Week 11 — Artists OTW — Student Choice
The artist I chose to write about this week is Alex Grey. Most of Alex Grey’s work is through paintings. When he was younger, Grey would collect dead animals and bury them in his backyard. There was always this theme of “death and transcendence” that has followed him from a young age. This theme is portrayed in most of his artwork today. After he dropped out of college and began doing his own work, he met his wife. With his wife, the two would take “sacramental journeys” through LSD. Now inserting Grey’s theme of “death and transcendence” and combining it with his “sacramental journeys”, he began to put his visions that he experienced from tripping, and putting them on a canvas with paint.
Grey’s work is very creative as it combines two different aspects of ideas that he holds dear to him. There is a certain energy that can be felt when looking at his work. The colors he uses really brings out the messages that he is trying to portray through the canvas. The way he shows the energy emitting from humans and sharing that emitted energy to other people is really inspiring. In his work, everything is so vibrant that any part of the painting has a message and can be interpreted by whomever in their own way.
In his art, Grey paints a series of events of human evolution. His first painting on his website is called “Adam and Eve”. His second is called “The Visionary Origin of Language”. In each of his paintings, his title represents what his interpretation of the art is. This inspiration that he gets for his painting comes from his childhood. Going back to the first paragraph, on how Grey would bury dead animals and the idea he got from it. These paintings are an image of that ideology he holds with him. One way to think about his art; The story and message of the art is his theme of death and the cycle of life, while the actual art and how he shows it with different colors and different perspective is the transcendence part.
The first time I looked at Grey’s work, it became a favorite of mine just because of how different it is from other art and artists ideas. The fact that these paintings were also influenced by him tripping on LSD, is really interesting to me because of the unexplainable visions and sights that can be witnessed. And for Grey to implement LSD visions with the cycle of life and why we live is very amusing to me.