Outside the Amazon, artists not born into or raised in indigenous or mestizo ayahuasca-using cultures, including such well-known visionary artists as Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, and Martina Hoffmann, have also rendered visual experiences attributed to the ingestion of ayahuasca or DMT. For want of a better term, I will call this body of work DMT art.

There are some remarkable convergences between DMT art and the abstract representations of the ayahuasca experience in indigenous Amazonian art. The indigenous work on the left, below, by Cashinahua artist Arlindo Daureano Estevão, represents the different worlds of the ayahuasca vision as houses with doors to be entered and paths linking the different contained spaces. This type of design is called nawan kene pua, or stranger’s design, since it is a map that keeps one from getting lost in the ayahuasca world. This abstract representation is strikingly reflected in the work on the right, below, entitled DMT, by photographer Peter Kosinski. It is difficult to say whether such convergences are due to acquaintance with indigenous art or to similarities in the visionary experience.

Arlindo Daureano Estevão, Nawan Kene Pua	Peter Kosinski, DMT

Similarly, on the left below is a traditional Shipibo woven cloth, whose design represents a sacred pattern derived from a cosmic anaconda whose skin embodies all possible designs. Shipibo shamans employ these patterns to reorder the bodies of persons who are sick. Certain diseases are thought to be caused by harmful, messy designs on the wsick body, which the shaman must magically unravel and replace with orderly designs. After drinking ayahuasca, the Shipibo shaman sees a luminous design in the air. When this design floats down and touches the shaman’s lips it becomes transformed into a song the shaman sings. Different elements of the song relate to different elements of the design; for example, the end of each verse is associated with the end-curl of a design motif. When the patient is cured, the design has become clear, neat, and complete. Again, this abstract representation is strikingly reflected in Vibrata Chromodoris’s Emergence, below on the right.

Anonymous, Shipibo Woven Cloth	Vibrata Chromodoris, Emergence

However, most DMT art is representational rather than abstract, and taps into the work of mestizo Amazon visionary artists. The first painting below is by mestizo artist Pablo Amaringo; the remaining pieces are DMT art by artists from outside the Amazon, all working with content recognizably similar to that of Amaringo, although not necessarily in the same naïve outsider style.

Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca and Chacruna (Detail)	Robert Venosa, Ayahuasca Dream (Detail)
Cyril Lanier, Ayahuasca Vision of the Blue Perfume	Michael Jacobs, Ayahuasca Dream

But even more striking, I think, are two motifs that appear with some frequency in DMT art but not in the indigenous or mestizo artistic traditions. The first of these I will call The Face — that is, a recognizably humanoid face with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, often filling the entire frame, and often constructed from smaller units, either geometric figures or dots. These figures are often described as a being, an entity, or a visitation. For example, Robert Essig says of his painting DMT Entity, below on the right, “This image was inspired from my first unnatural encounter with the spirit molecule. An Entity that seemed extremely real and intelligent appeared before me with terrific precision and speed. It dissipated as soon as I imposed my will upon it.”

Alex Grey, Ayahuasca Visitation	Robert Essig, DMT Entity

Indeed, The Face often appears in works that are not conceptually about The Face. In Luke Brown’s Pineal Feline, for example, below on the right, the titular face is that of a cat, at the bottom center of the painting; what then makes up The Face are floral arabesques and ornamentation of the cat’s face, almost entirely buried within — indeed, reduced almost to a decorative adornment of — The Face. Similarly, in Martina Hoffman’s La Chacruna, below on the left, The Face decomposes, upon closer inspection, into arabesques, including snakes and elephant heads, elaborated upon the relatively small face of the goddess, in the upper middle of the painting.

Martina Hoffmann, La Chacruna	Luke Brown, Pineal Feline

Sometimes The Face is deconstructed to simpler, rather than more complex, elements. At that point, we can begin to see the basic patterns from which complex Faces are constructed.

Dennis Konstantin, DMT Entity	Nisvan, Ayahuasca Vision (Detail)

What is interesting here is that underlying The Face is a relatively simple symmetric pattern, not unlike the abstract patterns of indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca art, but here cognitively assembled into a recognizable human face. Perhaps that is why Essig’s Face dissipated as soon as he imposed his will upon it; attempting to control the image distracted the perceiver from its imposed structural coherence.

Another recurring motif we can call the wingspread. This is a pattern very similar to the wings of a moth or dragonfly. Below, for example, is a more or less typical moth — actually, the tobacco hornworm moth (Maduca sexta):

Wingspread Moth

We can see this wingspread motif reproduced with increasing elaboration in the following pictures:

Strikingly, this wingspread pattern is often hidden rather than explicit, providing a formal structure rather than any content; look, for example, at the wingspread position of the hands in Alex Grey’s Light Weaver, especially in conjunction with, say, Robert Venosa’s Yagé Guide, above. The wingspread pattern underlies the purely formal similarity between Mariela de la Paz’s Ayahuaska at the Gates of San Pedro and Alejandre Segrégio’s Presente Divino. Indeed, sometimes this structure is so deeply embedded as to be difficult to discern, until the pattern suddenly emerges, as with the darker rock formation in Olga Spiegel’s Rendezvous.

The following article by Daniel Mirante (www.lila.info) discusses the deep ecological current within visionary art. A work in progress, to be regularly updated.

‘Nectarian’ describes a current within visionary or spirit art, it describes the work of the birds and bees as they sip nectar and distill honey from the flowering plants of primodial Gaia. It describes the rich symbiosis of life, that everything that exists, lives. And all that lives is One.

The hummingbird is the quintessential symbol of the Nectarian form of art. In Brazil the hummingbird is called the ‘beija-flor’ – kisser-of-flowers. This beautiful poetic term describes the deep sensuality of the intimate engagement with Nature. Nature is all that we know. Our entire brains and minds are Nature and generated by nature to interface with nature.

Nature is everything, the Kali-like wrath and the deep sweetness. The Nectarian vision encompasses all, and displays an all-encompassing fertility circuit in which beings can intimately couple with the cosmic and Gaian processes in non-dual ways. In the Nectarian vision we already live within a Spirit realm, a spiritual wilderness that completely transcends the division between inner and outer, imagination and reason, consciousness and matter.

Nature is the originator of language and by observing her flows we come into awareness of the cycles and patterns that govern our lives. Observance of nature is the progenitor of metaphor, and metaphor is the foundation of poetry, myth, shamanry and visual art.

Nectarian art is distinguished from most visionary art by its insistence of an anchoring within bodily and Gaian relatedness, including all our relations, the species both similar (dolphins, monkeys, cats) and dissimilar to ourselves (such as plankton, bacteria, and stellar bodies such as spiral galaxies and stars). Much visionary art purports to represent transcendent spiritual dimensions which are full of high saturation patterns, linguistic codes, esoteric symbols and glyphs. Nectarian art represents these spirit-glyphs in their immanent form, subtly informing the flowing patterns of water, bark and leaves, as well as the gothic-organic geometries of the human body, in the divine natural subtleties of colors and tones that nature effortlessly composes. There is nothing esoteric in Nectarian art, it does not depend upon an esoteric tradition for its interpretation, although the more ecologically connected participant would likely find more to appreciate in sympathy.

Rather than representing the ‘exclusive divinity’ of human self-hood the nectarian vision is selfless as a flock of birds, as wolves and deer in the chase, or a primordial tao shamaness riding the clouds. Observing the current of life on this planet one senses a vast and selfless process of intelligence, a vast metabolism, which is at the same time a vast sentience of cosmic drama, storytelling, and experience, which flows completely beyond our rigid and fragile categorical orderings.

Nectarian art affirms our journey on this planet as something to be celebrated and affirmed, rather than something to ‘transcend’ through some kind of spiritual development. It is thus similar to the left-hand path of tantric yogi’s. It is also similar in this sense in its celebration of voluptuous poly-amorous sexuality, woman, child, community and nurturing energies. We see such celebration in the work of Mark Henson, who’s psychedelic tantric paintings are reminiscent of Chola dynasty bronzes and tantric indian temple sculpture.

The ‘modern’ art establishment overlooks such art, for such an institutionalized mind finds Nectarian art embarrassing it in its lack of self-conscious irony and its unchecked enthusiasm for the experience of wonder. Despite this, many of the great artists throughout history have been Nectarian in orientation.

Nectarian art is vastly informed by dialog with plant teachers and fertile ecosystems. It is thus fundamentally shamanic and in its purest sense bioregional – reflective of the forms, traditions, and cycles innate to ones lands. Though it is true that ‘every part contains the whole’ tapping into ones locality one indeed finds ‘the all’.

In an age of climate chaos and an increasing awareness of both the beauty and fragility of ecological complexity, Nectarian art serves as a ‘medicine culture’, a prayer, affirmation and celebration of ‘the real’, the infinitely deep and ornate planetary jeweled garden in which we live our lives.

Some notable Nectarian artists :

Mark Henson
Maura Holden
Pablo Amaringo
Jarah Tree
Frida Kahlo
William Blake
Breugel
Gaudi

And many many more…