Interview with Alex Grey
Via SF Gate
Alex Grey paints souls. His work shows human bodies — rendered with medical-illustration precision — wrapped in layers of sacred energy. Whether you believe Grey's work depicts the reality of divine auras or a particularly vibrant artistic license doesn't much matter. His paintings have an uncanny effect on viewers, making them sense — or at least consider the possibility of — the subtle energies that surround us and how these personal force fields might change depending on our intention, actions and moods. They are modern-day religious icons and mandalas for 21st century Westerners.
Grey, 55, lives and works in New York City with his wife, the painter Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey. The Greys host regular full and new moon all-faiths-welcome gatherings at their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a sanctuary and art gallery where selected paintings of Grey's are on permanent display. I spoke to him by phone about art's power to transform, Tibetan Buddhism and the danger of chasing many rabbits but catching none.
In an essay of yours called "What Is Visionary Art?" you wrote that the artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. How do you do that, if you can put that into words?
I think that that's why artists make art — it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this. Their edict was, in order to paint the mountain you must become the mountain. That's one way to make the soul perceptible, when one mirrors something and then expresses it from that perspective. Then there are what I think of as gifts of the divine imagination, when one can gain a glimpse into the visionary realm. Some of these visions are so intense that they burn themselves into your neuronal fabric. And so you remember them, and then you make a drawing or, if it was an auditory thing, you write down or hum or do whatever the musician does.
You had a kind of vision as a young man that changed your life and work. Can you tell me about that?
It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money. I came back exhilarated and exhausted, not to mention slightly suicidal. I was pretty young, like 21. I'd been searching, and I just didn't understand what my life was all about. So at one point I kind of asked, "If there is a God, then please give me a sign."
Then, on the last day of art school, I was standing on a street corner, saying goodbye to my professor, when this woman drove by and invited us to a party later that night. My professor picked me up that evening and offered me a bottle of Kahlua and LSD, and since I felt like I had nothing to lose — I had never done psychedelics before — I tried it. I drank about half the bottle. And when we got to the front door of the lady giving the party, I told her what was in the bottle, and she drank the rest of it. I went into her apartment, sat on a couch and closed my eyes; inside of my head it seemed like everything was in a big, dark tunnel, but I was revolving around in a spiral toward the light. There was this beautiful, amazing kind of luminosity, a kind of light that I'd never imagined. It was the light of love, the light of redemption, in a weird way. I felt a kind of ecstatic joyfulness that was a real release from my depression, and I saw the experience as symbolically important in that I was in the dark, going toward the light.
Read more!
Alex Grey paints souls. His work shows human bodies — rendered with medical-illustration precision — wrapped in layers of sacred energy. Whether you believe Grey's work depicts the reality of divine auras or a particularly vibrant artistic license doesn't much matter. His paintings have an uncanny effect on viewers, making them sense — or at least consider the possibility of — the subtle energies that surround us and how these personal force fields might change depending on our intention, actions and moods. They are modern-day religious icons and mandalas for 21st century Westerners.
Grey, 55, lives and works in New York City with his wife, the painter Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey. The Greys host regular full and new moon all-faiths-welcome gatherings at their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a sanctuary and art gallery where selected paintings of Grey's are on permanent display. I spoke to him by phone about art's power to transform, Tibetan Buddhism and the danger of chasing many rabbits but catching none.
In an essay of yours called "What Is Visionary Art?" you wrote that the artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. How do you do that, if you can put that into words?
I think that that's why artists make art — it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this. Their edict was, in order to paint the mountain you must become the mountain. That's one way to make the soul perceptible, when one mirrors something and then expresses it from that perspective. Then there are what I think of as gifts of the divine imagination, when one can gain a glimpse into the visionary realm. Some of these visions are so intense that they burn themselves into your neuronal fabric. And so you remember them, and then you make a drawing or, if it was an auditory thing, you write down or hum or do whatever the musician does.
You had a kind of vision as a young man that changed your life and work. Can you tell me about that?
It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money. I came back exhilarated and exhausted, not to mention slightly suicidal. I was pretty young, like 21. I'd been searching, and I just didn't understand what my life was all about. So at one point I kind of asked, "If there is a God, then please give me a sign."
Then, on the last day of art school, I was standing on a street corner, saying goodbye to my professor, when this woman drove by and invited us to a party later that night. My professor picked me up that evening and offered me a bottle of Kahlua and LSD, and since I felt like I had nothing to lose — I had never done psychedelics before — I tried it. I drank about half the bottle. And when we got to the front door of the lady giving the party, I told her what was in the bottle, and she drank the rest of it. I went into her apartment, sat on a couch and closed my eyes; inside of my head it seemed like everything was in a big, dark tunnel, but I was revolving around in a spiral toward the light. There was this beautiful, amazing kind of luminosity, a kind of light that I'd never imagined. It was the light of love, the light of redemption, in a weird way. I felt a kind of ecstatic joyfulness that was a real release from my depression, and I saw the experience as symbolically important in that I was in the dark, going toward the light.
Read more!
posted by Mmothra at 3/24/2008 06:39:00 AM
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