reveal the increasing presence of the Numinous. We have
already recounted how Fuchs, at a most difficult period
in his life, saw in his dreams a colusses and, later, an
angel. These were no normal dreams. As he recounts, "I
dreamt in a way which I had never dreamt before: strong
and colourful, glowing..."(68) And, in a fascinating
passage from Architectura Caelestis, he elaborates, "My
encounters with the phantastic, with that world which the
corporal eye rarely or never sees... had always taken place
before on a different level: on... the painting or drawing
surface, the plate on which images impressed themselves
'automatically' as in a state of trance... Never before had I
dreamt so violently, never seen such a vision, had never
before 'really', with 'open eyes' been transferred into this
other world. For, I am sure of this, such a dream is not
seen in sleep, the state of the dreamer is awake, a brightly
awake one..." (69) These two dreams, like visio or
oracula, were so evocative of the Sacred, that all other
visionary experiences paled by comparison. And he
testifies, "The power of these dreams, especially the
second dream, surpassed by far anything which I had
experienced under the influence of drugs." (70)
Where the Surrealists were primarily inspired by
Freud's writings on dreams, the Fantastic Realists had
Jung's latest discoveries to spur them onward to new
dimensions of consciousness. And so, while the early
dream-works of Dali manifest much of the repressed
sexual imagery uncovered by Freud, the fantastic works
of the early Fuchs, by contrast, revealed the sacred
images of alchemy which Jung had recently uncovered in
dreams. (For example, Jung's Psychology and Alchemy
which, with its many plates and engravings, led Fuchs
onward to new experiments in imagery with his unicorn
engravings of the fifties).
During his own 'confrontation with the unconscious',
Jung spiralled down into deeper and deeper strata of the
mind, discovering there the collective imagery of dreams.
However, during the process, many of the images
upwelling from his dreams and fantasies remained a
mystery to him. After seeing a horned, bearded prophet
flying through the sky with four keys in his hands, he
responded in a curious manner: "Since I did not
understand this dream-image," he wrote,"I painted it."
(71) A series of dream and fantasy images followed, all
rendered into art. This culminated in a revelatory dream
where Jung visited a city shaped like a mandala, with a
sacred tree growing from its centre. "Out of (this
dream)," Jung wrote, "emerged the first inkling of my
personal myth." (72) This was the beginning, the moment
of discovery, the emergence of his own creative
psychology. Years later he remaked that "the years when
I was pursuing my inner images were the most important
in my life." (73)
Through the further researches of Eliade and
Campbell, this creative interplay between art, myth, and
dream has been expored to ever-greater depths over the
last century."Imagery, especially the imagery of dreams,"
Campbell remarked, "is the basis of mythology."(74) And
Eliade echoed this sentiment: "In the oneiric universe, we
find again and again the symbols, the images, the figures
and events of which mythologies are constituted." (75) By
documenting the evolution of imagery in their dreams,
visionary artists have contributed to this impetus -
offering a rich array of imagery from the darkest depths
of the unconsious and leading their beholders,
unexpectedly, to the light. Through the on-going
impression of image after image onto canvas, an artist
could gradually discover his own life-myth: a myth that
would reveal to him, ultimately, the Sacred underlying
his life. For "Myth," Jung recognized "is the revelation of
a divine life in man."(76)
Hence, the visionary artist descends nightly into the
underworld of dreams, arising each morning with new
possible sources for his works. Though some dreams are
difficult to remember, another species of dreams are
almost impossible to forget. This is especially true of
'lucid dreams', which have become increasingly
documented lately. Though Hervey de Saint-Denys
(1851) was the first and probably most-indepth
researcher of lucid dreams, Stephan Laberge has
emerged lately as their greatest champion. In a
characteristically lucid dream, the dreamer suddenly
'wakes up' within the dream, becoming strangely aware
of his state of dreaming. To a degree, he may even begin
to control its actions and events. The obvious advantage,
for Visionary artists, is the possibility of exploring
dream-imagery much more deeply. While Saint-Denys
used the technique to confront demons from his
nightmares, LaBerge used it instead to soar to new
heights of awareness and experience.
During his two revelatory dreams, Fuchs also felt
that 'he was awake' and seeing things 'with eyes open'.
Indeed, he "...was overcome by a high feeling at the very
beginning of the dream," (77) a sensation of 'supra-
consciousness' which, afterwards, caused him to reflect:
"What I have seen and experienced in this dream is still
far above my consciousness and knowledge."(78)
In fact, the higher world revealed to him in these two
dreams caused him, thereafter, to seek all means of
visionary experience, discovering a hidden link between
dream and drug states: "Of one thing I was sure...
between the two experiences (spheres) - the visionary
dream and the drug - there was a strong connection,
dream and hashish-ecstasy had to do with one another.
From then on, for about two years, I looked for these
states of ecstasy 'by all means' and experimented with
almost all hallucinatory drugs." (79)
But, no sooner had the two states come together then
they began to conflict. Soon, drugs offered him only
'stolen glimpses' of that higher world which dreams had
once made visible. "I knew or anticipated that the world
for which I was looking had a gate, and the drug was only
a ladder for thieves who, in order to 'steal', climbed over
the wall because they did not know the gate or did not have
the key for it.(...) I wanted to get rid of the bothersome
feeling of dependence, find a legitimate access to this
world, the only key to which seemed to be the drug... I
knew it from my dream which I had experienced without
drugs - there had to be other ways (...) Above all, I tried the
track of the permanence of the daily time of work... I
concentrated on the fixation of my picture surface." (80)
In the end, it was meditation - particularly
meditation upon the images he was painting - which
opened the gateway once more unto the world, so
desparately sought, of visionary experience. And so, with
this cautionary reminder, let us concentrate once more
 on the types of visions induced through psychedelics.

HALLUCINOGENS

Psychedelic substances have played a major spiritual and

mythologizing role in many historical cultures. In India,
the ancient Vedas mention soma, the sap of a sacred
plant now lost to us. In ancient Greece, the Gods were
said to drink ambrosia and nectar, which may very well
have been a veiled reference to the hallucinogenic
mushrooms amanita muscaria and panaeolus
papilionaceus. In the Middle and Far East, cannabis has
long been present under many forms (hashish, charas,
bhang, kif), and inspired religious practices among the
Sufis and Brahmins. The Aztecs and Mayans are known
to have used peyote (from the cactus lophophora
williamsii) and mushrooms (psilogybe mexicana), which
travelled up to the natives of North America. Meanwhile,
in South America, Amazonian tribes used yagé or the
'visionary vine' (banisteriopsis caapi) as well as the more
potent ayahuascheros.
While European culture officially recognized wine,
beer, and various liquors (alcohol) as a legitimate source
of social gathering and even as a religious sacrement, it it
strongly condemned the use of psychedelics, such as
those used in witches' brews (nightshade, mandrake,
henbane, toadskin) and possibly extracted in alchemy as
well.(81)
Still, by the 19th century, certain European and
American poets were producing works under the
influence of marijuana and hashish which found
acceptance in Occidental culture (Coleridge, Poe,
Baudelaire). By the middle of the 20th century, the use of
these substances was banned by law, even as new
psychedelics were being synthesized or isolated (LSD,
DMT). At the same time, the music, poetry, and art
which bore traces of their influence moved into the
mainstream. Beat poetry, free Jazz, Psychedelic music,
acid Rock - all of these forms moved from total obscurity
to partial acceptance. And the same is true of
Psychedelic art, Fanstastic Realism, Meta-Realism, etc
which we are gathering here under the rubrique of
Visionary Art.
The states of mind offered by hallucinogens are many
and varied. It is not simply a question of 'what images'
may arise. More difficult for the Visionary artist to
convey are the many modalities of perception, the
multiple states of mind, and the kinds of insights that can
occur. Many of these have been documented and
brought together under the heading of 'Transpersonal'
Psychology - perhaps the third revolution in psychology,
after Freud and Jung. A quick glimpse at the books lying
around the studio of many third generation Visionaries
will no doubt reveal atleast one or two titles by Ken
Wilber or Stanislav Grof - the former a philosopher of
the transpersonal, the latter its foremost psychologist.
In his on-going studies of transpersonal states, Grof
has made the observations that:

"In transpersonal experiences, as they occur in

psychedelic sessions or in various non-drug frameworks...
many experiences belonging to this category are
interepreted by the subjects as regressions in historical
time and explorations of their biological or spiritual past.
It is not unusual in psychedelic sessions to experience
quite concrete and realistic episodes identified as fetal and
embryonic memories... On occasion, LSD subjects report
experiences in which they identify with various animal
ancestors in the evolutionary pedigree or have a distinct
feeling of reliving episodes from their existence in a
previous incarnation.
"Some other transpersonal phenomena involve
transcendence of spatial rather than temporal barriers.
Here belong the experience of merging with another
person into a state of dual unity or completely identifying
with him or her... In a similar way, one can transcend the
limits of specifically human experience and tune in to
what appears to be the consciousness of animals, plants,
or even inanimate objects. In the extreme, it is possible to
experience the consciousness of all creation. (82)
"As the psychedelic process continues and the subject
explores the world of transpersonal phenomena, many of
the ...attributes of the Newtonian-Cartesian world-view
become philosophically untenable. The possiblity of
transcending the limits of matter, time, space, and linear
causality is experienced so many times and in so many
different ways that it has to be integrated into the new
world-view." (83)

The philosopher who has made the greatest attempt

to integrate these insights into a new world-view is Ken
Wilber. Particularly through extended periods of
meditation, he has tried to identify and articulate those
transpersonal states which hallucinogens offer for a few
'peak' moments (of timeless duration).
For Wilber, Transpersonal Philosophy involves
seeing all of life as part of a greater whole. That
wholeness is 'transpersonal' in the sense of being 'one
awareness' with creativity, self-consciousness and
spiritual unity. Meanwhile, each aspect of its totality is in
transition - the many strands of life that are gradually
evolving into greater, more complex, and yet holistic
structures. Through a process of 'transcend and include',
each organism within the great chain of being evolves to
a higher level - and a greater degree of complexity,
awareness, and wholeness.
Man is at a particularly high level, having achieved
not only consciousness but self-consciousness. He looks at
the world and his place in it from the outside and the
inside, both individually and collectively. (This creates
four particular world-views: the biological and
psychological; the social and cultural). Each offers its
own truth, though all are needed for a truly holistic view
of the world.
Within his own lifetime, a man evolves from the 'pre-
personal worldview' of early childhood (where you
identify yourself more with bodily development - the
physio- and bio-centric) to a later, 'personal worldview'
(where you find your centre in ego and its role in society
- the ego- and ethno-centric), to a final 'transpersonal
worldview' (where you have 'decentered' yourself from
the earlier levels and transcended them in favour of a
'world-centric' view).
This higher, transpersonal state of being is
uncommon: it may be witnessed by any of us for a few
fleeting moments during certain 'peak' experiences. But
more traditionally, it has manifest itself for more
prolonged states among shamans, yogis, monks, or other
contemplatives prone to mystical or visionary
experiences.
There are several 'peak' transpersonal experiences
identified by Wilber. The first of these include, what he
calls, Nature Mysticism: "Your identity decenters and
expands...(so that you) actually experience your central
identity, not just with all human beings, but all living
beings... You experience the World Soul."(84) Thus,
meditating upon a tree, you suddenly 'become that tree'.
Certainly, Mati Klarwein captured this experience when
he spoke of 'a motionless palm tree which used my
nervous system to communicate with the creator'. And he
went to great lengths in the attempt to capture this
experience in a painting.
This initial experience of Nature Mysticism may also
expand to include, what Wilber calls, Deity Mysticism.
Through deep meditation, certain timeless archetypes
arise which give form to the identity between you and the
transcendent whole: "you are looking at the basic forms
and foundations of the entire manifest world. You are
looking directly into the Face of the Divine."(85) Now, the
transcendent Unity (of which we are a part) acquires the
lineaments of our own face, but with features expanding
to divine proportions. All cultural images and archetypes
uprise in our memory, to render this experience into
form. Certainly, Johfra's image of the Unio Mystica, with
its multitude of cross-cultural symbols centered onto one
interior, captures this experience and offers it visual
form.
Another transpersonal state identified by Wilber,
'the Causal', pursues upwelling awareness to its source,
to its ultimate cause, only to lose itself ultimately in
"unmanifest absorption or cessation... likened to a deep
dreamless sleep, except... it is infinitely drenched in the
fullness of Being... this pure Self is pure Emptiness." (86)
Hence, "In front of you the clouds parade by, your
thoughts parade by, bodily sensations parade by, and you
are none of them. You are the vast expanse of freedom
through which all these objects come and go..."(87)
Ultimately, the causeless cause of awareness is called 'the
Seer' - "This pure Seer is prior to life and death, prior to
time and turmoil, prior to space and movement, prior to
manifestation..."(88) Hence, it is referred to as 'Formless
Mysticism'.
But, moving beyond this to the next transpersonal
state of 'Non-duality', we 'transcend and include'
Nature, Deity, and Formless Mysicism under the higher,
more-encompassing 'Non-Dual Mysticism'. We cease to
identify ourselves with Nature, with the Divine, or with
the Seer, and surrender ourselves to their deeper unseen
unity. "There is nobody watching the display, there is just
the display, a spontaneous and luminous gesture of pure
perfection... You are still you and the mountain is still the
mountain, but you and the mountain are two sides of one
and the same experience, which is the one and only reality
at that moment."(89) And, what is more, "Your soul
expands to the corners of the universe and embraces all
with infinite delight. You are utterly Full, utterly
Saturated, so full and saturated that the boundaries to the
Kosmos completely explode and leave you without date or
duration, time or location, awash in an ocean of infinte
care. You are released into the All, as the All - you are the
self-seen radiant Kosmos, you are the universe of One
Taste, and the taste is utterly infinite."(90)
It may appear impossible for Visionary artists to
render Formless and Non-Dual Mysticism into image
form. And yet, as Wilber's descriptions make clear, the
images are still present; it is only the attitude of the
viewer which has changed. By meditating upon images of
the world, he has gradually transcended them. But, all of
this is through a process of 'transcend and include': the
images themselves offer us the path which gradually
 leads to their transcendence. They are like a 'ladder of
vision' which, once it is climbed, no longer need exist,
and so may be discarded.
As such, the images in certain works of Visionary Art
may be so arranged as to offer us new paths in our
thinking. They do not describe or depict the resulting
states (as Wilber's texts have just tried to do) - they show
us the way to it. Klarwein's and Johfra' images, leading
to Nature and Deity Mysticism, become the first few
steps on our visionary journey. And yet, many of
Klarwein's later landscapes, or De Es' post-stone period
works, may also lead us further - and indescribeably - to
these higher Mystic states. It is all in the eyes of the
beholder. As De Es commented, "When we wish to fully
understand something we are observing, we must fully
understand who is looking." (91) And he adds
mysteriously, "If our vision were clear, we would find
ourselves at the bottom of everything. But all we get by
looking is - pictures." (92)
It is no secret that many Visionary works of art are
designed to be viewed 'with the aid of mind-altering
substances'. What the hallucinogens offer, for a limited
period of time, is a way of looking at pictures. And what
the pictures offer, in exchange, is a way of looking at
reality while in an altered state. The two compliment
each other. And yet, what remains, once the effects of the
drug has worn off, is the picture. A picture that, once,
was a gateway to another world.
And it remains so. It has taught us a new way of
looking, of seeing, of perceiving and beholding. Now,
through dreams, meditation, deep breathing, and a
variety of other means - the gate to that higher world
may once more be opened, and the image itself
transcended.

READING
Most of us take reading so for granted that we forget the
Visionary states it may induce. It is not merely a
question of imagining the worlds which words may
conjure - although that too is a visionary act. As Gustave
Moreau reminds us, "I am all the more for dreams, for
phantasmagorias of the imagination which I bring to my
reading, with its many tales of lost and far-off civilizations
- a naïvité, an impulsive child-like acceptance of
everything unbelievable. ...How else could we dream of
India, of the forests of the New World, of fantastic islands
in the Indian Ocean or antedeluvian flowers in the heart
of Africa..." (93)
As we read, words trigger images from our memory.
But the simple word 'temple' for example, in all its
emptiness and generality, may conjure up a whole series
of specific memory-images in any one person - each
image finely-detailed and described. Meanwhile, the very
same word may evoke an entirely different series of
memory-images in another person. Such is the power of
the imagination. Where these two people begin to share
their memory-images is at the level of art: actually
building such a temple communally, or rendering it into
a painted image recognizable to us all (and thus, a
'communal vision').
As we read, our art and imagination render into form
those mysterious worlds which words describe or denote.
But, moving beyond that, our art and imagination may
conjure up new worlds which words cannot describe -
things beyond all verbal description. As we read, we are
free to digress in our imagination, following chains of
imagery and creating new combinations which
eventually result in thoughts unheard of in the spoken
language. As in dreams, we may begin to think in an
image-language.
More fascinating still is the realization that we, while
reading, must imagine the correspondence between the
word and the world. We suppose it, we imagine it, and as
we read, we picture it to ourselves - as if it were really
there. But does such a connection actually exist?
While under the influence of hallucinagenic
mushrooms, Terrence McKenna imagined that he could
actually see this correspondence: "Things such as the
normally invisible syntactical web that holds both
language and the world together can condense or change
its ontological status and become visible," McKenna
wrote.(94) In a similar way, while living on the island of
Mallorca, Mati Klarwein "saw the entire coast, one
sunny afternoon, composed of Hebrew texts," and for the
probable reason that "I had ingested a wild dose... which
altered my state of consciousness for a while." (95) He
rendered this experience in two paintings: one of the
landscape itself, which he titled Landscape Perceived, and
the other of the same supposed landscaped, which now
was only composed of spiralling Hebrew letters. The
latter he called Landscape Described.
The images of this diptych invite us to ask: are words
able to describe all that we perceive? Indeed, "Is
language the adequate expression for all realities?" - as
Nietzsche asked.(96) Despite the unquestionable power
of language - to name, to model - is not the majority of
our seeing done 'without language'.
And, if this is the case, is it not possible that the only
correspondence which exists between words and the
world is one that we imagine? Meanwhile images may,
perhaps, possess a direct way of seeing - one which is
denied to words, indeed 'beyond words'. Huxley thought
as much. Despite the fact that he was nearly blind, and
made his living by writing words, under the influence of
mescaline he pronounced, "We must learn how to handle
words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve
and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world
directly and not through that half-opaque medium of
concepts." (97) In fact, Huxley came to mistrust language
profoundly, seeing its inherited, shared perception of the
world as"a reducing valve" (98) for the otherwise
substance-expanded mind.
The alternative: 'To see the world directly' - but
how? In another passage, Huxley offers a clue. Under the
effects of mescalin, "visual impressions are greatly
intensified, and the eye recovers some of the perceptual
innocense of childhood," (99) he writes. The way a child
sees the world, particularly a new-born baby, is - we
must remember - without language. It is also a way of
seeing without identity, perspective, space or time.
While painting his hundreds of flower pictures,
Fuchs described how "slowly feeling my way, my mind's
eye directed inwardly toward submerged forgotten images
of youth, toward earliest childhood, I came sporadically to
see that world again - a world having no purpose but to be
marvellous. The objects, the characters, and the
experiences had no names... I reminded myself that I too
had no name, that I did not know who I was in those first
days of discovery of this world. In that phase of childhood,
without having developed the beginnings of a personality,
the soul of a child relates unhindered to the wonder of the
world."
And he went on to elaborate how "Experiences of
that sort returned to my memory: my own stammering,
shrieking and laughter - all sounds not yet words, waiting
to be learned and ordered... At the threshold of my return
to childhood, I saw those roses again. I returned - I
crawled - under the high roof of the bower that my parents
had built as a sign of beauty, unconsciously remembering
their own childhood. And I found it again: the God-like
child playing with his gifts, worshipped by holy kings - in
this case gardeners, fathers, or uncles. I saw the child
playing in the water, immersed in the crystalline sparkle of
the liquid element. This recognition let me forget all the
evil; no pain, no threat could reach the heavenly child. He
reached toward the amazed eye of his mother, dug his
fingers deep into her lip, and laughed over her
exclamations of pain - reaching the world, touching the
world, understanding it without words." (100)
 THE ANCIENT IMAGE-LANGUAGE
Here we have the beginnings of a purely visual language - the
new-born's need for exploration, and the necessity for
him to create. Visionary art explores the many possible
ways we may combine images, in order to think further
through them. It seeks to create new images, which will
become part of our shared visual vocabulary. Combining
cultural styles, juxtaposing symbols, re-picturing myths
to ourselves - these give our visual language its grammar,
and allow for shared meaning.
Understanding the history of visionary art means
reading the hidden signs and recovering their lost
meanings. We begin to understand why Bosch made
plants as if from metal, why Klarwein saw the world as if
in Kabbalistic script, or why De Es' made his stonemen
suddenly transparent to light.
The visual language is a lost language, like cyphers
undecyphered. But it underlies all that we dream each
night. It invisibly appears whenever the images of vision
flow in a meaningful way. It emerges from madness. And
the images drawn from these visions or dreams and then
rendered into art - these begin to make the private
image-language of each person a shared understanding
and a communal experience.
From the trackless ways in the invisible dessert, the
solitary wanderers are slowly emerging. Their many
paths are crossing and combining. And, with child-like
wonderment, they find themselves sharing the same
horizon. The landscape they stand upon, though
invisible, is seen by all - for it is the ancient image-
language that allows them, together, to speak,
communicate, and comprehend. Even song is added to
their speech, as their artworks become ancient image-
poems offering visions of the beginning, middle, and end
of all things. This ancient image-language, otherwise
forgotten is now being spoken once more.

APPENDIX

THE QUESTION OF TECHNIQUE

From the technical point of view, Visionary artists are

surprisingly united in their tastes, temperment, and
preferences. Though their methods may differ - some
preferring classical techniques of oil and varnish, others
the airbrush, and others still the new graphic capacities
of computers - all agree that as precise a rendering as
possible is absolutely necessary for vision-inducing
works. Fine lines, gradual transitions, infinite details -
there is no limit to the pains endured nor the patience
required to successfully render a vision into image form.
Why this emphasis on accuracy? Speaking for the
Fantastic Realists, Fuchs relates that "From the
beginning we wanted to re-animate the craftsmanship of
the Old Masters. But, more than that, we wanted to depict
the fantastic image in such a way as if it were painted, not
by hand, but by the dream itself, leaving no trace of the
craftsmanship behind." (101)
And De Es expands on this idea: "In these early
works, I avoided anything which could look like a
brushstroke. The onlookers always wondered how it was
done. They were really quite mystified. That sort of
response made me feel very good about my work, because
that is how I perceived existence. There are no
brushstrokes in life, and only the creator knows how it is
done. I am left mystified." (102)
Just as the vision arrives spontaneously with little
indication of its origin, so does the artist leave his work
behind with little trace of his role as its author. For, he is
transcribing as faithfully as possible what he saw
uprising unbidden from within - like a prophet or seer
visited by uncommanded visions. The aim is to make the
painterly medium as invisible as possible, so that the
image itself is presented im-mediately to the viewer.
While the vision, and its faithful reproduction in
image-form, are of primary importance in Visionary art,
the use of different methods and techniques naturally
bring about different results. Many of the more
recognized Visionaries practise some variation of the
Mischtechnik (Fuchs, Brauer, Hausner, Klarwein, De Es,
Venosa, et al). This technique approximates, as much as
possible, the lost techniques of the Old Masters (Jan van
Eyck, Jean Fouquet). Fuchs gradually developed its
fundamentals after a reading of Doerner (The Materials
of the Artist), conversations with other artists (Annegoni)
and some disastrous experiments.
Like other members of the Fantastic Realists, he
possessed a strong desire to paint once more like the Old
Masters: "I remember how, as a quintet, the five of us
stood before Hugo van der Goes' Adam and Eve and made
a silent vow to acquire the art of painting in the same
manner as this artist. At the beginning, it went very bad
for all of us, as we had no direct predecessor to reveal the
secrets of Old Master's painting." (103)
The methods and effects of the Mischtechnik which
Fuchs finally developed are as follows. In principle, the
painting is built up in a series of alternating layers
between white egg-tempera emulsion and colour oleo-
resinous glazes. First of all, a dark, coloured ground is
laid down over the drawing (the imprimatura - usually in
red, violet, or caput mortuum) and the forms are then
defined using a white egg-tempera emulsion (laid into the
wet ground). Hence, the artist concentrates soley on the
tonal value of the object, building up its volume, texture,
plasticity, line etc - in the absence of colour. Opalescence
is important here - a fine hatching of lines or else a semi-
transparent stipling that creates 'optical greys' - which
allow the underlying colours to interract with the
subsequent colour glazes.
So much for the technique, as described thus far. Of
greater interest are the visionary states it may induce in
the artist. Through the whites, the artist can lose himself
in a numinous play of luminosity - achieving such
iridescent effects as haloes, radiance, back-lighting,
sillhouettes, the illusion of semi-transparent beings or -
indeed - total immersion into blinding white light.
Returning to the technique, the artist then lays down
a coloured glaze thinly and semi-transparently (even
lifted off with the palm of the hand) over the egg
tempera. As a result, the newly-added colour sits fairly
intact atop the opaque areas of white while, in the more
opalescent areas, it creates a strong interraction between
upper and lower layers of colour. By adding new layers
of white egg tempera emulsion between succeeding
colour glazes (to lay a foundation for new colours), the
process may be repeated indefinitely.
Just as alchemy traditionally passed through four
distinctive colour stages in the opus (the nigredo, albedo,
cauda pavonis, and rubedo), so does the Mischtechnik, in
its most basic form, move through four corresponding
stages: the red of the imprimatura, followed by the
yellow of the first glaze, then by the blue of a second
glaze, and finally by the 'local colours', depending on the
object to be rendered. In short, the vision of the beholder
passes through red, yellow and blue - the three primary
colours from which all others are constituted - followed
by a variety of local colours - like a peacock's tail - so
that all ultimately combine in his mind into a radiant,
gem-like whole.
More advanced practitioners of the Mischtechnik
have experimented with a variety of different colour
glazes. The unique result of such glazing is that the artist
may create a multitude of colour combinations, not only
through the effect of one colour beside the other
('traditional impressionism') but also on top of the other
('visionary impressionism'). Mixing such colours on the
palette would result only in mud. But, sitting on top of
one another on the canvas, they blend in the eye of the
beholder to form new colours of incredible richness and
depth, hitherto unseen in this world. Only in rare jewels,
clear seas, crystals and other vision-inducing materials
can those transluscent depths be experienced in the
exterior world. But, the unique colours created through
layering ultimately transcend that experience, and are to
be found only in the interior world of our dreams,
visions, and imagination.
As Fuchs recalls: "Hausner's contribution was to
sharpen our awareness of colour through his many
amiable critiques. He was able to demonstrate to us the
many possibilities of polychromy and complementary
colours, so that it became emminently clear how painting
had evolved since the time of the Gothics." (104)
Before embarking on the path of Fantastic Realism,
Rudolf Hausner had painted in a more traditional
Impressionist style. As a result, he was able to apply
Impressionest theories of Polychromy to the
Mischtechnik. As Hausner recounts:
"The painting of the Old Masters proceeds from the
local colour of the object... My painting proceeds from the
colour spectrum... The Old Masters painted a red ball in
local colour by using light red in the lights and dark red in
the shadows. They knew the complementary effect of warm
and cold in relation to light and shadow, and increased the
volume of the object in this way.
"I paint a red ball using spectrum colours. For
example, in the light, I put red-orange; on the shadow's
border, I put violet; and in the back light, I use green. And
in this way, the ball becomes red through the combined
effect of all these colours working together. I did not
discover polychromy - it came from spectrum analysis and
was brought forward by the Impressionists."(105)
Particularly when the tonal value of the colours is
very high in whites, a unique array of 'prismatic' colours
may be achieved, such as one sees in nature through
'mother of pearl' seashells or reflected by the carpace of
certain scarabs. As Terrence McKenna recounts, "The
diffraction of light that occurs in natural phenomena such
as rainbows, peacock feathers, certain insects, and the
colours that appear on the surfaces of some metals during
heating are persistent motifs within a particular stage of
the alchemical opus. The cauda pavonis (the peacock's
tail) is the brief stage that heralds the final
whitening..."(106) As such, prismatic colours are to
found, ultimately, in the vision-quest, where a
multiplicity of hightened colours may harmonize, blend,
and ultimately unite into pure white light.
Following the same technique, colours of extremely
dark tonal value may be laid repeatedly but still
transparently over a white or even black ground. This
gives us the opposite effect, of the deep rich colours
found in the stained glass of cathedrals (blue, crimson),
in the iridescent reflections on a black panther's fur or
the wings of certain butterflies (violet), in the feathers of
certain 'birds of paradise' (emerald), and even in
Buddhists' robes (saffron).
Finally, by 'bleeding' all these colours - gradually
removing their hue - a negative effect is created which
approximates the grey and colourless world described in
the visions of schizophrenics - the light-lacking
underworld, such as appears in many of Giger's works.
Beyond this, a symphony of blacks may be created, with
only the slightest hint of colour, to render more macabre
subjects.
Through the technology of the airbrush, the basic
principles of the Mischtechnik may still be applied,
accompanied by some interesting variations. First of all,
the airbrush is able to disperse the whites (using such
water-based paints as acrylics or ink) in a manner
similar to brush-painted tempera, so that the optical
greys may still be achieved. Secondly, the succeeding
colour layers may also be appliedsemi-transparently
allowing the upper colours to interract with the lower -
thus achieving the super-imposed colour mixtures
unique to Visionary Impressionism. These, however,
appear differently from the glistening depths of oleo-
resinous vehicles - thinner and shallower, but more solid
and voluminous.
As Giger relates, his first encounter with the airbrush
led to a virtual outpouring of the imagination:
"Encouraged by a girlfriend, I began some new
experiments with the airbrush at the beginning of 1972. A
veritable flood of monsters and exuberant baroque
decoration was released into my pictures." (107)
Finally, through computer rendering, a palette
extending to millions of colours may be achieved. Forms
may be scanned, turned about, echoed and repeated. A
multitude of textures, swirls, reflections and perspectives
may created through mathematical mappings. And with
animation, the image may even begin to move. The
visionary potential of this new medium is still largely
unexplored, though Beksinski, Bill Elsworth, Voke, and
many others (as yet still unrecognized) are presently
expressing their visions in this new art form, whose
canvas is nowhere and whose flickering, fleeting images,
meanwhile, may be projected everywhere. With no
doubt, the computer screen will soon open in our mind
new doorways of perception.
END NOTE
 A DEFINITION OF VISIONARY BEAUTY

Visionary works of art seek a beauty of 'balanced tension'. In

the lines, the colours, and the forms there arises, at one
and the same moment, a concord and a conflict: what is
contrary pushing them apart, and what is common
drawing them together once more. All the images of a
composition will manifest this tension - the parts
struggling to reveal a unified whole; the whole falling
once more into scattered multiplicity.
The task then of the artist: to depict a multiplicity of
things, yet still manifest the hidden harmony, indeed
unity, holding them all together - a unity that we may
suddenly see, reminding us of our origins.

L. Caruana
Atelier Fuchs,
Monaco, 2001

REFERENCES
1. Arthur Rimbaud, 'letter', cited in Colin Wilson, The
Outsider, Victor Gollancz publ, 1956, p. 230.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, Triad
Grafton,1954, p. 19
William Blake, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' in The
Portable Blake, ed. by Alfred Kazin, Viking Penguin,
1946, p. 258.
Ibid. p. 250.
Ibid. p. 315.
Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, author's
translation, p. 49.
Mati Klarwein, Mil Ventanas / A Thousand Windows, Max
Publishing, text to painting 'No Man's Land'.
Alex Grey, The Mission of Art, Shambhala Publications
Philip Rubinov-Jacobson, Drinking Lightning, Interface Press,
2000, p. 37, 42.
Ernst Fuchs, 'Fuchs on Fuchs' in Fuchs de Draeger, Draeger
Editeur, 1977, p. 101.
De Es, 'Artist's Statement 1974' Heavy Light, Morpheus
International, 1993, p. 32.
Ernst Fuchs,Architectura Caelestis, Residenz Verlag, p. 161.
William Blake, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' in The
Portable Blake, ed. by Alfred Kazin, Viking Penguin,
1946, p. 258.
Ernst Fuchs in Robert Venosa, Illuminatus, Interface Press, p. 13.
Ibid. p.12.
Alex Grey, The Mission of Art, Shambhala Publications
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, Triad
 Grafton, 1954, p. 106.
Ibid. p. 107.
Ibid. p. 108.
Ibid. p. 110.
H.R. Giger, Necronomicon, Big O publishing, 1978, p. 6.
Ibid. p. 6.
Ibid. p. 6.
Ibid. p. 3.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, Triad
Grafton,1954, p. 107.
Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, Hunter House, 1980. p. 219.
Ibid. p. 78.
Ibid. p. 78.
Ibid. p. 79.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, Triad
Grafton,1954, p. 108.
Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, Hunter House, 1980. p. 80.
Ibid. p. 83.
Ibid. p. 83.
Ibid. p. 84.
Robert Venosa, Illuminatus, Interface Press, p. 231.
William Blake, 'Jerusalem' in The Portable Blake, ed. by Alfred
Kazin, Viking Penguin, 1946, p. 459.
Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, author's
translation, p. 28.
De Es, 'Artist's Statement 1974' Heavy Light, Morpheus
International, 1993, p. 32.
Alex Grey, The Mission of Art, Shambhala Publications
Johfra, Astrologie: Tierkreiszeichen, Verlag Marco Aldinger,
1981, p. 3. Author's translation
William Blake, 'Marginal Note' in Kathleen Raine, William
Blake, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 18.
William Blake, 'Letter to George Cumberland' in Kathleen
Raine, William Blake, Oxford University Press, 1970, p.
27.
William Blake in Kathleen Raine, William Blake, Oxford
University Press, 1970, p. 14, 15.
Gustave Moreau in 'Un Ouvrier Assembleur de Reves' Gustave
Moreau, intro. and catalogue by Pierre-Louis Mathieu,
Flammarion, 1991, p. 14. Author's translation.
Ibid. p. 7.
Ibid. p. 7.
'The Book of Revelation', The Holy Bible, Revised Standard
Version, Catholic Truth Society, 1946
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell,
Triad Grafton,1954, p. 73.
Ibid. p. 79.
Ibid. p. 90.
Ibid. p. 80.
Ernst Fuchs, Paradiso, Gotz GmbH, 1998, p. 32. Author's
 translation.
H.R. Giger, Necronomicon, Big O publishing, 1978, p. 18.
Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis, Residenz Verlag, p. 165.
Mati Klarwein, Mil Ventanas / A Thousand Windows, Max
Publishing, text to painting 'Angels'.
Ernst Fuchs in Robert Venosa, Illuminatus, Interface Press, p.
218.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, Triad
Grafton,1954, p. 48.
Ernst Fuchs, Planeta Caelestis, Edition q, Berlin, 1987, p. 7.
Mati Klarwein, Mil Ventanas / A Thousand Windows, Max
Publishing, text to painting 'Night in Tunisia'.
Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Harper SanFrancisco,
1994, p. 149.
Ibid. p. 126.
Ibid. p. 208.
Ibid. p. 122.
Joseph Campbell, 'Schizophrenia - The Inward Journey' in
Myths to Live By, Bantam Books, 1972, p. 208.
Ibid. p. 225.
Ibid. p. 229.
Macrobius, (I. III. 10) Commentary on the Dream of Scipio,
translated by William H Stahl, Columbia University
Press, 1990, p. 90.
Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis, Residenz Verlag, p. 162.
Ibid. p. 162.
Ibid. p. 172.
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, 1961,
p. 183.
Ibid. p. 199.
Ibid. p. 199.
Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollongen Series C,
Princeton University Press, 1974, back cover.
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter
Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic
Realities,translated by Philip Mairet, Harper
Torchbooks, 1960, p. 14.
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, 1961,
p. 340.
Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis, Residenz Verlag, p. 162.
Ibid. p. 162.79.
Ibid. p. 165.
Ibid. pp. 169 - 170, passim.
Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, Hunter House, 1980. p. 269.
Robert Graves, Greek Myths, vol I, Penguin Books, 1955,
pp. 9 - 10.
Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, Hunter House, 1980. pp. 85,
86.
Ibid. p. 242.
Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, Shambhala
 Publications, 1996, p. 203.
Ibid. p. 218.
Ibid. p. 220.
Ibid. p. 222.
Ibid. p. 224.
Ibid. p. 228.
Ibid. p. 230.
De Es, 'Artist's Statement 1974' Heavy Light, Morpheus
International, 1993, p. 32.
Ibid. p. 32.
Gustave Moreau in 'Un Ouvrier Assembleur de Reves' Gustave
Moreau, intro. and catalogue by Pierre-Louis Mathieu,
Flammarion, 1991, p. 14. Author's translation.
Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Harper SanFrancisco,
1994, p. 73.
Mati Klarwein, Mil Ventanas / A Thousand Windows, Max
Publishing, text to painting 'Landscape
Perceived/Described'.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral
Sense', The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by
W. Kaufmann, Viking Penguin, 1964, p. 45.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, Triad
Grafton,1954, p. 60.
Ibid. p. 20.
Ibid. p. 21.
Ernst Fuchs, Planeta Caelestis, Edition q, Berlin, 1987, pp. 7 - 9.
passim.
Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, author's
translation, p. 21.
De Es, Heavy Light, Morpheus International, 1993, p. 6.
Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, author's
translation, p. 24.
Ibid. p. 21, authors's translation.
Rudolf Hausner, Ich, Adam, DTV verlag, p. 89, author's
translation.
Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Harper SanFrancisco,
1994, p. 142.

H.R. Giger, Necronomicon, Big O publishing, 1978, p. 32.

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