⬆"The Hashish Smoker" by Emile Bernard (1900):
Emile Bernard is one of the most colorful personalities of early modern painting. Bernard was born on April 28, 1868 in Lille. Soon he met painters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, made friends with Paul Gauguin and caused a stir among fellow painters with his pictures. After his first pointillist experiments Emile Bernard developed his own new pictorial idiom, which was later called Cloisonnism. In contrast to the delimitation of the impressionists, Emile Bernard clearly framed his subjects and colors with dark contours. This approach to pictures evoked interest from both van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, in 1888 and 1889 Emile Bernard and Gauguin worked closely together, though not without conflict. After van Gogh's death and the public's focus on Paul Gauguin as the founder of Symbolism, a confrontation arose between the former friends. Emile Bernard felt deceived. At the same time, he was at risk of being drafted into the military, so Emile Bernard fled to Egypt in 1893, where he lived for over 10 years and got married. Emile Bernard died in his Paris studio on April 16, 1941, aged 89.
⬆"Cannabis Sutra" by Alex Grey
Alex Grey (born November 29, 1953) is an American visual artist, author, teacher, and Vajrayana practitioner known for creating spiritual and psychedelic paintings. He works in multiple forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. He is also on the board of advisors for the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and is the Chair of Wisdom University's Sacred Art Department. He and his wife Allyson Grey are the co-founders of The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a non-profit organization in Wappingers Falls, New York.
⬆"Super Plant" by Fred Tomaselli (1994)
Fred Tomaselli creates psychedelic paintings that explore human perception and the vibrant complexity of the natural world. To build his collage-based works, he gathers a multitude of images from field guides, nature books and other sources, and assembles them into pulsating figures and geometric patterns. He blends formal and conceptual elements, and multiple artistic traditions, into works that vibrate with internal conflict and information overload. Tomaselli covers these rich compositions in resin, encapsulating layers of paint, collaged images, leaves and other objects into a floating surface that imbues them with a “sense of deep time.” For Tomaselli, painting is a route to alternative perception, and his colorful works transport us into a world of transcendent natural beauty that has been polluted by the pathologies of contemporary life. He invites us to get lost on our journey to this other dimension and to discover the boundless intricacy of nature. And when we arrive, he reveals a natural world that is at once sublime and afflicted by the countless battles that rage within it.