On Visionary Art

Mar 9, 2012 Rob Percival in Articles, Interviews 5 Comments Tags: Ernst Fuchs, fantastic realism, HR Giger, laurence caruana, lineage, prime of styles, Wolfgang Grasse

Visionary art is not easily defined. As a recognised genre it is recent, a half-century old at most – its first generation masters are still practicing, its horizons are still expanding. Visionary art is contemporary. To search for a defining boundary therefore is fruitless; definitions, being restrictive, are more readily established in retrospect. But if we cannot define, then we can unearth. For there exists in any art genre a lineage, a bloodline, and in Visionary art we find a genealogy that can be traced through the Surrealist and Fantastic Realist movements of last century, past the Renaissance, across continents and centuries, back to the first dawn.

Solstitial Bridge by Breck Outland

The position of drawing as a specialised discipline within this genealogy is an even more subtle ancestry to unthread. In Visionary art we find a bewildering breadth of subject matter; we find particular attention given to dreams, to death and memory, unexplored terrains of the psyche, madness, mythic creatures, gods and demons, the organic and mechanical, anatomy, animal consciousness and organic emergence, geometry and mandalas, and the symbolism of alchemy, astrology and assorted wisdom traditions. Yet none of this is essential, none of this in itself is sufficient to make a piece of art ‘Visionary’, for the genre rests upon a unified and identifiable foundation of technique, a technical style and temperament that those artists specialising in ink and pencil share with their painter siblings.

Ernst Fuchs has named this “ein verschollener Stil”- a “hidden prime of styles.” [i] This unity of style is the genetic code writ through the Visionary artist’s bloodline; it is the grammar upon which their language is constructed.

Visionary art rests upon a unified and identifiable foundation of technique, a technical style and temperament that those artists specialising in ink and pencil share with their painter siblings – a “hidden prime of styles.” This unity of style is the genetic code writ through the Visionary artist’s bloodline; it is the grammar upon which their language is constructed.

To begin at the beginning.

The underground caverns of Lascaux in Dordogne, the guide switches off his flashlight. “The senses suddenly are wiped out,” one visitor recounts, “the millennia drop away… you were never in deeper darkness in your life. It was – I don’t know, just a complete knock out. You don’t know whether you are looking north, south, east, or west. All orientation is gone, and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun.” [ii]

This primordial darkness is a space of pre-conceptual potential. This is a creative space.

The guide switches his torch back on and turns it to the roof and walls. Emerging from the depths of the rock are painted animals, images of bizarre creatures, half-human and half-animal hybrids. “A strange beast with a gravid belly and long pointed horns walks behind a line of wild cattle, horses, deer and bulls that seem simultaneously in motion and at rest.” [iii]

What motivates this art?

Ernst Fuchs is the recognised Grandfather of the contemporary visionary art movement.

It must be something of deep significance. The upkeep of these sacred sites was hugely unpragmatic. It was dangerous, exhausting, uneconomical and time-consuming. Visitors to these ancient caves were required to climb for some eighty feet down a sloping tunnel, sixty-five feet beneath the earth; some caves were so deep it took an hour to descend into them. Yet these sacred sites endured for 20,000 years.

This is not art born of idle fancy. It is not art which serves simply to satisfy the individual creative will, nor is it concerned with interpreting and analysing social context. This is art born out of a direct confrontation with certain inescapable fundamentals – death, physicality, conscious awareness, and the relation of humans to the organic and animal world.

These caves reveal that our ancient ancestors felt profound anxiety over the slaughtering of beasts in the hunt that were their friends and patrons. Anthropologists tell us that to assuage this anxiety they surrounded the hunt with taboos and prohibitions. They believed that the Animal Master had sent his flocks to the lower world, and that the performance of certain rites returned the slaughtered animals to posthumous life in world of the spirit. Hunters therefore hunted in a state of ritual purity, abstaining from sex before an expedition. They felt a deep empathy with their prey. Bushmen on the Kalahari planes reconstructed their kill by laying out its skeleton and pelt; others buried the non-edible remains. Hunters lay beside the dying animals and wept with them, imitating their movements and participating in their passing. [iv] In their sacred caves, they smeared the walls with the blood, excrement, and fat of the kill to restore it, symbolically, to the earth. Animal blood and fat were ingredients of Palaeolithic paints. The act of painting was an act of restoration.

These ancient cave paintings were the attempt to construct a visual language, a language in which the profound and disturbing mysteries of existence could be given voice: the incomprehensible translated into an aesthetic form, rendering it sacred, thus illuminating an essential value in the otherwise fragile and bewildering course of a life.

The Czarna Madonna. Ancient religious art is full of traces of mystical experience, indicated by their aesthetic sensibilities.

Visionary art is characterised by the attempt of each artist to develop this shared visual language, a language of illumination initiated by our primordial hunter forbearers. Each artist contributes to this universal narrative in their own distinctive accent, spoken through their chosen discipline – be it oil paint, airbrush, digital art, or drawing.

In sharing the commitment to developing this universal language, the Visionary artist distinguishes herself from gallery politics and financial speculations that unfortunately surround much modernist and post-modern art. Academicism and elitism are dismissed. Cynicism and cold irony give way to quiet contemplation. In Visionary art is the sincere attempt to transcend shock-tactics and cliché in order to revive something eternal within the contemporary experience.

French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau laments, “If only the great myths of antiquity were continually translated, not by historians, but by eternal poets. We must escape that puerile chronology which forces artists to translate their own times, in all its finitude, rather than the eternal… To give to myths their full intensity, we mustn’t lock them away in their own epoch – they need release from the moulds and styles of their time.” [v]

The Visionary artist is the eternal poet – ‘ein verschollener Stil’ is the grammar through which they speak.

The lineage from these founding fathers is subtle but true. From the shaman’s etchings, this artistic spirit continues into the carvings of the ancients. It is in the Egyptian pantheon and the Mesopotamian cuneiform. It finds expression in the art of the ancient Cycladic and the Minoans; and from these, ancient Greek mythology is born. In Middle America, it arose among the Aztecs, Mayans and Toltecs, and endures today amongst the last surviving indigenous tribes of the Amazon basin. In each of these cultures, common motifs are expressed. We find depictions of the creation and the cosmos, of form rising from the void, of Gods and the sacred hero, and of the endless cycle of death and rebirth. This is not Visionary art, but it is ancestral. [vi]

In the European dark ages the bloodline is more difficult to discern. We find traces in Nordic woodwork, and in the remnants of Celtic carvings – in their animal heraldry and horned gods. It is in the serpentine motifs that scatter the globe at this time, a spiralling symbol of transformative potential. In North America, it finds expression in the Indian peoples’ complex animal mythologies, through totems, weavings and carvings, through masks and dance.

The Visionary lineage predates religion, and has informed sacred art across the millennia. Within ancient Christianity we find Bible covers encrusted with precious gemstones, their contents illumined with arabesques and bestiaries. It is in the mysterious thangka of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. In the geometric mandalas of Persian Sufism. We find the language spoken in the stone and stained-glass facades of Gothic cathedrals and the egg-tempera icons of the Byzantines. It endures into the frescos of the Italians, into the oil and resin altarpieces of the Netherlandish painters.

Ohlhaeuser, a master painter in the mische technique.

In each of these, the subtle thread endures.

The great achievements of European art for the last thousand years have predominantly been in its depiction of the sensory world. It was five hundred years ago that the rules of perspective became widely known and began to be harnessed by artists, these painters embodying the discoveries and new understandings of actual geometry. This resulted in art that was realistic and empirical, and primarily concerned with nature. Even religious iconography from this period was concerned first and foremost with literal depictions of the virgin birth and crucifixion.

The onset of modern art was essentially a movement away from the sensible world to depictions that mapped the terrain of the mind. This was born out in symbolic, abstract, conceptual, and phenomenological art. In this it was not nature that was being depicted, but the psyche. Not realistic but abstract. Not Euclidean but Surreal. Beginning with Paul Cezanne, who Matisse called “the master of us all” [vii], the fixed perspectives of the material world were broken down and superseded by emotional and psychological participation. Vassily Kandinsky championed this new approach, stating, “It must be possible to hear the whole world as it is, without representational interpretation” [viii], prefiguring a vision drawn exclusively of the mind. Jean Delville and Pavel Tchelitchew were amongst those who pushed this trend over the threshold and into a temperament that may rightly be named Visionary.

Visionary art then is entwined with and born of this modernist thrust, but a number of notable Visionary artists preceded it and we may trace their bloodline.

Twelfth century mystic, polymath, and painter, Hildegard of Bingen, stands removed within the early period of Western art as a herald, her transparency of style and depth of vision being antecedent to later Visionary masters. She also pioneered the fusion of disciplines that has come to characterise modern Visionary art. She set her art in the context of poetry, theatre, and music, just as the modern practitioners of Visionary art are bridging disciplines by working with musicians, film-makers, and architects.

But probably the first true Visionary painter was Hieronymus Bosch. His work, rich in fantastic imagery, presents a door to occluded domains of hell and to a lost paradise. We speak particularly of the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych and the Temptation of St. Anthony. His distinguishing style, influenced by but significantly distinct from the contemporary Flemish practice of applying multiple glosses, bridged the disciplines of drawing and painting as he evolved his technique to ‘draw with his paintbrush’. His idiosyncratic vision and the Flemish style he diverged from each became foundational in the emergence of Visionary art mid-way through the twentieth century.

The earliest Visionaries that followed Bosch worked to elude the currents and fashions of painting in their own times, thus seeking to rise above what Moreau called the “puerile chronology”. Included in these are Goya – with his adumbral murals, and portrayals of Darker Realms in Black Paintings and The Disasters; Henry Fuseli; the engravings of Gustave Doré; and – perhaps most significantly – William Blake with his watercolours and etchings of the Ancient of Days, the Book of Job, the Last Judgement – all accomplished with little or no recognition.

Blake is seminal. In a widely celebrated passage he writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, then every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”[ix]

Gustave Moreau, an artist who transcends the definitions of symbolism, essentially a visionary.

In this is the founding dictum of Visionary art.

Following the Renaissance, the spirit of Bosch and Blake continued under the broader heading of Mannerist art in Bartholomäus Spranger and Wendel Dieterlin. In the last two hundred years there emerged the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, and the Symbolist and Decadent Movements of France and Belgium. These were followed by the later Symbolists, including Odilon Redon, Alfred Kubin, and Max Klinger. These were followed close behind by the Secessionist Visionaries – Gustav Klimt, Viteslaw Masek, and Jan Toorop. Singular amongst all of these was the masterful Gustave Moreau. [x] Each of these artists illuminated the ancient language; each broadening its vocabulary and honing its grammar.

From here, a more recent lineage can be traced with greater precision.

Surrealism must undoubtedly be identified as a direct influence upon Visionary art, but two strains within this movement must be separated and identified. The one, Automatist Surrealism, tended more toward form and abstraction, with Joan Miró heading this group. This movement inspired Abstract Expressionism and Action painting in America. Of these, Visionary art has less in common. The other, Figurative Surrealism, tended more toward the accurate, plastic representation of dreams and their imagery in paint. Here, Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Delvaux, and particularly Dali must be recognized as the modern forefathers of contemporary Visionary art. From these we arrive at the source.

In the aftermath of Second World War, the misinterpretation of Surrealism led a group of academy painters in Vienna to eventually create the movement now recognized as Fantastic Realism. Hausner and Hutter, Lehmden and Brauer, and particularly Ernst Fuchs, sought to revive old master’s techniques of painting, combine it with Impressionist colour theories, and dedicate this new finesse and precision to fantastic subjects. In this elite group was contemporary Visionary art given birth.

As many of these painters are still alive today, they have become recognized as first generation Visionaries. Included among this generation of painters, but working more independently, are also Ernst Steiner, Peter Proksch, and Wolfgang Grasse.

Of his art Fuchs states, “I have always been drawn towards things which man cannot see from the exterior. And I have always practiced a kind of art which depicts things that, otherwise, man only sees in his dreams or hallucinations. For me, the threshold has to be crossed from inner images to their expression in wakeful being – the transformation of dreams and fantasy into the world of reality and its plane of visual imagery.” [xi]

Of Surrealism and Fantastic Realism, two things must be noted. Firstly, that the Surrealists primary concern was with the dream-state. ‘Surrealism’ is the umbrella term under which Visionary art is often conflated, but the latter does not give the same predominance exclusively to dreams as does the former. Secondly, that where the Surrealists were primarily inspired by Freud’s writings on dreams, the Fantastic Realists, from which Visionary art is born, were more influenced by Jung, particularly his work concerning the Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. And so, while the early dream-works of Dali manifest much of the repressed sexual imagery uncovered by Freud, the fantastic works of the early Fuchs, by contrast, revealed the sacred images of alchemy which Jung taught in his dream studies.

Under the expert guidance of Fuchs, a second generation emerged in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, practising (what Max Doerner called) the Mischtechnik, as taught to them by Fuchs. A direct link is traced from here through Fuchs to Mati Klarwein, De Es Schwertberger, and Robert Venosa. During this period other students of Fuchs organized movements and became teachers of the technique: Brigid Marlin (member of Inscape and founder of The Society of Art of the Imagination), Philip Rubinov-Jacobson (member of the New York Visionaries and organizer of the Old Masters/New Visions seminars), as well as Fuchs’ own son, Michael Fuchs. [xii]

Augustin Lesage, outsider artist

Of the same generation, but working more independently: Alex Grey constructed his series of Sacred Mirrors – anatomical paintings infused with subtle energies, informed by transpersonal philosophy and by many years of psychedelic exploration in the city morgue. In Switzerland, H. R. Giger harnessed the techniques of airbrushing to his aphotic visions of aliens, bio-mechaniod symbiosis, and the occult. Also exploring the shadow side of Visionary art at this time, in Norway and Poland, were Odd Nedrum and Zdzislaw Beksiński, whose individual yet resonant visions of archetypal beings inhabiting desolate and apocalyptic vistas continue to inspire contemporary masters, most notably in the work of Chet Zar and Jeremy Caniglia. Many of the Visionaries working in Europe during this period – Fuchs, Hausner, Giger, De Es, Venosa – crossed the Atlantic and were introduced to a broader American audience by the magazine Omni.

Contemporary with this was the rediscovery of l’Art Brut, Outsider art – untrained artists whose psychomimetic style was expressed in imagery strikingly similar to the more calculated works of Visionary artists. These include the water-colours of Heinrich Nüssbaum, the apocalyptic landscapes of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and the work of Augustin Lesage, whose detailed patterns set within a surrounding ‘negative space’ have resonated strongly into Visionary art. Many of these works have been documented through Raw Vision magazine. The parallel emergence of Juxtapoz magazine in California, championed by Robert Williams, and later of Hi Fructose, has widened the context in which Visionary art proper may be understood.

Through a synthesis with other media and disciplines, Visionary art has expanded beyond the art world to give birth to an international Visionary culture. Grass-roots groups including Pod Collective, Elfintome, and UK based Lila, have been instrumental in this, establishing Visionary galleries at music festivals and cultural events worldwide.

“Through a synthesis with other media and disciplines, Visionary art has expanded beyond the art world to give birth to an international Visionary culture. Grass-roots groups including Pod Collective, Elfintome, and UK based Lila, have been instrumental in this, establishing Visionary galleries at music festivals and cultural events worldwide.”

Included in these is the Entheon Village at Burning Man in Nevada, spearheaded by Alex Grey and US organisation MAPS [xiii]; and the Visionary art gallery in the Liminal Village at Boom festival. In Boom is the leading synthesis achieved, with Visionary art forming the backdrop and context for ground-breaking electronic music and mixed-media disciplines, all underpinned by a sustainability ethos based on the pioneering theories of permaculture.

Alex Grey has opened his art up further into the music world with his collaborations with rock band Tool; and his collaboration with transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber has led to a fusion with modern academia and a thriving multi-disciplinary lecture circuit where Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffman are to be found speaking alongside leading psychologists, writers and scientists, including Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner and (in years gone) Robert Anton Wilson. Alex Grey is also an ambassador for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Mars 1, a contemporary painter straddling visionary and pop surrealism.

Visionary art has organised itself into a flourishing and integrated global community. Those at the forefront of the contemporary scene include – but are certainly not exhausted by – Oleg Korolev in Russia, Maura Holden in the USA, Peter Gric in Austria, Satoshi Sakamoto in Japan, Kuba Fiedorowicz in Australia, and Laurence Caruana in France. Jon Beinart’s Surreal Art Collective at beinart.com has provided international artists with a central hub through which to promote and share their work, and has been instrumental in a number of collaborative international exhibitions. UK-based Daniel Mirante’s www.lila.info has charted and explored the movement and associated artists since 2000ad. Canadian Delvin Solkinson has been instrumental in organising and presenting visionary art to an international audience through publications and the Galactic Trading Card oracle complex.

In America the Visionary art scene remains rooted predominantly in California, with Robert Venosa basing himself between Colorado and his spiritual home in Cadaquez, Spain, where he studied under Dali; and Alex Grey working independently to build the Temple of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York. The Cannibal Flower exhibitions, hosted by various galleries across Los Angeles, have given the opportunity for upcoming artists to exhibit alongside more established names, and the ‘Temple of Visions’ gallery, a huge space on downtown Gallery Row, opened opposite Hive in spring 2010, proudly “bridging International Visionary Culture and the Los Angeles Art World”[ [xiv] Large collective Visionary art exhibitions have been held recently in Germany, Spain and Amsterdam; France hosts the Chimera Visionary art festival. The UK is notable for lagging so far behind this international movement.

For 20,000 years our ancient ancestors committed themselves to the development of a visual language through which to express the bewildering and the incomprehensible.

Speaking of his role as an artist, Robert Venosa states, “I believe I’ve figured out that my true purpose in the scheme of things is to act as a translator – in the language of form and color… allowing the artist, and the viewer, access to the infinite iconography.” [xv]

In Visionary art this ancient spirit endures.

The mainstream art establishment, however, has been reluctant to acknowledge Visionary art. Nowhere is this truer than in London, where an aloof hyper-modernism has rendered the Visionary artist stranded. Certainly this is in part due to widespread ignorance of the Visionary artists’ ancestry and pedigree that grant her a rightful place on the contemporary scene. Probably it is also because the establishment is yet to fully grasp the extent to which Visionary art is a coherent and flourishing international movement. But most likely it is due to incorrect and uninformed assumptions over what classifies a work of art as ‘Visionary’ – the misconception centring on the notion that the term refers predominantly to subject matter. This leads to cynical and misinformed associations between Visionary art and New Age-tinted depictions of fairies, dolphin consciousness, alien abduction and crystal healing. These do not make an artwork Visionary. It is not what is portrayed that matters, it is how.

The hidden prime.

Fuchs speaks elusively of “a secret art whose traces I have discovered with almost all people and cultures, but also in nature itself, there where the primeval world appears.” [xvi] The nucleus of this secret art is a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, which both distinguishes the Visionary artist from her contemporaries and betrays her ancestry. This secret grammar is the unifying factor that underpins the bewildering diversity of the genre.

Fuchs speaks elusively of “a secret art whose traces I have discovered with almost all people and cultures, but also in nature itself, there where the primeval world appears.” The nucleus of this secret art is a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, which both distinguishes the Visionary artist from her contemporaries and betrays her ancestry. This secret grammar is the unifying factor that underpins the bewildering diversity of the genre.

From a technical point of view, Visionary artists are unified in their tastes, temperament and preference. Though their methods differ – Venosa and Fuchs preferring classical techniques of oil and varnish, Giger the airbrush, Lipton and McFadden ink and pencil, and others including Luke Brown the graphic potentialities of computers – all demonstrate a commitment to an exactingly precise rendering of their vision. Fine lines, gradual transitions, infinite subtlety, mystifying detail – these are the hallmarks of the Visionary artist.
Why such intricate detail? Why such precision?

Speaking for the Fantastic Realists, Fuchs relates that “From the beginning we wanted to re-animate the craftsmanship of the Old Masters. But, more than that, we wanted to depict the fantastic image in such a way as if it were painted, not by hand, but by the dream itself, leaving no trace of the craftsmanship behind.” [xvii]

De Es expands on this idea: “In these early works, I avoided anything which could look like a brushstroke. The onlookers always wondered how it was done. They were really quite mystified. That sort of response made me feel very good about my work, because that is how I perceived existence. There are no brushstrokes in life, and only the creator knows how it is done. I am left mystified.” [xviii]

In Visionary art we find a dedication to seamless detail and precision of form, a subtlety of technique that renders the medium as translucent as possible, so that the image is presented immediately to the viewer. There is a self-emptying that is reminiscent of the Zen painters of the Orient. Just as the Zen painter sits quietly before nature, perhaps before a bird or flower, and allows the spirit of the object to flow through him onto the paper, so too the Visionary artist makes themselves transparent to their vision, so that it may flow unchanged through them and onto the paper – only unlike the Zen painters, they express the vision through an exacting technique of exquisite detail and precision that is rooted in a thousand years of Western tradition. In so doing, the Visionary artist permits the artwork autonomy, leaving behind little trace of her role as its author.

Nowhere is this commitment more recognisable than in those artists choosing drawing as their preferred medium within the genre. Of these we name the light-infused etchings of Gustave Doré and William Blake, of Ernst and Michael Fuchs, early Kris Kuksi, the deeply representational drawings of Laurie Lipton (which place her on the very fringe but certainly within the Visionary tradition), and the art of Breck Outland, Daniel Freedman, Bethan McFadden, Dariusz Zawadzki, and Michel de Saint Ouen, amongst many others.

Gustave Doré completed illustrations in Visionary style to The Divine Comedy (particularly The Inferno), Don Quixote; and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. In these he developed an accented expression based upon light and form. His technical style, in which a unified work emerges from countless tiny marks, finds expression in the contemporary scene in Laurie Lipton.

Laurie Lipton

“My imagery is savage but my technique is extremely controlled,” Lipton recounts, before lamenting, “It’s so much harder to sell a drawing, when I started out all the galleries said, ‘Do colour or we won’t show you and you won’t be able to make a living.’” [xix]

If the mainstream art world is slow to recognise Visionary art, then to draw within the genre presents the artist with a double challenge.

Yet in choosing a medium where colour is absent, the artist is free to explore their subject in depth through Doré’s lens of light and form. Of her work, Lipton states, “It’s like a Diane Arbus photograph: monochrome makes it stark, it feels frozen in time. There’s an atmosphere to black and white which I like: it’s the colour of ghosts, of memories and ancient photographs… And it’s also much harder to do.” [xx]

The distinction between black and white can serve to draw apart other polarities, while paradoxically unveiling their underlying interrelation. In a pencil drawing, light and shadow are interdependent – only through shades of darkness can light be understood; without light there is no boundary to shadow. These two, light and shadow, give birth to form. Light and shadow anticipate and precede form. In this sense, drawing is the most immediate of all the visual arts – drawing is an exploration of the foundation upon which all visual art is based.

The interdependence of light and shadow form the context in which other polarities may be explored – those of life and death, animal and human, physical and spiritual, organic and mechanical, heaven and hell.

HR Giger

H.R. Giger, maestro of a ‘symphony of blacks’, exploited this to explore the polarities of organic and mechanical. Giger shows us female human figures in fearful symbiosis with cold mechanical beings; the organic arising amidst an industrial underworld, never able to escape it. Giger states that he “established certain connections in the architecture of the human body on the one hand and in the technological world on the other.” [xxi] The absence of colour acts to highlight the stark distance between these polarities, while the inherent interdependence of light and shadow unveil a hidden ambiguity and underlying unity.

Jerwood Drawing Prize judge Paul Thomas states this as the key criteria in assessing any artwork – “Is the language appropriate for the subject?” [xxii]

The Visionary artist speaks a grammar of exacting detail and subtlety. Whether the subject is the emergence of consciousness from the seamless unity of the organic world, or the liquid landscape of dreams, memories, and archetypes, the vision is expressed in a language that allows all authority and primacy to remain with the artwork. This lucidity is an artistic temperament that reaches back to Hildegard of Bingen, is given genius in Hieronymus Bosch, honed and mastered in William Blake and Gustave Moreau, and finds full expression in the modern masters of the art.

The challenge of an art establishment preoccupied with the deconstruction of modern trends is to demonstrate the validity and authenticity of such a temperament. To penetrate the aloofness of such an establishment requires a deep-rooting in ancestry that allows the Visionary artist both to anchor themselves in history and to justify their position on the contemporary scene.

To penetrate the aloofness of the modern art establishment requires a deep-rooting in ancestry that allows the Visionary artist both to anchor themselves in history and to justify their position on the contemporary scene.

Even the masters found this a challenge. Ernst Fuchs speaks of the difficulty he had at the beginning of his career in rooting his art in an authentic context. It was only later, when he began to master his craft, that he discovered his true ancestry, “scattered through many countries, they were members, as I understood it, of a secret lodge: the Masonic Order of Visionaries.” [xxiii]

This ‘invisible tribe’ is the same that has been working for centuries, often in isolation and ignorance of one another, to elucidate and expand the visual language that was initiated by our primordial ancestors. They have done so through a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, which underpins and justifies their vision.

De Es summarises the Visionary project: “Reading the story of the universe backwards is our method of reaching the beginning. We encounter all the images which form and direct our wants, needs, and urges imprinted on the core of our mind. We discover pictures there, as if carved from stone, prevailing through time and revealing what powers are holding the world together. If we could read these pictures, our vision would grow clear. We would find ourselves at the bottom of everything – holding it all together.” [xxiv]

In Visionary art, the artist has come full circle to apply a contemporary technique, honed and mastered over a long Western tradition, to illuminate a visual language rooted in our ancient prehistory. This is Ur-Sprache, the primal language, a language born in the caverns of pre-conceptual darkness. This is a language that precedes speech, a language given form tens of thousands of years before the word. The word may fail – may strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, and decay with imprecision – yet, where the word fails, Visionary art presents us with a language in which the image endures.

Rob Percival 2010
http://tetrahension.com

Bibliography

[1] Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis, 1966
[2] Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 2009
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Pierre-Louis Mathieu (ed.) Un Ouvrier Assembleur de Reves, Gustave,1991
[6] This ancestry is not without its own bloodline, being descendent of L. Caruna’s Visionary Manifesto, 2001, which should be recognised as the patriarch of writings on Visionary art.
[7] See Richard Lacayo The Master of Us All: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1881981,00.html
[8] Quoted in Alex Grey – Sacred Mirrors, Introduction by Ken Wilber, 1990
[9] Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. See: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html
[10] This Visionary nexus is further indebted to Caruana
[11] Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, (L. Caruna translation)
[12] See: Caruana, http://visionaryrevue.com/webtext/longman1.html
[13] See: MAPS, http://maps.org/ For further psychonaughtical exploration, see: Erowid, http://www.erowid.org/
[14] See: Temple of Visions, http://templeofvisions.com/
[15] See: Reality Sandwich, http://www.realitysandwich.com/slideshow/robert_venosa
[16] Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis,1966
[17] Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, (L. Caruna translation)
[18] De Es, Heavy Light, Morpheus International, 1993
[19] Interview with Tony Thorne, The Extraordinary Drawings of Laurie Lipton, 2009
[20] Ibid.
[21] H.R. Giger, Necronomicon, 1978
[22] See: http://www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/uploads/documents/Who%20would%20be%20a%20selector.pdf
[23] Ernst Fuchs, Fuchs de Draeger, Draeger Editeur, 1977
[24] De Es, Heavy Light, Morpheus International, 1993