Psychedelic art

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 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.

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:

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. Whereas the mechanism for surrealism is the observance of dreams, a psychedelic artist turns to drug induced hallucinations. Both movements have strong ties to important developments in science. Whereas the surrealist was fascinated by Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious, the psychedelic artist has been literally "turned on" by Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.

Mikhail Bulgakov was the first writer to describe narcotic hallucinations.Art researchers Tim Lapetino and James Orok trace the connection of psychedelic art with Dadaism, Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism. Notable figures within the psychedelic art movement include Lautreamont, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Stanislav Witkevich, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, De Quincey, Terence McKenna, and Carlos Castaneda.

Early examples of "psychedelic art" are literary rather than visual, although there are some examples in the Surrealist art movement, such as Remedios Varo and André Masson. Other early examples include Antonin Artaud who writes of his peyote experience in Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara (1937) and Henri Michaux who wrote of his experiments with mescaline and hashish in his 1956 novel, Misérable Miracle.

Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) remain definitive statements on the psychedelic experience.