Step into Alex Grey ’s world and you are transported from the dawn of civilization into the deepest inner realms of your body,mind and soul,and out to the fringes of outer space. His work combines science, psychedelics, religion and history into an overall cosmic consciousness,and illustrates our connections to each other, our planet and the universe. Grey realistically paints psychedelic visions so that a sober person can experience what it is like to trip, making visions turn to reality and reality turn to visions.His X-ray paintings of the human experience reveal the surreal and psychedelic geometry and energy waves that he believes are within us all.Grey, 49, is a family man and many paintings portray the daily events of family life and his wife Allyson and daughter Zena are frequently at his side. They are an artistic team (Allyson is a painter and Zena an actress)and give Alex advice on works in progress. Some paintings take one or two years to complete.Despite the time invested in these masterworks he refuses to sell them,instead saving them for his own museum.The Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors will be designed as a spectacular,futuristic pyramid and a lavish, spiritual place to view his visionary art.

You paint a lot of unseen energetic force fields that connect people together. That special unseen energy exists between band and audience at a Phish show. Do you think that would be a good subject for one of your paintings?
Oh totally, oh yes I’ve often thought of how one could represent this kind of group soul that harmonizes with the musical experience. It’s an unbelievably beautiful thing that I’m sure keeps people coming back to these experiences. Because it is a unique kind of bonding that occurs in our resonance and harmonizing with these sounds. I’d like to try to visually portray the sound waves for one thing. I’ve seen them in my mind.

And it’s not just familiar sounds but with the invented sounds that comes with the jams. There are moments of total creativity where the band is open to allow a flow of creativity in to reinterpret a riff they have been working through. So people who are really astute listeners are right in there with them kind of co-creating that moment. And if they’re tripping at the same time then they are creating what Hendrix used to call the sky church. The linking up of all those consciences in those incredibly harmonic resonant moments of invention that are unforgettable for many people. You can articulate the dome of heaven with sound. The kaleidoscope that occurs over the crowd in the minds of all the onlookers who are tripping and experiencing the invention. There is one twist of the kaleidoscope with every new sound and I have tried to visualize it in some way. I haven’t portrayed it yet. There’s a number of group experiences I have yet to portray that I really look forward to.

What are these group experiences you want to portray but haven’t yet?

There’s kind of collective memorial or grieving imagery that I’d like to put forward and collective laughter. Dancing, all kinds of normal things that people do together. But right now I’m working on a painting that has lots of heads interlacing each other. It’s a very large painting. It’s about 7 by 14 feet and is very difficult to describe. The heads are pillars in an infinite hall of great being. Each layer of these pillars that extends infinitely in an expanse like that is just one layer of a kind of membrane of these pillar like heads. It’s a series of layers of the same kind of space using a network of heads that expands outward and all of them are connected at the heart of the higher mind. .

What music do you listen to when you paint?

I listen to all kinds of music. It just runs the gamut. I think my earliest love was for the classical composers. Bach, Beethoven, Schubert – all those heavy Germanic romantic musicians that have very complex yet deeply felt riffs. One of my favorite musicians to trip to was Bach and the organ music played by Albert Schweitzer. He was an incredibly altruistic being his organ music feels like the sound of your organs inside when you’re tripping.

I think what I found in the work is that it resonates on a level of Schweitzer being a healing presence. He was the person that coined the phrase reverence for life. This was his philosophical outlook and attitude toward life. He had set up a mission in Africa to take care of the sick and needy. And prior to doing that he had become one of the world’s foremost Bach scholars and had done numerous concerts of Bach’s organ works.

He began his career as a musician but when he was 30 he decided to dedicate himself to serving the world. He couldn’t believe that he was so fortunate in a world that was filled with so much suffering. So he decided to become a physician in order to serve suffering people. He put himself through medical school and became a first class doctor. And then he said “I’ve learned my craft now I’m going to find one of the poorest places on earth where they don’t have adequate medical care and I’m going to set up a hospital there.” And so that’s what he did. He went to Africa. For many black people he was probably the first kind white person they ever encountered. He accepted goats or coconuts or whatever the heck they had as payment or nonpayment.

In order to support his mission over in Africa he would fly back to the United States and Europe and perform concerts on the organ, frequently Bach, in order to raise money. That was the way he supported himself and his mission with his musical talent and his notoriety. I feel that kind of generosity of character is perceptible through the music. And when you combine such a spiritually and ethically motivated person with the most religiously moving music ever written with the most complex fugues and fractal like structures of music in Bach then you have an extraordinary joining of forces.

But then of course the psychedelic music from Led Zeppelin to Pink Floyd and you know The Doors and all the rest of those guys that you would imagine. All kinds of jazz. I became enamored with the trance rave scene a little bit the last few years because that scene had already been using my work. And then Tool have been one of my favorite groups and I’m really stoked they wound up using my artwork in their recent shows.

More specifically who do you think are the most psychedelic classical composers or rock bands?

I think Bach is amazing because of the complexity of the structure. To me its very much like the tripping mind. One listens to musical offering while tripping and it very directly reflects the kind of amazingly complex and intricate fabric that the mind is woven from.

I’m also a big fan of Phillip Glass. The recent fifth symphony that Phillip Glass put together has a libretto that goes through through all world religions. Its all about the beginning of the universe. The coming into being of humanity and an apocalyptic end and the amazing resurrection of the spirit of humanity. And so I love his orientation because it transcends a single religion. It incorporates them all and it’s at the highest level of symphonic writing today.

And then groups like the Dead and Phish are amazing because of their ability to improvise and to draw together the energies from an audience and just out of the air create. And that goes in a different way then the way that we understand jazz to have evolved. And in some ways that is related to the raga kind of capacity of this ongoing endless sound that is related to the ohm. The primal sound that one has continually going in the background or understood as the primordial sound. How could you go for 8 hours (Phish at Big Cyprus) unless you were tapped into a primordial energy that is continuous. And you are an expression of 8 hours of it is something that is truly beyond time, something that is an eternal sound. You are a reflection of that and you are modulating it through your capacity as a human being. Music is their soul and that is what they are meant to do. That’s their gift to the planet. Their capacity to represent that primordial sound making language.

How does your art fit into Tool’s concerts?

Adam Jones is one of the great guitarists. As a musician and artist I really respect where he’s coming from. The whole fist of tool is they are a hardcore band. Their sound is not gentle. Their sound is very powerful and I am honored they had a resonant feeling with my artwork and wanted to bring it into the design. Adam basically had cajoled me into these various interactions with the band. He invited me to do the CD jacket, which I initially resisted. But we kept talking and he was so open in allowing me to interpret this idea in my own way. They loved how the CD turned out so next they invited my participation in the music video for Parabola. And that was something I had never done before but really enjoyed it and by all accounts it turned out nicely.

Then shortly before Tool went on tour Adam asked me if I had any ideas about stage sets. So I had a number of ideas and we went back and forth. I had just finished a painting called Interbeing and I thought wow that could make an interesting kind of backdrop. So I gave them a whole bunch of ideas and they took a lot of them including using my paintings Interbeing, Collective Vision and several from the SACRED MIRRORS series. They were used at various times in the performance and they were all timed and sequenced to work with the music. (Editors note: Tool performed the entire concert in front of huge backdrops of Interbeing and Collective Vision. Several large banners from the Sacred Mirrors series were unfurled at various times throughout the concert.)

I think Adam and the guys and lighting people created an unbelievable spectacle. It was an astonishing memory to me and it introduced hundreds of thousands of people to my work all across America and Canada so I can only be incredibly grateful for that.

Your paintings on Maynard James Keenan’s body (Tool’s singer) were quite detailed. How long did they take?

I painted him a couple of times. I painted him at the recent Halloween show but it wasn’t a very dramatic kind of thing. He had a specific idea of what he wanted for that which was a bunch of dots all over his body which he thought were related to the acupuncture dots and things. So I did that just for fun and it probably took a half hour. The Radio City one took a longer time. It took about 45 minutes and was a lot of flame and eye imagery. Which he kinda liked and I thought looked nice under the black lights.

Did you hear the Lateralus album before you began work on the art?

No. Maynard gave me the words so I had a feeling for the lyrics. But they weren’t releasing anything before it was released to the public because of the understandable concern for piracy. Even if I’m a trusted friend they weren’t letting anybody have it. I found that very curious ‘cause I’m not even sure what this album sounds like, ha, ha!

The art is in perfect synchronicity with the music that I find it amazing you never actually heard the album.

I guess. I guess.

There is also a striking similarity between Tool’s career and your own. Both of you started out creating art with a darker edge but today are create more uplifting and positive work.

That’s true, I think there is a kind of resonance like that. I think that as their audience grew in size and they matured as artists they wanted to create something positive for people as well as express the rage that we all feel about the situation of the world we’re in.

The Lateralus album and tour were psychedelic but Tool was not previously known as a psychedelic band. I’m surprised you don’t have a stronger relationship with more traditional psychedelic bands.

Tool is industrial strength psychedelia. The relationship occurred because Adam is a visual artist. He directs and designs all their music videos. He illustrates his dreams in them really. It’s not because I’m not attracted to all these other bands. It’s because Adam made a pitch and has been a friend and reached out to me. That’s the sole reason. I have occasionally heard from ambassadors from Santana that Carlos likes my stuff and they mentioned doing a shirt together or something like that but nothing ever gelled. Adam is a visual artist and a rock and roll musician and he wanted me to work with the band. That was it.

Shortly after our initial interview, Alex became friends with Sting Cheese Incident. So, you’ve recently become friends with SCI?

I’ve been talking with the management and the band about the possibility of working together. They brought me out to one of the New Years gatherings in San Francisco. There were moments of the concert that I thought were stunning and transcendental in a very trance like way. Michael’s fiddle playing was quite extraordinary. Of course all of the members of the band are extraordinarily proficient. They have moments where they all coalesce into quite a striking synthesis of sensibilities. They did seem to be able to veer from one historical reference point to another and weave it together quite uniquely. It made for a rich and beautiful experience.

One of the most remarkable things as well was the audience that showed up. They had vendors all over that were fairly amazing artists. Some of whom I already knew or who knew me. So I got to hang out and talk a bit.

Would you ever approach a band or musician to do soundtrack music to accompany a specific piece of your own art instead of the other way around?

Sure. If I had the dough, you know. If I had the money to do that then I probably would. Who knows that might be in the future.

Some people think the eyes are dark or evil but I know that is not your intention. Can you explain the symbolism of the eyes? You use this eye imagery both in your own work and with Tool.

What Satan uberrralis, is that what some people think??? (laughter). I interpret it because basically it is something I’ve seen in my visions. That’s basically why it winds up in my paintings. But the way I interpret is that the eye is a symbol of consciousness and awareness and especially for a work of visual art. We look into each other eyes to see if someone is paying attention to us and if they see us. So for us it is a way that we check out if someone is aware or not. So the eyes is what we use to Gauge someone’s awareness. And therefore if you make infinite eyes you’re talking about a symbol of infinite awareness. To see with the divine eye is to see beyond your normal binocular vision. It’s to open eyes in all dimensions and if you are able to open all your eyes you could be open to everything everywhere. And that is the idea as to suggest that it is possible for us to perceive infinity through the lens of our imagination.

Why do some people think your X-ray portrayals of the human body are disturbing when you are just painting the human experience?

You can see people’s guts and bones and things. And for some people it makes them very uncomfortable to think they are actually made up of guts and bones and veins and flesh because it reminds them they are going to die. And basically the most uncomfortable thing we have as living beings is the knowledge that we are going to die. We don’t know when and it makes us very uncomfortable. We distract ourselves into all kinds of things to not think about it.

And so the progress of the soul paintings by directly facing that makes it part of our consideration about being alive. Being alive is a temporary condition. We are Impermanent. And hopefully that will encourage people to do what they want to do with their lives. To not put it off until tomorrow because you never know how long you are going to be around here. So it should be a kick in the pants to do something good with your life.

These reminders of our mortality can be depressing on one hand but on the other it’s very rare that someone is naturally drawn to the spiritual. They usually have to go through some dramatic or traumatic incident in order for them to say "Wait a minute, now I have to question what my reality is? What makes life worth living? What’s it all about? A lot of people don’t start questioning things until stuff falls apart. So I try to work that into the paintings just as a reminder not only to be mindful of our mortality but to be compassionate with each other because we are all subject to this brief existence. In a certain way that should bond us. We should be comrades in our temporary ness here and find a way to resolve our difficulties with each other. It should be an impetus towards love, a motive for compassion.

All the Buddhist teachings talk about various considerations before you start on your spiritual journey. One of them is “Boy you’re really damn lucky to have a physical body. This human rebirth here that you took is a pretty rare thing and you ought to be appreciative of that.” That is one thing they say. And then another thing they say is “But its not going to last long. So get on with your business and do some good in this life.” I try to sneak those things into my paintings too.

What caused you to change from a performance artist exploring darker realms to such a positive painter and spiritual person?

It’s a complex story but to make a long story short love saved the day. My relationship with my wife was the way that I turned away from my focus on death and trespassing on bodies at the morgue where I worked. Which was more the manifestation of my shadow realm of the dead kind of passages. I did work in a morgue for about five years and during that time I was working out a lot of stuff morally. Such as “What are we as human beings?” And “Is a corpse just a hunk of meat? Or is it basically an empty container of what was a sacred life and in a sense should be honored as a sacred container?” So I basically came to that understanding of honoring the dead. But I went through some weird spaces getting there. And my relationship with my wife showed me there were reasons to focus on love and the things that make life worth living rather than keeping fixated on the inevitability of our death.

And so that kind of love I felt because I was tripping a lot in those days. I came to see our relationship as an expression of the divine ground of being of love. That there is an infinite love that binds us all together and it is kind of archetypal or hidden realm that is basically what I think of is god. God is the glue that holds everything together. God is one. The entire cosmos is one big creative work of art that is god. And us procreating this reality and the juice that moves it all is love.

So I see Alyson as a direct expression of that sort of divine ground of love that’s come into my life. So this is where the whole idea of the Sacred Mirrors comes from. Is that we are each reflections of this divine realm and can be that for each other. And I came to that realization in our relationship. Alyson named the Sacred Mirrors series. She inspired it. My whole body of work of the Sacred Mirrors is the gift of the love that is our relationship. So that’s why I’m always trying to acknowledge her as a source for me and a great painter in her own right.

The theme of infinity runs through a lot of your paintings.

As a visual artist I think Escher was one of the greats to be able to point to this experience of infinity. And certainly when we look at fractal geometry we start to have a visual reference point for an understanding of or an evocation of the infinite. When we come towards an experience of mystical reality or spiritual reality, God, Primordial awareness. You are starting to dip into the ocean of infinity. When we experience god we’re experiencing our minds united with the cosmos. United with the infinite web of life. You know. All the various consciousness that exist and that we recognize ourselves as being one with. And so that oneness and growing beyond our limited ego self is connecting with the greater being that we all are participants in. And so as visual artists infinity is one of the ways of seducing peoples minds into the possibilities that are latent within them and the spiritual potentials that are within everyone. You look at the portrayals of Krishna’s revealing of the divine form like with the Hare Krishna art or looking back at the Yoga art that shows Krishna’s revealing of the divine form. you see numerous heads, numbers arms, numerous legs and numerous people inside the body. There’s worlds within worlds and the infinitizing. The pointing to the possibility of the capacity. An infinite capacity of the mind. When we talk about mind expansion we are going from a limited to an unlimited. To a vastness and that is pointing toward the infinite.

Sometimes trips become bad trips because the person is stuck in infinite nightmarish thoughts.

I’ve had hellishly frightening trips where this infinity does come into play. It’s true. Infinity isn’t just some ho hum thing. Infinity is awesome. Infinity is like a tidal wave of enormity that is so vast. Some people get freaked out when they go out west and just look at the sky and are like ‘’oh my god this is so vastly huge, get me back to my apartment, it’s too big.‘’ So it depends on what you are coming in with and your context for holding that infinity. I think if you trip enough you’re gonna encounter those head spaces where you have fear. Because fear is normal for humans. We have fear. If the psychedelic is as Stan Groff calls it “a nonspecific amplifier of our mental state” then sometimes we are going to have ecstatic bliss to the max. Way beyond what could be imagined. Infinite bliss. Infinite ecstatic space. And sometimes your gonna have infinite hell. It discourages people from going back. It really does.

I think your paintings depict the psychedelic experience much more accurately than the words or music of other psychedelic spokesmen.

Maybe it is an aspect of the psychedelic experience that is really in need of articulation. It’s a different kind of language, the language of form, the language of art. And I think one of the most interesting things about psychedelics is they have been a catalyst for artistic works from the very beginning. The poetry of the Vedas. The Rig Veda is spiritual poetry and it was inspired by psychedelics. Plato’s philosophy is in a sense a telling of the story of Socrates and recounting of dialogues. It’s like writing a play. It’s a work of art. A work of literature basically is philosophy. And so I also am making sort of philosophical paintings or statements with the artwork. But that’s not different than almost any kind of sacred art. Because sacred art refers to a philosophical or a spiritual understanding of life.

So the artwork comes at the tip of the iceberg of the whole full worldview. And because psychedelics alter or influence powerfully our worldview, make us question things and make us think in new ways about the world people wrestle with it. They experience visions, colors and patterns and any number of archetypical forms while in the psychedelic state they don’t know what to do with it.

You could talk to your buddies until you’re blue in the face. Maybe you write a journal about it or write a poem. But making a painting or a computer graphic work that is based around that experience are the visual ways. And primarily for most people it’s a visual trip. It’s something that happens in the divine imagination. Maybe words can point to it. But many times it’s something you saw that is etched into your memory that you just can’t forget. You know I’m just making a painting. It’s just colors rubbed on a flat surface you know. But invariably if people have had an experience that is related and they are able to see it reflected it in this two dimensional representation of a multidimensional experience.

It’s a poor translation really. It’s got a lot of static and its not really well downloaded because it’s just a two dimensional thing. Yet paintings speak to me. I love the whole history of painting so I relate to it. I think looking at and contemplating a static image still has the power and ability to speak to us, you know?

How can one harness the spiritual/creative aspects of LSD as compared to using it as a party drug? How can one follow through with grand plans or personal goals that come to them while tripping and turn those ideas into reality later?

Well I think that is an important question that will not be resolved until someone actively addresses that. One of the promises that my wife and I made about our trips together was that we would not trip again until we integrated in some positive way the experience that we had. It most likely would take a while, sometimes months and occasionally years between trips. I have done some jungle journeys where it’s been every other day I take Iowaska but at those times I’m doing a lot of journaling, drawing and painting. It’s really important to be working at integrating that material if you are anticipating dosing yourself shortly. So it’s kind of a value do for yourself, you know? Until you’ve integrated it in some fashion through writing or some kind of creative activity or taken some kind of steps or perhaps you got some advice or something. If there is some project you feel you need to work you need to take some steps towards realizing that project before before allowing yourself to dose again. Otherwise it just becomes a distraction instead of a tool for gaining insight and wisdom which it can be.

How do you paint energy fields and conscience even though these things are unseen, formless and colorless? It seems like you are very accurate in your representations even though nobody knows for sure.

I think that you go with your intention to make as direct and literal interpretations of these fields as possible. But you know that you won’t be able to translate it exactly. I’m hopeful that in the varieties of ways that I’ve tried to portray these energies so that we can have a little bit more of a feeling for how these fields and waves and strings kind of connect us. My first thoughts go towards when we’re swimming in a pool or a pond and we see the sun reflect off the surface of the water or I visualize the motions of air. Or we can look at Leonardo da Vinci’s visualizing of how a waterfall would swirl out into various kinds of swirly patterns. We can see how the elements create these flows. Then we look at various representatives of energies like lightning. It comes in bolts of electricity. These waves of light play in patterns of electrical jolts and bolts. These are all ways that we are referencing radiance and light waves and stuff. And so the notion is basically I see them inside and then try to bring them out. But they are kind of taken from all those reference points.

You can look at the history of eastern and western art and see that holy people glow. You’ve got halos and auras around Jesus and Buddha and around various religious figures. So already we’re trying to think that certain kind of individual saints and what not glow. So what happens if we put that around every man. That confers a kind of holy status to everyday reality if we see our own auras and halos. Then if we draw the lines between each other when we look at each other eye to eye there is a bridge of energetic connection that happens. And you know it. When you recognize your friend or your beloved in a crowd there is a different thing that goes off then if you just looking at a bunch of faces in a crowd. When you recognize someone there is something that happens. You know you feel it. Even though you can’t visually see it. You do have a feeling of a connection. So in a visual artwork I’m just trying to make symbols of those experiences that we have. Sometimes they are visions that I have that I’m directly interpreting. Sometimes they are feelings that I’m trying to come up with symbols to represent.

Do you ever look back on your work months later and have a psychedelic or spiritual experience?

Sure, that’s the most fun thing to do with them is to approach it like you didn’t make it. And experience it as though it is a new thing because that can happen. If there’s something you hadn’t seen for a long time and then you look at it and you think “Oh my god I can’t believe I had anything to do with this.” You just appreciate it.

Do you ever notice something in your own painting that you never noticed before or completely forgot that it was there?

The Gaia painting has two airplanes flying over the World Trade Center. I never remembered that until I got an email after 9/11. Someone was sending it around on the web and it was just this random email about this guy Alex Grey. “Look what this guy found out.” I thought that was really weird.

What’s the difference between viewing your art sober vs. viewing it while tripping?

Once I was tripping and looking at one of the Sacred Mirrors or the Psychic Energy System. For me the ultimate experience of the Sacred Mirrors is standing in front of these paintings and reflecting. You stand in front of them with your body and your hands and feet in the same position as the figure itself. So I was doing that, staring at the eyes of the figure and I sort of felt my conscience or energy being sucked out of my body through my eyes and being absorbed into this painting. The painting was alive. It was crackling with energy. It took energy out of my body, reformatted my psychic hard drive and gave me back that energy. I felt opened up. Clarified. It was some kind of subtle body massage on the psyche. It was really weird and wonderful. In a tripping mode you are more open to seeing the archetypal and symbolic meaning and directly recognizing it in the work. One of the things that happens when you trip is that after everything becomes hilariously funny then things start to take on a deeply meaningful symbolic importance.

Tripping fuels meaning in everything. Just breathing and existing takes on a phenomenal importance and you start to see and feel the literal importance and preciousness of every moment. From that heightened perception these paintings were meant to draw you into that consideration of the preciousness and meaningfulness of life. So that is the ideal state from which to be viewing the work and it keys you back into perception. And hopefully there’s an overriding perception of the sacredness of life. That you can see behind the veil of the material forms, say in the Copulating painting. That these beings and thus we ourselves are expressions of a kind of cosmic order and that order is the laws of love.

Your art is psychedelic but yet you also consider it sacred and spiritual at the same time. How is that possible, how are they intertwined?

My hope is that in the future our religious institutions will be open to the integration of the sacraments of the psychedelics into a revitalization of what those faiths are. If the cradle of eastern and western civilization at least was influenced by the use of psychedelics it seems they have a place in human history. And right now it’s being penalized. There is a war on the visionary state of the divine imagination. There’s a war on understanding of ourselves as sacred beings and the web of life as a sacred thing. There’s a war on that perception which is a sad, sad thing. It’s my hope due to the decriminalization of certain substances in Europe and other parts of the world that this will lead towards more leniency towards their use. If we are able to create the chapel I fully expect that people will come there already in a tripping state (but not necessarily dosing up on the property) and get that way and perceive some of the artwork and open up to it. There are probably people getting stoned and going to museums right now. They certainly get stoned and go to concerts. In some ways it can tune your aesthetic antennae to a deeper and more meaningful experience.

You’re keeping some of your largest, most epic pieces for yourself to place in the Chapel. That is surprising because these works could be sold for the most amount of money. By refusing to sell them it is a compliment to your character and shows you are genuine, completely sincere a dedicated to your vision.

It’s been to the detriment of our finances that’s for sure. We could have sold these numerous times. It definitely works against my career and works against all kinds of things because collectors and museums work on the basis of selling your artwork for god sakes. And if I’m saving the ones that I work a year or two on for a chapel then they’re not going into public collections or they’re not going into the hands of collectors. I’ve sold numerous paintings. I can’t not sell anything because we need money to live and survive. But a lot of times I regret selling them because I wish I could have them for exhibit in the chapel. Now certain collectors have already said they would donate pieces back to the chapel if we were able to build it.

So the possibility of creating this chapel seems to becoming closer and closer to reality. Hopefully within the next year we will discover where this thing will be built. It will still take a great deal of money to build it and to care for it and endow it. But it could be a deeply inspiring place for people to make a pilgrimage to and be able to tap into their own identity on an individual basis. People will then see our collective consciousness and then go on to a more planetary and more cosmic identity. We want to create transformative architecture that will allow people to see aspects of themselves.

How do you decide if a piece will be sold or saved for the chapel?

Well, ideally I’d save them all for the chapel. But if we’re in a situation where we absolutely need to make some money, which happens all too often, then they wind up for sale. I’d like to live in a fantasy world where money is not a concern. But I don’t live in that world. There are numerous paintings I’d like to buy back for the chapel. However my wife has advised me that it’s important and good to have people “own them out in the world.”

Will music be a part of the Chapel?

I think so. It would have to be. There will be various kinds of ceremonies and ways of getting in touch with the sacred reality and certainly music is one of the primary ways that people do that. I could hope we could take advantage of that.

It’s a difficult decision for any writer, artist or musician to decide what projects or ideas to work on next. But your work is so epic and detailed that the decision must be even tougher for you. Certain paintings could take years to complete. What thoughts go into deciding on the next project? What takes precedence the physical demands or the message of the painting?

All of those things are considered but quite often it is just which imagery seems more demanding at the time. And also I subject it to the scrutiny of my keenest and most insightful friend Allyson my wife. She is a great, great painter and an unfailing intuition about what the most important piece to do next is and just how best to go about it. I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas of what comes next and usually both Alyson and Zena get a vote and I take that very seriously.

While you are working on a large painting that takes months to complete are you simultaneously working on a smaller one?

I’m usually working on a very small piece and some other scale piece. The small piece I don’t work on until I travel so I take it with me on journeys. Yeah, I get out my paints and work on airplanes. I try to keep from spilling anything on people.

Have you had any problems flying with all of your supplies because of increased security since 9/11?

You can’t bring oil paints on board because the paints have solvents and they won’t allow that. So I had an encounter that made me understand I’ll never bring oil paint on board. But acrylic paint it’s all just water soluble. There isn’t a whole lot they can do about that. Usually people are dozing next to me so I try not to disturb them.

How do you have the patience and will power to create art with such epic, complex, painstaking detail?

It’s just what you’ll let yourself get away with. My goal is to make something extraordinary. Not to make something mediocre. You just work as hard as you can and it always falls short of what you want to do. You’re pushing your own limits. You try to push beyond something you have already done and try to be inventive. Sometimes the imagery I’ve seen in my minds eye is extremely detailed so I have to honor that and spend the time it takes to realize that imagery.

In an older interview you criticized heads for not buying art. Do you still feel that way? Or do you think they will begin to buy more art because our generation is now further along in their careers and have the money?

Possibly. This is a troubling economic time and a lot of people are under economic stress. The first thing to go for most people are the superfluous things like art. Now for me art is my lifeblood. But for people who may have never bought art before it can amount to thousands of dollars. As one art dealer said. What is art? It’s like it has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it. You can’t fuck it. The transaction of the sale of an art object is a holy transaction. It is something that is unnecessary and yet it seems to be vital. The economics and art are very bizarrely intertwined. What other kind of object on earth could be as valuable as a two foot square piece of cloth with some colors smeared on it that would go for 50 -80 million dollars? What kind of thing is there? I don’t know if there is any other thing of that size that would be worth that kind of money. But Van Goughs are sold at that kind of value. So there is some value that humans place on art. And sometimes it’s exaggerated and ridiculous but in another way it’s just pointing to the priceless ness by which we value our representations of the sort of sacredness or holiness of life. If an object can directly access that reality then it is priceless. It may be worth millions of dollars because it is one of a kind and a pipeline to god. What’s that worth? It’s priceless.

So, yes, maybe now some people can afford to put money into where their worldview comes from. They can invest in their worldview. You can look at the museums and see a lot of pop art and abstract expressionism and various kinds of art styles that were important to the collectors and then the trustees of the museums. Some of the great collectors from the last decades have been people that run bulk mail or junk mail houses. And advertising industries and things like that. They’ve made millions of dollars and they’re investing their worldview about consumer items and things like that. They invest in pop art and that is the philosophical vantage point that now we have expressed into our museums. So it’s not that that’s bad. They’ve made a cultural contribution that reflects their lifestyle and their mind style.

Whereas many of the folks into the psychedelic and rave scenes and jamband scenes are not thinking to themselves “how can I contribute back to my culture?” Maybe by becoming a trustee at a museum and influencing the visions that people have before them at these major cultural venues. So it is something that maybe some people will be called into doing. Frequently it is individuals who are personally called toward it. I try to make artwork that is available to anyone that can afford $20. They can buy a poster if they like my work. I try to make it available to everybody.
I hope we will find investors for the chapel that will see the values of the sacred realities that we’re trying to portray in a contemporary way and feel in alignment with the message that the chapel brings. So, we’re looking for ’em – angels.

I definitely think the music community can help.

Yes, that’s true because it’s the creative community. It’s the community that’s changing culture. It would be great. I don’t know who would be into my artwork or into helping in trying to help create this chapel. It certainly would be greatly appreciated and I would love to help put together an event like that.

A lot of young people in the trance scene have helped feed this vision already. We’ve raised thousands of dollars through benefit trance parties. Tool has introduced a number of people to the work. I would love to work with any bands that might feel it would be in alignment with their message.

Are you trying to communicate directly with god or a spiritual source or just your viewer? Is your art a pipeline to god?

That’s for the viewer to decide. For me it’s involved in my encounter with divinity. The intention of the work is about that encounter. At times it feels that there is a transcendence of the painter. Basically you’re the meat puppet that is getting sourced. Whatever it is, is playing through you, and you’re trying to be as transparent to that process as you can.

I have seen people walk up to you and tell you they have seen some of the exact same visions you have painted.

There is a collective unconscious that we tap into when we’re tripping. There are certain archetypes that recur in that realm and in those dimensions. They have certain characteristics, there are things that people see repeatedly when they’re tripping. So there are similarities to the kind of terrain that people go into even though they have individually unique experiences. I’m excited about trying to understand what those similar characteristics are and finding ways of evoking them in my artwork. Because these are part of this realm of transpersonal archetypes that the religions have drawn from when they concoct their sacred arts. And if we’re trying to create a contemporary sacred art we need to go back into the ocean of the archetypal unconscious and dig for gold and dive for pearls in that ocean. This is the realm that has been accessed by these various sacred traditions and is available for us today either through tripping or through deep meditation or even dreams. Sometimes people are able to enter into these dimensions of awareness and tap into these archetypes and then make artwork that draws from them.

Do they see that stuff because they’ve seen it in movies, or posters and its already engrained in their imagination?

I don’t think its only because we’ve seen them represented before that we necessarily then project “oh this is what I’m supposed to see therefore I am going to see it.” The idea of the rainbow or spectral color and a very specifically unusual kind of iridescent colors and things like that that we see are unique to these inner world spaces. And you can see it in the artwork of the schizophrenic whose having these intense visionary experiences on the natch but it could be very disturbing for them. You can see it in the psychedelic art of the Native Americans. The WEECHIL Indians. The IOWASKARROWS who are trying to point back to this realm. They invariably use these very vivid and rainbow kind of radiant color effect. It’s a way of seeing the world. It’s one of my goals is to try and model my work so that it will point back to that way of seeing the world.

Your choice of colors is amazing. The shades and bleeding of color put me in a psychedelic state of mind.

They’re vivid. They’re intense. It’s a way to get the minds attention. To say this is not your usual, drab landscape colors. This is something more intense and why our minds play like that I’m not sure. When you look back at the psychedelic posters of the 60s what were some of the most extraordinary things about them? It wasn’t just the fluidity and kind of art nouveaux sinuousness and sensuousness of the lines and flame tracery and things like that. But it was also the vividness of the colors that were making these complementary blue and orange or red and green intense contrasts or rainbow hues coming together. You can look at the Tibetan Tonka painting and see the same kind of thing happening. They frequently use the rainbow around the Buddha. These are how the spiritual essence of the individual becomes this rainbow body. It’s a phenomena in the Buddhist teachings. Because they are working in this visual realm they are using the same sort of terminology that a tripping teenager would use.

How do you manage to stay so positive while there are so many depressing things happening in our world today?

I wish we could see beyond these ridiculous kind of interfamilial differences and recognize our common humanity and oneness with the web of life. That amounts to being a very tall order for people. And yes there are plenty of reasons to be both frightened and cynical about the possibilities of survival for humanity. This great experiment that we are as a species may go down in a ball of flames. And this is a very real possibility.

Do you really think it could happen in our lifetime?

Certainly you know Bush is an idiot. And the oilgarchy that he represents and is a puppet for seems to be hell bent on wrenching the last drop of oil and dominating the world and keeping everybody locked in the ministry of fear in America. I think our political situation is very dark and very ridiculous. So I do find the most positive thing is our personal relationships of love that we have with each other. And finding the god and the inner spirit within that is not swayed by the supposed facts of the world going to hell in a hand basket which you can’t do a thing about anyway. To look for a commonality with the force of creativity that bursts this universe. That’s beyond the regimes of both America and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and all the rest. They’re mere mortals fighting over land and money and the psyches of their populous and trying to keep us cowed into a fear that is really very dispiriting.

What I feel our goal as a species should be is finding a way for us to create a sustainable culture. If that was our vision – to find a way that we could live together peacefully and solve the problems of the poisons that we’ve inflicted already in the web of life then we may have the chance to mature as a species. At this point we’re an addicted adolescence in a speeding car careening towards disaster. And Dick Cheney and his band of thugs are pedal to the metal. And so this is discouraging.

But we have to create a counter insurgency of creative positiveness that is possible within the jamband scene. People go there because this is a creative scene. This represents the creative positive possibilities that human beings have. We can get together. We can enjoy each other’s company. We can create something new. This should feed people with what it is that the universe has to offer. We have this chance of making something beautiful here on earth. And our creativity is the way it is going to be shown. Obviously the politicians are clueless as to vision. It’s in the hands of the artists to show what positive visions we have as a species.

That is why the jamband is a very important part and a very positive part of our historical scene as we have it now. It is based on the creative possibilities of every moment. In every moment a new thing can evolve. Isn’t that a miracle! Isn’t that amazing! You can bring it into being just by being in a collaborative relationship as a band and give birth to something that’s never been before. It’s a beautiful thing. If we could be inspired by that possibility and bring that positive vision into whatever it is we’re doing. What does an artist bring into their world? New creative possibilities. Let’s think creatively and not be cowed by the ministry of fear. What choice do we have?

How are you able to get such a multiethnic, multicultural, multi religious knowledge? Every god and religion is represented in your work.

Well I find them all fascinating you know. Especially the world’s mystical wisdom traditions. There is this basic kind of question or quandary that anyone who has had a mystical experience kind of carries with them. Which is “Am I crazy or Is this really real?” When you study the mystics of all the different world religions then you have verifiyiable truth that this greater, higher deeper mysterious presence that goes by many names and for the Jews is unnamable. Is a greater reality which we’re in. You find this truth mirrored throughout all these different mystics. I’m basically collecting evidence that argues for my sanity. Or at least that here has been a collective imbalance. Some scientists have been shoddy, especially materialist sciences. Farnice Krick was particularly snide in his dismissal of the mystical experience. He has suggested that some sort of what he terms a theotoxin is a kind of a god poisoned in the brains of some mystics that have allowed them to interpret reality in some sort of bizarre way. I don’t buy that shit. I think that basically the mystics have all the different traditions. They have opened into a collective consciousness that some would call super conscious. And that this is the basis for all world religions and all spirituality. And it’s accessible to anyone who seeks it.

I’ve heard you say “the milky way in our DNA” and “we are made of cosmic dust.” Can you explain our role and our relationship with the universe.

People will have to answer that themselves. For myself it has to do with pointing to our potential to realize our interconnectedness with each other and with the great web of life and to realize that we are one with the fabric of universal creativity.

Has the word visionary replaced the word psychedelic? How are they related?

Psychedelic means mind expanding. Psyche – mind and delic – expansion or opening. So visionary I would say one aspect of what the psychedelic experience opens one into. And visionary would refer to the inner worlds of the imagination that one can tap into using the psychedelic drug or in a meditatitive state. Visionary can be used for a lot of other and applied to a lot of other situations other than just taking psychedelics. The current contender for the replacement of the word psychedelic has been entheogen and the entheogen basically points to the god within or spirit within. It’s more or less an orientation of the individual whose taking the drug. They’re looking for spirit. It’s done as a sacrament. Not as a party drug or to get high or merely alter or expand your consciousness. It’s done deliberately as a spiritual practice. I would tend to lump myself in with that kind of crowd more oriented to the entheogenic use of psychedelics.

Most of our readers have never heard the word entheogen.

It was coined by a group of folks including Albert Hoffman and Johnathon Ott and Richard Ruck. Ruck is a classicist in literature, Hoffman of course discovered LSD and Ott is a researcher into psychoactives and an old friend of Hoffman’s. They were looking for something to get out of the 60s rut that psychedelics had seem to become. I think psychedelics still packs some punch as far as a word goes. People know immediately what you are talking about.

I’d like to have it understood within the context of the greater history of the use of psychedelics. And that’s what those men were trying to do. They had a theory about the beginning of western civilization with Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and all those fellows who were the cradle of western civilization. The Greeks had a mystery religion that was the ELUSINIAN Mysteries. And at the height of the mysteries there was an imbibing of a drug called a kykeon and a kykeon was a psychedelic. And this is the basis of western civilization. So the insights that Plato had brought him to understand that there was an order that was behind the material world. And it was an archetypal world of forms that became expressed as this material world and that visionary archetypal world was prior to and superior to the material world. And that was this ideal world or the platonic ideals or ideas that we understand through philosophy 101 in colleges. But they neglect to tell you about the kykeon which was the psychedelic which might have led to the direct perception of this ideal realm.

There are still questions about what it was. It was a very highly secretive mystery religion/mystery school. But you’ll find many references to it. It is similar to the use of soma in the Rig Veda, which is probably the oldest existing written text of humanity. It is a religious text that refers to a psychedelic drug. Soma. Thousands and thousands of years ago in the INDUS Valley the yogis were taking something that was tapping them into this same kind of visionary divine realm. They started a religion and it came out in the Vedas and then the PONNESHODS and these are the basis for the Hindu religion. So now here we have both the eastern and western civilizations that may have been founded on psychedelics. This is not so far fetched any historian can look back and see this is so. But it’s been hidden. It’s been something that’s kind of been washed over. And now at the end of history as our kind of strange times have been sometimes been termed we’re getting a glimpse back at the birth of our civilization. We’re seeing how there was use of these psychoactives to put us in touch with this higher dimension of reality.

And so I think along with the Native American use of peyote and the WEECHILS use of peyote and the African use of ABOGA and many shamanic cultures use of these psychoactives we can see the use of psychedelics in a much broader framework. In a truly spiritual framework that goes beyond our understanding of “turn on, tune in, drop out and tie dye.” That was our time capsule that we’ve stuck our minds into about the 60s. “Well that was really cool when psychedelic happened.” But now we can see psychedelic as the cradle of Eastern and Western Civilization, an integral part of ongoing shamanic culture, and by the way something that happened from the 40s on. ALDOUS Huxley and quite a number of gifted intelligences were able to articulate the importance of these medicines to tap us into a reality of a spiritual dimension that the west in its deal to make everything a consumable item has kind of lost touch with.

In your painting of Adam and Eve, they are holding magic mushrooms. Do you think Adam and Eve ate psychedelic plants?

Here is another original myth: The sin that Adam and Eve committed was that the serpent enticed them to become as gods. Basically you will become as gods if you were to take this substance. This fruit. This fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Whether it was an apple or not doesn’t really make any difference. What kind of fruit is it that would cause the scales to fall from your eyes and for you to see the veils of materiality and understand the cosmos as god understands it? That’s more like a psychedelic. If you look at it, it’s more than eating an apple. But our experience of eating an apple is different from the experience of eating acid. The apple became translated and symbolized as an apple. There is never a description of the fruit as an apple in the bible. They don’t call it an apple. To me what it is is a denial of the goddess oriented psychedelic culture. It’s putting that down. Turn away from that. That is when we all went wrong folks. When we started to take mushrooms and worship the goddess here. So put Eve in her place and see how she is the cause of all our suffering. Blame the goddess for everything bad that ever happened and stop taking the drugs. And get with our Yahweh, who is the terrifying war god, more like a man. The goddess oriented religions didn’t have language. So the man whose now articulating the story and telling his story is going to interpret and recontexturalize things so they are no longer worshiping the goddess. It’s time to worship the man. So the patriarchal religions started up ad nausea all over with this kind of orientation. So it was a patriarchal god, it was a punishing god it was probably turning us against the use of psychedelics.

I know that you have also spoke about how psychedelic plants helped man evolve as a species.

Yes, it’s Terrence McKenna’s stoned monkey theory. Imagine if you were the dawn humans. You were omnivorous basically. As a primate you were coming out of the trees and starting to roam the plains. And you might come across mushrooms growing up in the cow dung or ox dung. So you’ll try anything once so you’ll eat the mushrooms and low and behold something really interestingly weird happens and you kind of sit down. Perhaps you’re more able to tap into the whole fabric of the jungle around you. You become more aware of the tiger or lion or saber tooth tiger or whatever predator you’re looking out for. Maybe your extra sensory perception is keying you into this web of life a little more acutely. So this gives you in fact a leg up on the others around you that may not be as sensitive to their environment. You may be more sensitive and therefore more fit for survival. And so this is McKenna’s stoned monkey theory. Those who were the tripping monkeys were perhaps not only more metaphysically oriented but they were probably more engaged in the whole web of life and perhaps had sharper perception about what they needed to hunt and what they needed to watch out for. Maybe they became more articulate spokes monkeys.