Alex Grey

In high school we went to visit Alex Grey at his studio in New York City. The director of our stagecraft department was friends with him. I remember my parents had give me two twenty dollar bills, and with it I was able to purchase the softcover copy of this book. I also remember getting home late that night and spending what felt like hours looking at the illustrations in the book.

For some reason, I haven't gotten around to actually reading many of my of the "coffee-table" style books until recently, even though I picked up many of them in my childhood and teenage years. I've found it quite rewarding.

This book summarizes the work of Alex Grey between his birth in 1953 and its publication in 2001. It starts out with what I find to be an extremely dark period in his youth when he worked in a morgue. He relates a chilling story where, after making a mold of a woman's inner ear by pouring molten lead into it, in dreamtime a judge and jury put him on lifelong probation. This was his wakeup call, and his art after this moment is of a new chapter, which draws on human anatomy, but is also highly energetic in its content.

His incident with the molten lead followed by a renaissance reminds me of a period in my youth, when I participated in the dissection of a ram (after his death, as part of an animal husbandry program), contrasted the following weekend by a delightful fling with a woman I was enamored with. Both experiences were full of visceral emotions, as well as unforgettable physical and energetic moments. And, as much of Grey's art depicts, in a way, they represented the dark and the light, polar opposites.

People in peak experience are a common subject of Grey's art. For example, it is very hard not to be touched by the power of paints like Grey's depiction of birth. His work rarely involves nature as its primary subject (plants, animal, fungi), although such being do play supporting roles (especially entheogens).

The words in this book feature a series of essays, many of which are written by Grey's friends. The book features an interview with Ken Wilbur, founder of Integral Theory. Integral is a good representation of Grey's art. Grey is much more focused on the cosmic and the universal as opposed to the specific, the chthonic (aside from in representational form representing temptation and downfall). In this regard, the messaging behind his art are conventional (Christian, Buddhist) rather than indigenous.… (mere)