Drug Inspired Color: Psychedelia

On of the most colorful times in history was the 60's and the period of psychedelic art, which used bright and highly contrasting colors, surreal images and swirling patterns of psychedelic states of consciousness...

Today we're taking a look at some work by a few of the classic psychedelic poster artists along with a contemporary psychedelic artist, plus a little altered mind inspiration from the COLOURlovers groups New Rave, Techno Electro and Glow in the Dark and Neon.

Victor Moscoso

Victor Moscoso

Poster Art

At the forefront of the 1960s Psychedelic Art movement were San Francisco poster artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art. Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering, strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, and bizarre iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art style. The style flourished from about 1966 - 1972. Their work was immediately influential to album cover art, and indeed all of the aforementioned artists also created album covers. - read more

Alton Kelley

Alton Kelley

Wes Wilson

Wes Wilson

LSD Blotter Art

Psychedelic art was also applied to the LSD itself. LSD began to be put on blotter paper in the early 1970s and this gave rise to a specialized art form of decorating the blotter paper. Often the blotter paper was decorated with tiny insignia on each perforated square tab, but by the 1990s this had progressed to complete four color designs often involving an entire page of 900 or more tabs. Mark McCloud is a recognized authority on the history of LSD blotter art. - read more

Stanley Mouse

Commercialization of the Style

By the late 1960s, the commercial potential of psychedelic art had become hard to ignore. General Electric, for instance, promoted clocks with designs by New York artist Peter Max. A caption explains that each of Max's clocks "transposes time into multi-fantasy colors." In this and many other corporate advertisements of the late 1960s featuring psychedelic themes, the psychedelic product was often kept at arm's length from the corporate image: while advertisements may have reflected the swirls and colors of an LSD trip, the black-and-white company logo maintained a healthy visual distance. Several companies, however, more explicitly associated themselves with psychedelica: CBS, Neiman Marcus, and NBC all featured thoroughly psychedelic advertisements between 1968 and 1969. In 1968, Campbell's soup ran a poster promotion that promised to "Turn your wall souper-delic!"

The early years of the 1970s saw advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful acts of pseudo-rebellion. - read more

Alex Grey

Alex Grey

Rick Griffin

Psychedelia in Digital Art

Computer art has allowed for an even greater and more profuse expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal generating software gives an accurate depiction of psychedelic hallucinatory patterns, but even more importantly 2D and 3D graphics software allow for unparalleled freedom of image manipulation. Much of the graphics software seems to permit a direct translation of the psychedelic vision. The "digital revolution" was indeed heralded early on as the "New LSD" by none other than Timothy Leary. - read more

Wes Wilson

Rick Griffin

Rick Griffin

Psychedelia In Ancient Art

Using altered states of consciousness as a source for artistic expression is not a new concept and has been practised throughout human history. Where this art occurs in the past it is often called 'psychedelic art' to conceptually link it to the well-known modern movement. This linkage is contentious and the difficulty in proving the psychedelic origins of prehistoric artwork has led many people to refer to it as entoptic art or subjective visual art. 'Entoptic art' emphasises the fact that evidence for its hallucinatory origins comes mainly from identification of motifs related to entoptic phenomena. Prehistoric entoptic art lacks the range of colors of modern psychedelic art and is often characterised by repeating concentric circles and spirals. - read more

New Rave Palettes

Techno Electro

Glow In The Dark and Neon