Psychedelic art
art related to altered states of consciousness
Psychedelic art (also known as psychedelia) is art, graphics or visual displays related to or inspired by psychedelic experiences and hallucinations known to follow the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Coined by British psychologist Humphry Osmond, the term "psychedelic" means "mind revealing". By that definition, all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic".
In common parlance "psychedelic art" refers above all to the art movement of the late 1960s counterculture and early 1970s counterculture. Featuring highly distorted or surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke, convey, or enhance psychedelic experiences.
Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, liquid light shows, liquid light art, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling colour patterns typical of psychedelic hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness. In the 2000s there has been a revival of psychedelics and psychedelic art with some prominent artists, like Raul Lopez Pomares.
Features
Psychedelic visual art is a broad, widely-represented term, though it is commonly identifiable by its use of one or more of the listed subject matters:
Fantastic, metaphysical, and surrealistic subject matter
Kaleidoscopic, fractal, or paisley patterns
Bright and/or highly contrasting colors
Extreme depth of detail or stylization of detail, also called Horror vacui style
Morphing of objects, themes, and/or collages
Phosphenes, spirals, concentric circles, diffraction patterns, and other entoptic motifs
Repetition of motifs
Innovative typography and hand-lettering, including warping and transposition of positive and negative spaces
Origins
Psychedelic art is informed by the notion that altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are a source of artistic inspiration. The psychedelic art movement is similar to the surrealist movement in that it prescribes a mechanism for obtaining inspiration.
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This entry incorporates text from “Psychedelic art” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.