LSD BRITAIN - Blotter Art Articles

Sheets of perforated strips dipped in LSD were once just a vehicle for distributing drugs to blissed-out hippies. Now, with an emerging market on eBay, and collectable examples signed by LSD inventor Albert Hofmann, the images are hitting a natural high. Simon Garfield takes a trip into blotter art

Earlier this month, a man calling himself Gabbachris posted an unusual listing on eBay, and hoped for an enthusiastic response. He was selling something called '60 Years of LSD - Mindstates IV Sheet', and you could buy it for £2,750. The high price was due to the presence at the bottom-right corner of the sheet of the signature of Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, the Swiss chemist who famously took a psychedelic bicycle ride back from his lab after synthesising and sampling his wares in 1943. Hofmann turned 100 earlier this year, and his autograph is more sought after as each day passes. But what is the 'Mindstates IV Sheet'?

The eBay listing went on: 'A Holy Grail of Blotter Art. This sheet would be the pinnacle of most blotter collections. Not many people can boast a Hofmann. This is about as good as it gets. It comes with a photocopied letter by Dr Hofmann, but don't ask me what it says as it is not in English.' And then, in green text in order to underline something very important, the listing stated, 'Quality is assured.' For those none the wiser about what £2,750 actually gets them, and perhaps hoping it was drugs, Gabbachris noted: 'These sheets are artworks. They are intended for enjoyment of the art and nothing else. To suggest they are anything else or intended for any other reason, other than being works of art, is simply hearsay.'

So yes, it was blotting paper. Not the blotting paper favoured by Dickensian scribes, but the sort used by the manufacturers of LSD in the past four decades to get their product to the market. Before it was made illegal in the mid-Sixties, psychoanalysts and recreationists could get their LSD in several ways. Large pills were popular, as were infused sugar cubes. The length of a jail term for possession was based on the weight of the LSD delivery method and so the smart set looked for lighter ways to distribute their hits. Gelatin was tried for a while, but nothing proved as popular as thin, absorbent paper; the acid could be dropped on to marked portions, dose by dose, or an entire sheet could be dipped and then broken up.

Even users without heightened powers of perception soon began to notice that their individual hits had little logos on them. Pyramids and shields were popular at first, and then cartoon characters and strawberries. These motifs served a dual purpose: they signified the strength of dose, and they signified the doser. It was branding for hippies: proud LSD labs wished to establish their credentials as drug-makers you could trust. The early sheets were torn freestyle, but soon perforations ensured a better split and equality of high. By the time Albert Hofmann turned 70, some sheets of blotter art only began to make sense when seen as a whole design - an original and collectable art form that lost its integrity as soon as someone tore a bit off and put it in their mouth.

Not many people can boast a Hofmann. But then again not many people can boast a Jerry Garcia or a Peter Fonda or even a Lucifer. One person who can boast a Lucifer is Lucifer, a 31-year-old one-named former traveller who now resides in a converted dairy farm near Horsham, in the Sussex countryside. Lucifer is a collector and designer of blotter art, and a former user of the molecules they contained. These days his collection is entirely clean and artistic, and it is a beautiful thing.

When I visited him, Lucifer told me that Lucifer was actually his birth name, and showed me three albums' worth of historical images, each perforated into 900 or 1,000 squares. They reminded me of small sheets of stamps, albeit the sort that could mail you to another universe.

'The first sheet I saw complete was the Timothy Leary Profile,' he said, as he produced a highly complex multicoloured design incorporating many visual interpretations of the teachings of the pro-LSD psychology professor. 'It has the skull and crossbones on his shoulder and musical notes coming out of his ear. It has the SMILE theory in the background - Space Migration equals Intelligent Life Extension.

I think it was 1995, and I was at a rave site before the rave had started. There was a sofa around a fire, and I sat on that and someone turned up with a new sheet that had just been dipped and it was this one. People held it and went, "Wow!" You could feel the energy from it through your fingertips.'

In those days, each tab cost Lucifer between 50p and £3.50, depending on market forces and strength. He remembers certain parts of certain sheets were stronger. Sometimes they were held up by a top corner after the dipping, so that the LSD would drip to the bottom or a corner. 'On the Timothy Leary, I was told the sheet was dipped again just on the skull and crossbones.'

Lucifer drifted into the rave scene from skateboarding and high-adrenaline sports, but stopped using LSD in his early twenties. 'I felt it wasn't safe enough. Every person that touches a dipped sheet adds their energy to it. I had taken various ones that had led me to negative perceptions. Not really a bad trip as such, but I had believed the whole point was to reach some awakening or bliss, and I was missing that when I received heavy hallucinations and strange sounds. I was almost experiencing someone else's life history.'

By then he had already begun to think his future in the scene lay not as a consumer but as a creator, and he began to build his own rare art collection. 'This is The Simpsons,' he says as he flicks through his plastic folders. A well-thumbed copy of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell lies by his side. 'And this is a Beavis and Butthead, and the Hendrix, and Easy Rider, and the Dancing Skeletons. And the famous Alice Through The Looking Glass - which is double-sided.'

He gives me one of his own designs, an intense mixture of symbols representing ancient tribal beliefs, Kabbalistic languages and swirling celestial bodies. The printing was complex, he explains. 'There are 147 separate layers to enhance the clarity. I send them on a disc to someone in England then, when this person has enough designs, he books a ticket to America, waits to see them printed, and then comes back with 50 of each.'

Lucifer acknowledges a certain risk attached to his calling. 'People can get rather alarmed if they just see all these sheets lying around. The police use a UV lamp - it will glow if LSD is present, and the lamp will also destroy it. If you're a collector it's best to have them framed on the wall.' He has recently begun to sell blotters on the website he runs with friends called Hunab Ku (http://www.hunabku.biz/ 'This site,' reads the online mission statement, 'which emerged from a shop in Glastonbury, has been some time in the making, but now we have fixed the time dialation components and there is less chaotic flux emanating from the crystalline source.' There is a disclaimer attached to each image: 'This is vanity blotter art and has never been in contact with any illegal substance.'

Lucifer is fairly new to the game. He speaks with awe of fellow designers Rick Sinnett, Alex Grey and James Clements, but in particular he admires the work of Mark McCloud, the creator of the Alice blotter. McCloud, who lives in San Francisco and has been busted and acquitted twice for his suspicious-looking hobby, runs what he calls The Institute of Illegal Images. This is by far the largest blotter art collection in the world, with many unique items surviving not as sheets but only as single tabs. McCloud now sells art-print enlargements of the more iconic images for $1,000 each, including The Mighty Quinn (an eskimo looking out to sea), The Sorcerer's Apprentice (thought to have been dosed with LSD from Albert Hofmann's own laboratory), Snoopy (featuring the dog in shades with what McCloud has described as 'an illegal smile'), and Gorbachev ('This is the Gorby that brought the Berlin Wall down!').

McCloud is blotter art's archivist, but there has yet to be an official catalogue establishing rarity and pricing structure, and the collecting market has yet to be tested by a major auction house. As with all valuable artefacts, there is also a convincing line in forgeries. Gabbachris is the most visible seller on eBay, and is also responsible for blotterart.co.uk and blotterart.com, the principal online shops. Lucifer believes there are about 20 serious collectors in the UK, and hopes the market will expand soon. He shows me plans for his own designs on a bank of Apple screens.

'This is based on an original painting,' he says of a fantastical scene depicting the Garden of Eden. 'I've added the lightning and the dripping leaves and all this coming out of these moons and all the lights on the mushrooms.' He asks me to step closer. 'If you look carefully,' he says, 'you can see the LSD molecule underneath it all, perfectly perforated.'

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The History of LSD Blotter Art
Compiled by Rich Mills

http://www.thisisull.com/art/richblotterart.html

Blotter Art is a term that refers to the artwork that liquid LSD is dropped onto. The artwork is printed onto blotter paper and then perforated into tiny squares or hits, which can be torn apart into easy to manage quantities.

In 1938 LSD-25 (or diethylamide of d-lysergic acid) was synthesized in Basle, Switzerland by a scientist named Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz chemical-pharmaceutical laboratory. It was not until 1943 that Albert Hoffman accidentally ingested a very small amount of the chemical through his finger tips that he was working with during the purification of the condensation process. Three days later, Albert Hoffman ingested a large quantity of the chemical on purpose, (known as Bicycle Day) and thus began the first real experiments with LSD.

In the beginning Albert Hoffman gave LSD the name DELYSID, and it was distributed and prescribed to over 40,000 individuals and used as a tool for therapy by hundreds of psychiatrists, with much reported success.

In the 1960s, when LSD was legal, it was distributed in large pills, sometimes called barrels because of their shape. It was also sold on anything from sugar cubes to animal crackers. Dealers began to want their batch of LSD to be recognizable from the others, so they began to invent ways to trademark their acid.

The chemists would make the pills a certain shape or colour as to set them apart from others, especially if they were packaging particularly potent dosages. This also served as a form of a validation of authenticity, proving that the dealers were not selling fake LSD. As a bonus, the dealers would get a kick out of the buzz created by their “brand” of acid.

Sometime after LSD became illegal, mandatory minimum sentencing was set into place. These laws placed mandatory sentences on drug offenders based on the weight of the substances with which they were caught. Therefore a drug dealer busted with one dose of acid on a sugar cube that weighed 1 gram would get the same sentence as a dealer caught with 1 gram of LSD crystal, which would represent about 10,000 doses of LSD! It didn’t take a genius to figure out that a new, lightweight, medium for distributing LSD was needed.

The first blotter sheets were simply white sheets perforated into hits, soon after that, coloured paper was used and the designs began to become more elaborate, many times reflecting the signs of the time.

The foremost Blotter Art historian, Mark McCloud, suggests that after Owsely Stanley’s pill press was busted, that Blotter Acid began to make its way on to the streets, replacing the pills as the standardized medium.

In the early 1970s Blotter Acid began to make an appearance on the streets of San Francisco. Shortly after, iconic images began to make their way onto the Blotter Paper, which allowed dealers to put their own logo on the acid they were selling.

The logo could have been professionally printed or have been a rubber stamp of some freaky image. Not only did this serve to identify a brand of acid, but by using Blotter Paper, which weighed far less than other mediums, it kept drug dealers who got busted from getting as much mandatory time.

Over the years there have been hundreds of blotter designs, ranging from sacred images to the profane. Cartoon characters have found their way onto sheets along with mystical symbols, and musical imagery.

The collection of this form of art has become recognized and legitimized, and blotter art is being seen for what it truly is, a real folk art.

Today, Blotter Art is a highly collectable form of artwork. It has transcended the underground drug market and is available to art lovers worldwide. It steals its popularity from the visual similarities it shares with its’ once prolific chemical-soaked cousin.

It is not illegal, it is ART! It celebrates the days gone by when we were young and our minds were blooming. Now we no longer have to use an illegal substance to take a trip, even if it is down memory lane.

Check out Blotter Art at www.blotterart.com

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LSD Blotter Art
by Thomas Lyttle (thomlyttle@aol.com)

MAPS has recently received nearly $20,000 due to the sale of signed blotter art that was donated by Tom Lyttle and Jon Hanna. This story is about the origins and development of blotter as an art form.

THE EARLY DAYS

Early on in the underground trade of illegal LSD, it was distributed in pills or capsules, or sometimes dropped onto sugar cubes. Around 1970, LSD first began to appear on sheets of perforated blotter paper. This trend has continued, and even today, most street LSD is still distributed on perforated or unperforated blotter paper, often covered with logos or art, and sometimes sold under "brand names." In the past, blotter art was printed fairly secretively, with underground producers perforating it using hand-cranked machines, feeding in a single sheet and cutting it in one direction at a time, before flipping the sheet 90 degrees to crank the complet- ing set of perf lines. These days, the art is usually printed via the four-color separa- tion process. One blotter art producer recently even went so far to print his design on a hemp-blend paper with soy-based edible inks. Perforations for blotter are nowadays primarily done by professionals in the print industry, quickly stamped out by the thousands via automated die-cutting machines.

As LSD entered our cultural consciousness, it affected a generation of artists. In the late 1960s, "fantastic realist" painters like Mati Klarwein and Robert Venosa were heavily influenced by LSD. The album cover art that they produced for Santana's Abraxas reflected this new style. (This cover later appeared in miniature on LSD blotter art.) In San Francisco, underground comic and rock-and-roll poster artists like R. Crumb and Stanley Mouse soon saw their images appropriated for use on LSD art, which featured the likes of "Mr. Natural" and "Flying Eyeballs." In more recent years, work from contemporary psychedelic artists has also appeared on blotter, such as "Carbon Jesus" (aka "Purple Jesus") by Alex Grey, "Lucifer" by Reverend Samuel, and "Tribute to Preston Blair" by Frank Kozik.

Eventually, satirical blotter art started showing up; one sheet depicted the "FBI Emblems," while another featured the mug of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev-the popular "Gorby" acid. Every variety of pop art and ideology became fair game, as LSD blotter art spread like wild fire. LSD is a powerful spiritual experi- ence for many, and for some this experience has political overtones. It also seems to enhance the creative process. Occult or religious symbols, moire patterns, and fractal designs have been exploited on blotter art. Examples include: "Chinese Dragons," "Pentagrams," "Tetragammatons," "Eye of Horus," "Knights of Malta Crests," and so on. But one of the most consistently popular inspirations for blotter imagery has remained the lowly comic or animated character. Over the years, examples of appropriated cartoons have included Otto Messmer's "Felix the Cat" and Walt Disney's "Goofy" and "Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice," as well as the more contemporary "Beavis and Butt-head," "Bart Simpson," and "South Park."

FROM THE STREETS TO SOHO

The original collector and scene maker of blotter art is Mark McCloud, a San Francisco artist and former art professor. McCloud's collection covered everything from the late 1970s up to today: several hundred types of LSD blotter art. In the early days this art could only be obtained with LSD already on it. He bought these sheets, matted and framed them, and hung them like fine art. Ironically, it was initially quite difficult for McCloud to collect the undipped (and hence legal) sheets of art, making him both an art collector and a potential outlaw due to his interest in this unique form of folk art. But soon McCloud began to produce his own images- as well as make connections to other such artists in the community-and the bulk of his collection shifted to completely legal, undipped blotter. (The older pieces from his collection have been purposefully exposed to ultravio- let light, to destroy any LSD that might have been on them.) McCloud promoted his collection at galleries, and he won second place at the 1987 San Francisco County Fair for his "unusual but timely" art exhibition. National Public Radio gave McCloud exposure, and he won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and others.

The year 2000 saw McCloud busted by the federal government for "conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD." In a highly-publicized trial, the DEA claimed that he was supplying chemists and wholesalers with perforated sheets of undipped blotter art, as 30,000 of these had been found in his possession. This was the second such arrest for McCloud-having been busted on similar charges in 1992- and in 2001 he obtained his second acquittal. It is estimated that McCloud spent over half a million dollars on his defense, and the prosecution spent unknown amounts of money on a year-long stake out of his home-based businesses.

McCloud, along with New England art and antiquities dealer Adam Stanhope, has recently published a key piece of the prosecution's evidence from his trial: a large binder filled with a collec- tion of blotter obtained from busts across the United States spanning the ten years previous to his arrest, compared side-by-side to art that was seized from McCloud's home. The Bust Book acts as a history of the art of blotter as compiled by the federal government, making it a unique offering in the world of art. It is only available in a limited edition of 250 numbered and autographed copies for $500, or a special edition of 10 that also include an actual sample of the vintage (undipped) "Eye of Horus" blotter art-the oldest piece of blotter art still in existence-for $1000. (See www.acidartz.com for more details on this book.)

SIGNATURE PIECES

Back when I was publishing my journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, a friend introduced me to Mark McCloud. With Mark's encouragement, I started my own collection of undipped blotter art. After I had been collecting for a while, I had an idea. I approached psyche- delic luminaries, like Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, John Lilly, Robert Anton Wilson, Laura Huxley, Alexander Shulgin, and many others, and asked them to sign limited edition, hand-numbered blotter art prints. These then were matted and framed per museum display specs, and sold to galleries, art catalogs, nostalgia buffs, autograph stores, and 1960s memorabilia brokers. This was the beginning of what has been termed "vanity" blotter art. That is, blotter art which has been produced solely for art's sake as a collectible, and which was never intended to be dipped with any drugs. Indeed, in rare cases, including a signature on these pieces made them more valuable to collectors than if they had been dipped with LSD and sold on the streets. (Autographed vanity blotter art has been advertised for prices ranging from $65 to $4000!) Soon I was making decent money from the sale of my autographed blotter art, and in a few years was actually able to quit my job working as a chef, which I had done for 25 years. I spent more time at home, pursuing my true loves of art, writing, and research. One of the first projects I collaborated on with Mark McCloud and Robert Demarest was getting Timothy Leary to sign some of our undipped blotter art. As the figurehead for the LSD movement, Leary was even more famous than the man who discovered LSD himself, Albert Hofmann. Through Leary's archivist Michael Horowitz (who I was doing book business with), I contacted Tim and was pleased to hear that he agreed wholeheartedly with my idea of creating signed blotter. The first sheets he signed were called "Roses," featuring art produced by Stanley Mouse and Anton Kelley, well known to Grateful Dead fans. All 250 of the "Roses" sold out in less than a month!

The original collector and scene maker of blotter art
is Mark McCloud, a San Francisco artist and former art professor.

We then contacted Albert Hofmann in Switzerland, and in 1994 he signed about 15 "Knights of Malta Shields" blotter art sheets. We sent a few of these "Shields" sheets to Tim Leary, and he included his signature alongside Albert Hofmann's-a powerful artistic statement to be sure. [Editors note: Those pieces with autographs from both Leary and Hofmann have sold for the highest prices to motivated collectors.]

The blotter that I've produced has appeared in art catalogs such as ArtRock, Key-Z Productions, and Vroom. Through third-party brokers, my blotter appears all over the world, in rare book catalogs like Flashback Books and Red Snapper. The major auction houses Christie's and Harrods UK have even taken an interest, and my autographed blotter designs continue to increase in worth and collectibility. I've even sold blotter art to police depart- ments, drug counselors, DEA officials, and universities. It's somewhat surreal to see law enforcement agents buy my blotter art for display in their offices.

Timothy Leary signed many sheets of blotter; by doing so he helped to raise LSD's image into the world of fine art. The very week of his death, Leary was signing blotter art sheets for myself and others-Ram Dass was even sitting next to him during one such signing. More recently I contracted with porn star/director/sex educator Annie Sprinkle, PhD, to do a limited edition of "tit prints:" her breasts were dipped in paints and pressed onto blotter art sheets, which were then autographed. A 2002 project included a new blotter image, this time in collaboration with digital art guru Laurence Gartel, featuring his cybernetic Fetish imagery.

Finally, blotter art has come "full circle" in recent years,
acting as a fantastic support vehicle for the psychedelic community.

Signed and unsigned "vanity" blotter art is now available from web sites such as lsdblotterart.com, blotterart.co.uk, tripatourium.com, and my own thomlyttle.com, as well as half-a-dozen other sites. E-Bay regularly holds 50 to 75 "live" auctions where legitimate dealers and those interested in collecting converge. Art galler- ies around the world, such as Luna Star Cafe (Miami), the Fuse (NYC), and Galerie Macabre (Fort Lauderdale) regularly showcase blotter art. Blotter art collecting has gotten so popular that counterfeiting occasionally occurs. For example, images from Mark McCloud's original underground collection, such as "Red Lightning Bolts" and "Japanese Crests," have been unethically reprinted. H.R. Giger's "Illuminatus I," a signed and numbered limited edition blotter art that was originally produced by myself in coopera- tion with Giger and his agent Leslie Barany, has been counterfeited; fakes of poor quality were sold at Phish and Other Ones concerts, as well as being hocked on E-Bay. Another potentially questionable approach taken by many underground blotter art producers is the appropriation of images from famous contemporary artists, such as Alex Grey, with- out paying royalties. Underground blotter producers may justify borrowing the imagery that appears on their work, due to a concern that they don't want to implicate the artist by directly involving him or her in the process. And, they themselves quite reasonably wish to remain anonymous. Producers of vanity blotter have a harder time defending such an approach, now that this form of folk art is an above-ground cottage industry. Aside from Mark McCloud's two busts, the legal issues surrounding blotter art have mostly been minimal. I recently went to British Columbia carrying about 50 sheets of signed and unsigned blotter art, and I was stopped by Customs. They immediately knew what it was (or what it was supposed to be). After a lecture that lasted about an hour-one of my funniest-a crowd of Customs officials were drawn into the conversation. They eventually recognized that this was only art, albeit controversial and creative. They seemed amused enough, but at no time did they make any tests or remove anything from my collection for review. I walked right into B.C., Canada with my perforated sheets of blotter art, selling to several collectors there, with a great new story to boot. Finally, blotter art has come "full circle" in recent years, acting as a fantastic support vehicle for the psychedelic community. In 2003, Dr. Albert Hofmann signed blotter art designed by visionary artist Stevee Postman (see the inside back cover of this Bulletin)-a piece conceived of by Jon Hanna to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of LSD's effects and to act as a fund-raiser for MAPS and Erowid. [Editor's note: In fact, this article was edited on a computer purchased with funds raised from Hanna's blotter art donation.] MAPS has recently obtained nearly $20,000 due to the sale of blotter art. In this way, blotter art not only has raised LSD to a culturally valued art form, it has also contributed back to the community that generated it.

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Hit parade

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