Entry tags:
Can't Sleep; Have Some Musings Instead
Remember that experiment from the '50s where the government gave a professional artist some LSD and asked him to draw portraits of the scientist conducting the experiment?
A modern performance/visual artist has apparently been conducting his own, much less controlled version. Brian Lewis Saunders has drawn a self-portrait every day for years. A series of these were done while under the influence of different substances both legal and illegal.
Looking them over, I suspect they are attempts to depict how each drug made him feel, rather than literal records of the experience -- while the style varies from picture to picture, only a few things (bath salts, Cephalexin, computer duster, Dilaudid, and PCP) actually seem to have impaired his coordination enough to affect his drawing ability. I suppose we also only have his word for it that he really did take all that stuff, though he claims it eventually impacted his health enough that he had to stop.
Also interesting to relate it to the famous sequence of Louis Wain cat drawings, which supposedly marked the progression of his mental illness, but which a more recent article points out are undated.
Full disclosure - as someone who has drawn various things in various styles at various times of her life, mainly while sober, I have an automatic suspicion and dislike of the reaction "woah, man, what was he on?!" that any piece tends to elicit when it isn't strictly Realist . I once spent a conversation at a party trying to convince someone that no, Lewis Carroll couldn't have been on LSD, as it was not discovered until 1949* (the Rev. Charles Dodgson may well have taken opium, but so did most Victorians - it was the Tylenol of the day - and very few of them went on to write classic nonsense literature).
* and despite its recent popularity as a plot device, ergot poisoning is not the same thing as an LSD trip; it's less likely to include hallucinations and way more likely to include nerve damage, gangrene and death.
A modern performance/visual artist has apparently been conducting his own, much less controlled version. Brian Lewis Saunders has drawn a self-portrait every day for years. A series of these were done while under the influence of different substances both legal and illegal.
Looking them over, I suspect they are attempts to depict how each drug made him feel, rather than literal records of the experience -- while the style varies from picture to picture, only a few things (bath salts, Cephalexin, computer duster, Dilaudid, and PCP) actually seem to have impaired his coordination enough to affect his drawing ability. I suppose we also only have his word for it that he really did take all that stuff, though he claims it eventually impacted his health enough that he had to stop.
Also interesting to relate it to the famous sequence of Louis Wain cat drawings, which supposedly marked the progression of his mental illness, but which a more recent article points out are undated.
Full disclosure - as someone who has drawn various things in various styles at various times of her life, mainly while sober, I have an automatic suspicion and dislike of the reaction "woah, man, what was he on?!" that any piece tends to elicit when it isn't strictly Realist . I once spent a conversation at a party trying to convince someone that no, Lewis Carroll couldn't have been on LSD, as it was not discovered until 1949* (the Rev. Charles Dodgson may well have taken opium, but so did most Victorians - it was the Tylenol of the day - and very few of them went on to write classic nonsense literature).
* and despite its recent popularity as a plot device, ergot poisoning is not the same thing as an LSD trip; it's less likely to include hallucinations and way more likely to include nerve damage, gangrene and death.