What is visionary art? It is difficult to find the apt words to explain something that lies beyond our realm of imagination and time. Here’s my attempt ~
Visionary art is about elevating one’s state of consciousness to paint a vision, dream or a revelation that transcends our regular modes of perception. It opens our mind to different realities which can be accessed in an altered state of consciousness. The images, colours, patterns, sacred symbols, are all captivating, in most cases, have been witnessed/experienced by the artist.
In my quest to explore this sacred space, I stumbled upon an inspiring, young visionary artist from Queensland, Australia – Adam Scott Miller. His work often explores transcendental energy fields, light fused with diverse perspectives like sacred geometry, mythology, science, esoteric and so on.
As an artist, he has this sense of being an explorer – sailing into unknown territory to bring back maps to share of lands we are not yet in, or aware of.
In an interview with Fractal Enlightenment, Miller explains, “I choose to be an artist because it is the path of great mystery, novelty, realization, and translation into beautiful vocabularies that I can offer the world.
Creating my art is how I process what I am learning, and my art are artifacts of what I have learned. It is the by-product of the experience of my consciousness.”
Many powerful events throughout his life brought him on this path where he recognises the universal force and occult dimensions; it was like rewiring of the brain.
At the age of around 10, for a year Miller regularly experienced night terrors where he would wake up in the middle of a dream and the experience would be merged with the waking reality.
“Often, or perhaps each time, I felt confused, and panicked amidst the surrealistic place in which I found myself, awake. This life stage of perceiving dream worlds superimposed over the ‘real’ world had a major impact on my psyche and sensitivity to the subtle. When I was fifteen years old, I suffered an impact to my head resulting in a concussion and damage to my optic nerves. Obvious to me afterwards, my memory and vision was affected.”
“Mysteriously, I began seeing subtle forms throughout all space, within my immediate vicinity – wispy strands that transfer between my fingers when held palm facing palm; snakelike currents of tendrils moving along floors, up walls and around corners; and perceiving things within a person’s ‘auric’ field that move in immediate accord to that person’s movement. This ‘shamanic wound’ marked my life as a formative causal factor in how and what I see.
It was the way in which I healed also, that opened this latent gift. I had already consciously begun my spiritual search, artistic self-styling, and the occasional phenomena of recognizing etheric forms… so it seems my intention directed this rewiring,” says Miller.
The ability to portray that which is intangible requires some effort and the state of mind to achieve that is ‘flow’. “Typically, it takes a few hours of ardent effort before my mind becomes translucent enough during the action of painting until it is a channeling of something cosmic to the art itself, in an art of ‘flow’.
I am tuned to have some relative ease in perceiving particular frequencies of subtle perception when my mind has sufficiently ‘let go’… I sense that the clarity with which I perceive around me has a direct correspondence to how clear I am within myself, like a sentient crystal.”
Various psychedelic experiences also has influenced his art, as Miller puts it, “Through whatever process necessary for the experience of numinous gnosis, and from that precious space comes the vision for the greatest and truest art.”
Images or visionary art is the doorway into the hidden realm, something you might lose yourself in, empowering us with new possibilities and ways of perceiving reality. he concludes, “The visionary artist is both a shamanic hero on the mythic journey and a journalist who as witness, records the journey to share with the community.”