A MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART

WILLIAM BLAKE:
THE ANCIENT OF DAYS

L. CARUANA

      "What is Visionary Art?" a friend of mine asked me during a late-night conversation at the Abbey Bookshop in Paris. My interlocutor, Guy Livingston, was a contemporary musician, seriously dedicated to his art, and his question deserved a seriously considered response. It was then that I realized how, despite having painted visionary works all my life, I couldn't easily articulate what I did. The need for this manifesto was born.
      In between working on my paintings, I began researching and translating the writings of other Visionary artists - finding that they too had struggled to define what they did, though no simple formula readily appeared. Usually, at three or four in the morning, I would wake up with certain phrases going through my mind - 'seeing the unseen','le sur-visuel'. And, terrible insomniac that I am, I would not sleep again until I had written them down. (Indeed, as I write this, it is again three o'clock in the morning...) Such phrases, definitions, and even 'a history' of Visionary Art were recorded in my journals, awaiting the day when they would finally be arranged as a manifesto.
      Then, quite by surprise, I found myself in the south of France, studying under Prof. Ernst Fuchs, the eldest and perhaps greatest practitioner of our art. (If I had properly interpreted certain omens in my dreams, I would have seen that all of this was forthcoming...). And it was here, in his studio on the 'Quai des Artistes'in Monaco that the manifesto finally took shape, inspired in part by conversations with him.