Welcome!

Hello!

 My name is Aiya, and I'm studying Graphic Design in DMU and I am welcoming you to my page!

 

I am a graphic design student, which means I will be working with digital art just as well as real life art. I love both of these art methods and projets like these are my first steps in the digital art direction - my first blog! I consider myself a creative person, so I'm hoping I will be able to give you something interesting :)

Alex Grey

I will start with sharing my latest finds. The video above is a compiled collection of multiple amazing works from an artist that had me intrigued from a very unusual perspective.

 Alex Grey is a very talented visual artist, author and a teacher known for creating spiritual and psychedelic paintings.

"Grey's paintings are a blend of sacred, visionary art and postmodern art. He is best known for his paintings of glowing anatomical human bodies, images that "x-ray" the multiple layers of reality."

He is mostly known for his art that he made for the music band TOOL. And quite frankly, that was how I found out about him. 

My favorite albums had such interesting and beautiful covers that had me interested, so I started researching about this art style and the artist, and I opened a new world of psychedelic and in a way, spiritual art.

Below, there are examples of TOOL albums that 

included Alex Grey's work.  

Lateralus (2001)

 

10,000 Days (2006)

Looking through Grey's wiki page, I found out that Grey's work wasn't exclusively made for TOOL, but Grey was a very popular album cover maker and many artists felt like their music had resemblance in Grey's art.

         In Utero, Nirvana              Meshuggah, Selfcaged                   David Byrne, The Visible Man  

The spiritual part of Grey's work wasn't just in the looks, but rather in how he portrays and connects his art to inner belief in freedom and even religious ideas.

Alex Grey and his wife Allyson founded The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a Jewish church and a nonprofit organization that promotes the idea of 

"building an enduring sanctuary of visionary art to inspire every pilgrim's creative path and embody the values of love and evolutionary wisdom".

Sacred Mirrors, Entheon 2021

While in Entheon, visitors can enter the CoSM and admire Grey’s "Kissing", "Copulating", "Pregnancy", "Birth", "Gaia", "Net of Being" , and "Nursing".”

CoSM is a place where people can ascend spiritually and worship while admiring Grey’s beautiful artwork. Alex allows any other artists like himself to put their work up in the Chapel.

"The mission of CoSM is to build an enduring sanctuary of visionary art to inspire a global community."

I love how Alex Gray supports any way his art could be used by people. It is amazing how his art affects the world in so many ways, and I still have so much to learn about this artist and art style. As a designer, an at-home painter and a lover of anything debatable, I admire him and his work, and how perfectly it resembles music, freedom and the spiritual world.

References:

Zeiba, D. (2018) In Upstate New York, an ecstasy-inspired psychedelic temple rises, The Architect’s Newspaper. Available at: https://www.archpaper.com/2018/06/psychedelic-art-temple-entheon/ (Accessed: 06 October 2023).

Home (no date) CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Available at: https://www.cosm.org/ (Accessed: 06 October 2023). 

Home (no date) CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Available at: https://www.cosm.org/ (Accessed: 06 October 2023).