August 15 - September 25, 2020
Reception: Saturday, August 15, 5-7 pm
This is an invitational show featuring some of the great masters of the genre.
The California Visionary Art Movement was born in San Francisco in the late 60’s and early 70’s inspired by the psychedelic era, spiritual awakening, transformative synergy, and a search for deeper inner meanings of life.
Utopia, shamanic mysticism, the moon landing, new age ideals, East meet West philosophies, and fantastic realism were concepts for artists to discover and draw upon. Sacred geometry, world building, the beauty of nature and the human body, were important themes.
Music advanced technology with the arrival of synthesizers played an important role in this movement as both inspiration, and by creating meditative spaces to work by. Visionary art became album covers.
With visionary art, the artists became shamans, magicians, and alchemists transmuting inner visions into sacred art, or at least they attempted to make inner truths and the transcendental into manifest forms such as paintings and drawings.
Some of the artists associated with this movement painted scenes of earthly beauty, a return to Eden, sanctuaries for the soul, imagined cosmic landscapes before the age of planetary discovery. Others artists painted surreal and hallucinatory compositions, and sometimes satirical commentaries on modern life.
