Now that we have defined what I feel is art, and that I what I am doing is to some degree serious in nature. How did I get there? Where did it begin? I had done lots of drawing in my childhood. mostly stick figures, but lots of them. Later in high school I sketched a few buildings for my college architecture applications, and drew skeletons and doodles from greatful dead and zepplin posters for book covers. I never on any of those occasions drew a piece of "art". I can think of only two exceptions. Sometime in elementry school, I remember drawing a series of cubist figures and something like kegs of wine in crazy patterns, I think in oil pastel. I called it the drunk. It was quite bizzare, and only in writting about it now did I remember it. No clue why I did it, i probably had never seen a drunk person. I think it happend while studying art in one of my special classes. The other instance where I created "art" was in my senior year of high school. I drew a grotesque looking green man in a vest, in oil pastel. It was really quite sad. I still have the drawing today, and It has absolutley no artistic merit, skill or value. But it does not sit right in any context other than that of art, albiet very bad art.
At the age of 18, I began my 1st year of colledge studying architecture at Virginia Tech. I went into architecture because I always had a strong creative side, and what could be more creative yet practical than designing buildings The odd thinkg about Virginia Tech architecture was that for the two years, we were not permited to draw a building, and for the first year, not even permitted to approach a design at a human scale. We had an endless line of projects diagraming, modeling, sketching everything from a rock, to time. Virginia Tech was also a very modernist school, a direct descendent of the bahaus movement. The facualty was also a bit inbred with alot of former studends taking possitions to teach, and allot of proffessors with 10year that had not evolved much over the last 30 years. Because of this, I offen clashed with my proffessors, as I was unable to "diagram" properly, and had no interest in their form of abstraction. My drawings were more organic than what they wanted. When they said "draw a rock" what they wanted was a series of diagrams of angles and shapes, that looked nothing like the rock, but was a diagram of the nature of rock. Anyone who drew a realistic image of the rock was not around next semester. I drew my diagrams, but they were fluid, and free, not rigide and abstract. From this point forward, I was a lost cause to almost every professor I had, and only graduated because of my shear persistance. I probably would not have done so without the help of Ellen Braaten, the assistant dean and pottery teacher, whome I have respect for, artistically and as a human being. The prime directive of Bahuas modernism is the universalization of every element in life. According to the writtings of Walter Gropius, there should be only 1 type of door handle, 1 type of window, 1 type of carpet, and that the purpose of design was to find new ways to arrange these items. Needless to say, I found this sick and twisted I want every doornob to be different. I want to see life and design in everything around me. The result was an enourmous conflict of opinions between me, and those who I had to please to get my degree. I had one proffessor actually pull me aside and tell me that my designs and drawing would lead me to a path of death and insanity. at least the first part turned out to be wrong.
What did all this do to me??? It gave me a new way of looking at things. The world of LSD is one of patterns. When you ingest LSD you hallucinate. These hallucinations are usually caused by the brain finding patterns in objects that you see, or sounds that you hear. It is sort of like you mind connecting the dots to form new things out of the existing things in the room, all of this is further complicated by a distortion of color. colors seem to take on powerful neon-like energy. Sounds reverberate and echo in the mind, forming new more complex sounds. And the thought process itself is distorted such that issues like time don't seem to move correctly. An LSD trip can last from 6-24 hours, depending on the dose and purity. During this time you cannot sleep, eating is hard. It can feel like an eternity.
So how did this effect me? Well spending so much time in what feels like a near death experience, altered my priorities. After a tragedy, most people are quick to say, it makes you realize what is really important. Well after spending months in a hallucinatory state, I feel that I am in a permanant state of realizing what is really important. My interests shifted from money, acheivement, and possetion, to love, life, emotion, helping, growth and aesthetic. I consider this a good thing. I may have come around to it on my own anyway, I'll never know. So my priorities shifted. I begin to put more energy into things that made me feel good, like doodling, or making weird building designs that were laughed at by many others. The heavy exposure to hallucinagens helped make me pretty adept at finding new wonderful patterns to create and tie into things. I guess after enough usage, I no longer need the drug to see those patterns. I no longer use LSD and have no intention of doing so again. I think I learned everything I needed to know from it, and can put it behind me.