American painter and performance artist (born 1953)
Alex Grey (born 29 November 1953, as Alex Kenton Velzy), is an American visionary artist, author, teacher, and Vajrayana practitioner. His body of work spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. Grey is a member of the Integral Institute, is on the board of advisors for the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and is the Chair of Wisdom University's Sacred Art Department. He and his wife Allyson Grey are the co-founders of The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a non-profit church supporting Visionary Culture in Wappingers Falls, New York.
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Around the age of 20, I was doing unusual performance pieces focused on the exploration of polarities. This was a somewhat naive and intuitive venture based on my dreams and visions. I hadn’t yet encountered Taoism or other mystical teachings related to duality and the union of opposites. … One of my more dramatic polarity performances was to journey up to the North Magnetic Pole. After returning from the Pole, having spent all my money, two life-changing events occurred: At a party, I took LSD for the first time. Sitting with my physical eyes closed, my inner eye moved through a beautiful spiral tunnel. The walls of the tunnel seemed like living mother-of-pearl; it felt like a spiritual rebirth canal. I was in the darkness, spiraling toward the light. The curling space going from black to gray to white suggested to me the resolution of all polarities. My artistic rendering of this event was titled "The Polar Unity Spiral." Soon after this, I changed my name to Grey as a way of bringing the opposites together. The other life-changing event was meeting my wife, Allyson, that same evening. She was the only other person at the party who had taken LSD. We made a profound connection at that time, and have been together ever since. It’s been twenty-five years.
A universal spiritual art would be art that any person would recognize as having a spiritual intention. It could speak to the heart and soul of the individual and orient them toward the greater aspect of their own being, their interconnectedness with all life and the cosmos. A universal spiritual art would return the viewer to their own ultimate identity, which lies beyond representation, but can be pointed to when our inspired visions are brilliantly transmitted. The challenge to artists today is to integrate the vast history of art from as many cultures as possible, to reach deep inside themselves for their own personal insights into the transcendental and allow this to coalesce into the most powerful imagery possible.
The twentieth-century Surrealists operated in a territory without clear moral order: a dreamship adrift in the ocean of the unconscious. … The visions of the Surrealists help to define a dream realm where any bizarre juxtaposition is possible. A profound truth resides in such strangeness, for these visions can shock us into deepening our acknowledgement and appreciation of the Great Mystery.
People generally begin to understand my work after they’ve had some experience with the subtle visionary inner-worlds. These altered states can occur in many ways, from meditation to psychedelics to near-death experiences. A fellow in Japan came to my exhibit and showed me a five-inch elliptical scar over his heart where he had been struck nearly dead by lightning. He claimed that he had entered the "universal mind lattice," one of the "sacred mirrors" I’ve painted, during his near-death experience. What these various experiences or altered states have in common is the person who experiences them is profoundly transformed. They now know there are dimensions beyond the physical that are deeply mysterious and equally infinite to the outer worlds.