The Dawning Aeon – Gregory Pettit

Apr 1, 2010 Daniel Mirante in Interviews 2 Comments Tags: Gregory Pettit

Gregory Pettit is a visionary painter and psychonaut who uses paint to trap 2D images of the perpetually evolving robo-ghosts and other assorted extra-dimensional entities which are often streaming across the window of his mind’s eye. He holds a BFA in studio art from the University of Texas and currently lives and works in Austin,TX.

Sing me to Sleep by Gregory Pettit

How did you discover your path into painting?

You know I never really had a strong interest in making art until I was 20. At the time I was enduring very terrifying recurring episodes of sleep paralysis in which I was certain that I was being attacked at a psychic level by malevolent forces that were either demonic or human in origin. I would awaken every night to find that a dark shadowy figure was standing at the edge of my bed or sitting on my chest attempting to suffocate me. The whole situation was truly maddening, but it was my first initiation into learning how to defend myself against the negative energies which are always attempting to influence us through the backdoor of the subconscious. Somehow I figured out that exteriorizing my anxieties and fears through drawing gave me power over these forces. I eventually challenged the entity by creating an image of it and invoking it in a lucid dream. By facing it head on I was able to dismantle its hold on me. My dream life began to change for the better after this period and making art became an all important bridge between my waking life and the interior archetypal realm that I would experience in sleep and pre-sleep visions. I’ve been making art for about 9 years, but as far as painting goes, I feel like I’m really just getting started. I took my first painting lessons in 2006 and didn’t really dig into it until 2007, though it has quickly become my method of choice.

When did you begin to discover these glowing alien realms?

I’ve always had a window into the hypnagogic. I remember when I was a child I used to stare at the ceiling until I would see my dream images forming out of the glowing miasma that would appear within my field of vision. As a teenager I took great interest in the fact that I could reproduce LSD and psilocybin like hallucinations by merely concentrating on an object. My eye for that in-between state has been greatly enhanced over the last few years by the twin practices of painting and guided visualization. My dreams often have a true beginning and end, where I can see the rudimentary phosphorescent geometries of the alpha wave state begin to crystallize into landscapes and personalities and then dissipate again into nothing as the dream dissolves. And of course I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to psychedelics in enhancing my experience of seeing the astral side of things. Though I don’t really have much interest in drugs at this point in my life, they’ve played a valuable role in my life in the past as a potent tool for exploring these same levels of consciousness .I’m content now to induce visions that are more controllable and of shorter duration. 12 hour LSD trips are a little more than I care to commit to nowadays.

What are your own feelings toward these images?

It took me a couple years to get to the point where I could comfortably talk about why I make the kind of art that I make. A lot of people just don’t get it because they don’t share the experiences or the ideas that fuel it. By now so many people have contacted me out of nowhere with positive accolades that I’m a little more comfortable in my own skin now as an artist, and I see my work evolving pretty quickly from year to year, which really pushes me to work harder. Because painting is such an intense creative act that generally involves creating something out of nothing, it really has served as one of the best methods I have for studying the phenomenon of appearance; how a single rudimentary energy can diversify into all these specifics of form and yet still be homogenous underneath.

The dawning Aeon by Gregory Pettit

I can look at my paintings from just a couple years ago and feel that they are vibrating much more rapidly now, pulling me forward towards some realization that I can’t yet fathom. I’m climbing into higher and more abstract realms of the visionary experience and I feel that if I abandoned it at this point my mind would have no suitable outlet to organize all the subtle influences that come rushing through. Painting is how I keep an open conversation with the hidden side of my mind and equilibriate the imbalances within myself.