Visionary art, often called DMT art or ayahuasca art, is a loose label for paintings and digital images that try to depict reported visions: shifting geometry, vivid colour, tunnels and beings. Researchers treat such art as one way of recording the experience; a 2020 paper lists “paintings featured in ‘visionary art’” among the sources that describe how DMT changes perception (Schartner and Timmermann, 2020). In 3,778 coded online reports, 32.6% described fractals or patterns (Lawrence et al., 2022).
The painter most often linked with ayahuasca visions is Pablo Amaringo (1943–2009), who came from a family of vegetalistas, mestizo plant healers (Dino, 2019). His collaboration with the anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna produced the book Ayahuasca Visions, reviewed in American Anthropologist in 1993 (Whitten, 1993). In 1988 the two founded the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting, which Luna says had around 300 students when he left in 1994 (Luna, 2023); it is in Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon (Dino, 2019).
This kind of painting is newer than many assume: figurative painting is relatively absent from traditional Western Amazonian contexts, where geometric designs are more typical (Dino, 2019). Every picture is an interpretation, because the reports describe motion and meaning a still image cannot hold.
Sources
- Schartner and Timmermann, 2020, Neuroscience of Consciousness: art, DMT and perception
- Dino, 2019, Chacruna: Pablo Amaringo and ayahuasca art
- Luna, 2023, University of Exeter psychedelic colloquium archive
- Lawrence et al., 2022, Scientific Reports: 3,778 coded DMT reports
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