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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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The visionary artist does not hesitate to record images of shock, horror, pain, degradation, demons, monsters, and all manner of underworld tortures. He explores the darker side of his imagination, and liberates many of his impulses by giving them tangible form. All that is taboo must be transcended.
In the pursuit of such art-making, light often acquires a symbolic property and, as illumination, signifies something more Sacred: the one light behind all images and shining through them. Darkness and shadows, by contrast, portend all that is hidden, forbidden, obscured, and unknown.
In the works of Alex Grey, the human form is refracted (like light through a prism) into multiple 'ekstases' of being - these ascending from the biological to the personal to the ultimately transpersonal. For the beholder, the effect, in the end, is like gazing into a series of 'Sacred Mirrors'. Before engaging himself on this life-task, Grey worked for many years as an undertaker's assistant - acquiring an intimate knowledge of our mortal human anatomy. Then, through his visions, the artist sought to surpass this finite reflection of life. Not, however, by evading death's terrible potency. The method instead was 'to include and then transcend':
"Each artist is a facet of God's unfolding infinite vision, refracting the light of awareness in their own particular way. The shallows and shadows and terrors of life are just as much a part of the Vision Crystal as views of abstract beauty, spiritual heavens and our precious endangered planet."(16)
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ALEX GREY: MAN IN PRAYER
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