Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Visionary Art


Visionary art

Visionary art is able to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences.

Both trained and self-taught (or outsider) artists have, and continue to create visionary works. Many visionary artists are actively engaged in spiritual practices, and some have drawn inspiration from psychedelic drug experiences.


Excerpt from:

A MANIFESTO
OF VISIONARY ART


by L.Caruana
One makes oneself a visionary
by a long, immense, and reasoned
disordering of the senses.
- RIMBAUD

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'. Insuch 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.

Old master visionary artists


Visionary artists

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