Chromatic Mysticism

1.     Oscar Wilde has speculated that a sense of color is better for the developing individual than is a sense of morality. That is, liking how someone is dressed is probably a better social binding agent then is liking whether or not they conform to some ethical code.

2.     A curious long-lasting side effect of the psychedelic experience is a heightened sense of color. It can seem as if you had received a very strong aesthetic style from a plant. The Native art of the American southwest is an expression of a vision that appears particular to peyote. It is as if the human were expressing the plant’s dream; a cooperative aesthetic vision shared between species.

3.     As a child I imagined that in heaven there existed new colors that had never been seen on earth. As it turns out you can see these colors on LSD. On LSD at the beach once upon a time on a very windy, cold and bright day in April 2020, I sat on an eiffel chair wrapped up in my rain coat, pea coat and a moving blanket against the wind, watching as the waves flowed to shore in the some of the more intense colors I had yet seen in this waking life; hot pink, deep flowing purple, neon safety-yellow, amidst a thousand brilliant blues. When I returned to the beach some weeks later, I was astonished to note that the impossible colors were still there in the waves, more subtle now, but still visibly present.

4.     Were you a skeptic and wished to deny such experience as being pure hallucination you would be correct. Color is weird: according to science color does not technically exist. The reality that science depicts, based on observable fact in the study of light and the visual field, is a gray scale reality. In other words, all colors are hallucinatory; they are a pure artificial spectacle of your brain. It is this weird mobius twist between what appears to us as obvious and real—the green of plant leaves for instance—and what is otherwise entirely subjective and hallucinatory, that makes the chromatic mystical. Color is a phenomena at the limits of sense.

5.     Vassily Kandinsky, perhaps having had his own psychedelic experience among the natives of Siberia and subject to lifelong synesthesia, has elevated color to a new discipline within the tradition of abstract art. “Color provokes a psychic vibration,” Kandinsky claims. “Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”

6.     The most exemplary expression of chromatic mysticism, surpassing even Kandinsky, is the extraordinary work of the witch-mystic Hilma af Klint. Through a strange process of occult technique, scientific spiritualism and seances held with fellow female mystics, Hilma af Klint would transmit visions from beyond through the canvas. Hilma af Klint did not think of these as paintings but rather visions of a deeper plane. These paintings do not mimic these visionary experiences, but rather are the experiences themselves. This remarkable body of work is yet more visual evidence that as one nears the limits of human experience the colors become more profound. We see new colors because Hilma af Klint saw them first.

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Melancholia (2011)

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The Dream Hotel