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Rick Griffin/ 2012 - Satoshi Kinoshita
RICK GRIFFIN/ 2012  
( Satoshi Kinoshita )

Series: Prints on paper: Portraits 3
Medium: Giclée on Japanese matte paper
Size (inches): 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size)
Size (mm): 420 x 297 (paper size)
Edition size: 25
Catalog #: PP_0258
Description: From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.



"Having transcended the seven evolutionary superuniverses of time and space which circle the never-beginning, never-ending creation of divine perfection, Murphy arrives at the heart of the eternal and central universe of universes on the stationary isle of paradise, the geographic center of infinity and the dwelling place of the eternal living God!!! It is here that our story opens..."

- Murphy, Surfer Magazine, May 1969



Rick Griffin -

Richard Alden Griffin (June 18, 1944 - August 18, 1991) was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best known posters and record jackets. His work within the surfing subculture included both film posters and his comic strip, Murphy.[1]

Reference:

1. ^ a b c d Stephenson, Tim (2007-04-10). "Biography". Myraltis. Retrieved 2007-09-20.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Griffin



Psychedelic art -

Psychedelic art is any kind of visual artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences induced by drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist Humphry Osmond) "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic". In common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above all to the art movement of the 1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.

Origins:

Psychedelic Art is informed by the notion that altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are a source of artistic inspiration. The psychedelic art movement is similar to the surrealist movement in that it prescribes a mechanism for obtaining inspiration. Whereas the mechanism for surrealism is the observance of dreams, a psychedelic artist turns to drug induced hallucinations. Both movements have strong ties to important developments in science. Whereas the surrealist was fascinated by Freud's theory of the unconscious, the psychedelic artist has been literally "turned on" by Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.

The early examples of "Psychedelic Art" are literary rather than visual, although there are some examples in the Surrealist art movement, such as Remedios Varo and André Masson. It should also be noted that these came from writers involved in the Surrealist movement. Antonin Artaud writes of his Peyote experience in "Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara" (1937). Henri Michaux wrote "Miserable Miracle" (1956), to describe his experiments with Mescaline and also hashish.

Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (1954), and "Heaven and Hell" (1956), remain definitive statements on the psychedelic experience.

Albert Hofmann and his colleagues at Sandoz Laboratories were convinced immediately after its discovery in 1943 of the power and promise of LSD. For two decades following its discovery LSD was marketed by Sandoz as an important drug for psychological and neurological research. Hofmann saw the drug's potential for poets and artists as well, and took great interest in the German poet, Ernst Junger's psychedelic experiments.

Early artistic experimentation with LSD was conducted in a clinical context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Janiger asked a group of 50 different artists to each do a painting from life of a subject of the artist's choosing. They were subsequently asked to do the same painting while under the influence of LSD. The two paintings were compared by Janiger and also the artist. The artists almost unanimously reported LSD to be an enhancement to their creativity.

Ultimately it seems that psychedelics would be most warmly embraced by the American counterculture. Beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs became fascinated by psychedelic drugs as early as the 1950s as evidenced by The Yage Letters (1963). The Beatniks recognized the role of psychedelics as sacred inebriants in Native American religious ritual, and also had an understanding of the philosophy of the surrealist and symbolist poets who called for a "complete disorientation of the senses" (to paraphrase Arthur Rimbaud). They knew that altered states of consciousness played a role in Eastern Mysticism. They were hip to psychedelics as psychiatric medicine. LSD was the perfect catalyst to electrify the eclectic mix of ideas assembled by the Beats into a cathartic, mass-distributed panacea for the soul of the succeeding generation.

In 1960s counterculture:

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

Although San Francisco remained the hub of psychedelic art into the early 1970s, the style also developed internationally: British artist Bridget Riley became famous for her op-art paintings of psychedlic patterns creating optical illusions. Mati Klarwein created psychedelic masterpieces for Miles Davis' Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for Carlos Santana Latin Rock. Pink Floyd worked extensively with London based designers, Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums. Los Angeles area artists such as John Van Hamersveld, Warren Dayton and Art Bevacqua and New York artists Peter Max and Milton Glaser all produced posters for concerts or social commentary (such as the anti-war movement) that were highly collected during this time. Life Magazine's cover and lead article for the September 1, 1967 issue at the height of the Summer of Love focused on the explosion of psychedelic art on posters and the artists as leaders in the hippie counterculture community.

Psychedelic light-shows were a new art-form developed for rock concerts. Using oil and dye in an emulsion that was set between large convex lenses upon overhead projectors the lightshow artists created bubbling liquid visuals that pulsed in rhythm to the music. This was mixed with slideshows and film loops to create an improvisational motion picture art form to give visual representation to the improvisational jams of the rock bands and create a completely "trippy" atmosphere for the audience. The Brotherhood of Light were responsible for many of the light-shows in San Francisco psychedelic rock concerts.

Out of the psychedelic counterculture also arose a new genre of comic books: underground comix. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground comics, and featured the work of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Robert Williams among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Gilbert Shelton created perhaps the most enduring of underground cartoon characters, "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers", whose drugged out exploits held a hilarious mirror up to the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s.

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

In corporate advertising:

By the late 1960s, the commercial potential of psychedelic art had become hard to ignore. General Electric, for instance, promoted clocks with designs by New York artist Peter Max. A caption explains that each of Max's clocks "transposes time into multi-fantasy colors."[1] In this and many other corporate advertisements of the late 1960s featuring psychedelic themes, the psychedelic product was often kept at arm's length from the corporate image: while advertisements may have reflected the swirls and colors of an LSD trip, the black-and-white company logo maintained a healthy visual distance. Several companies, however, more explicitly associated themselves with psychedelica: CBS, Neiman Marcus, and NBC all featured thoroughly psychedelic advertisements between 1968 and 1969.[2] In 1968, Campbell's soup ran a poster promotion that promised to "Turn your wall souper-delic!"[3]

The early years of the 1970s saw advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful acts of pseudo-rebellion.[4] The Chelsea National Bank commissioned a psychedelic landscape by Peter Max, and neon green, pink, and blue monkeys inhabited advertisements for a zoo.[5] A fantasy land of colorful, swirling, psychedelic bubbles provided the perfect backdrop for a Clearasil ad.[6] As Brian Wells explains, "The psychedelic movement has, through the work of artists, designers, and writers, achieved an astonishing degree of cultural diffusion… but, though a great deal of diffusion has taken place, so, too, has a great deal of dilution and distortion."[7] Even the term "psychedelic" itself underwent a semantic shift, and soon came to mean "anything in youth culture which is colorful, or unusual, or fashionable."[8] Puns using the concept of "tripping" abounded: as an advertisement for London Britches declared, their product was "great on trips!"[9] By the mid-1970s, the psychedelic art movement had been largely co-opted by mainstream commercial forces, incorporated into the very system of capitalism that the hippies had struggled so hard to change.

Notes and references:

1. ^ Heimann, Jim. 60s All American Ads. Cologne: Taschen, 2002. pg. 523
2. ^ Herdeg, Walter. 68/69 Graphics Annual. Zürich: The Graphics Press, 1968. pgs. 45, 75, 248
3. ^ Heimann, Jim. 60s All American Ads. Cologne: Taschen, 2002. pg. 798
4. ^ Heimann, Jim. 70s All American Ads. Cologne: Taschen, 2004. pgs. 443, 102, 76, 85, 484.
5. ^ Herdeg, Walter. 71/72 Graphics Annual. Zürich: The Graphics Press, 1971. pgs. 39, 49.
6. ^ Herdeg, Walter. 71/72 Graphics Annual. Zürich: The Graphics Press, 1971. pg. 78.
7. ^ Wells, Brian. Psychedelic Drugs. New York: Jason Aronson, 1974. pg. 19
8. ^ Wells, Brian. Psychedelic Drugs. New York: Jason Aronson, 1974. pgs. 19-20
9. ^ Heimann, Jim. 70s All-American Ads. Cologne: Taschen, 2004. pg. 523

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_art


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Series Prints on paper: Portraits 3
Frantz Fanon/ 2011Isaac Asimov/ 2011Theo van Gogh/ 2011Mikhail Bakhtin/ 2011Marcel Proust/ 2011Orson Welles/ 2011Martin Heidegger/ 2011Alban Berg/ 2011Igor Stravinsky/ 2011Tom Dowd as a boy/ 2011Sri Aurobindo/ 2011György Ligeti/ 2011
Luigi Nono/ 2011Hermann Rorschach/ 2011Serge Gainsbourg/ 2011Paul Verlaine/ 2011Charles Baudelaire/ 2011Stéphane Mallarmé/ 2011Søren Kierkegaard/ 2011Françoise Sagan/ 2011Robert Mapplethorpe/ 2011Ed Wood in Glen or Glenda/ 2011The Amazing Criswell/ 2011Pierre Boulez/ 2011
Ron Geesin/ 2011Tokyo Rose/ 2011Lewis Carroll/ 2011Jan Švankmajer/ 2011Albert Camus/ 2011Raymond Jones/ 2011Fukusuke/ 2011Leonard Cohen/ 2011Gottlob Frege/ 2011Wolfman Jack/ 2011Lightnin' Hopkins/ 2011Rubin Carter/ 2011
Steve Reich/ 2011John H. Hammond/ 2011Billie Holiday/ 2011Nick Cave/ 2011Salvador Dalí/ 2011Man Ray/ 2011Thomas Edison/ 2011Carl Jung/ 2011Truman Capote/ 2011H. C. Speir/ 2012Buster Keaton/ 2012James Baldwin/ 2012
Alex Haley as a young man in the U.S. Coast Guard/ 2012Arthur C. Clarke/ 2012Stanley Kubrick/ 2012Dennis Hopper/ 2012Otto K. E. Heinemann/ 2012Jeff Buckley/ 2012Harriet Beecher Stowe/ 2012Woody Allen/ 2012Terry Riley/ 2012Albert Hofmann/ 2012Rick Griffin/ 2012Robert Crumb/ 2012
Stuart Sutcliffe/ 2012Klaus Voormann/ 2012Bill Graham/ 2012Jim Carroll/ 2012Abbie Hoffman/ 2012Al Jolson/ 2012George Eastman/ 2012George Bernard Shaw/ 2012Charlie Parker/ 2012Henri Rousseau/ 2012Guillaume Apollinaire/ 2012Marie Laurencin/ 2012
Biography of 'Satoshi Kinoshita'
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