Visionary facts for kids
Defined broadly, a visionary, is one who can envision the future. For some groups, this can involve the supernatural or use of mind-altering drugs.
A visionary state can be achieved via meditation, drugs, lucid dreams, daydreams, or art. One example is Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century artist/visionary and Catholic saint. Other visionaries in religion are Mohammed (who had a vision of and communed with the Angel Gabriel), St. Bernadette (who had a vision of contact with the Blessed Virgin), and Joseph Smith (who had a vision of contact with the Angel Moroni).
In art
Artists may produce work loosely categorized as visionary art for its luminous content and/or for its use of artistic techniques that call for the use of extended powers of perception in the viewer: (e.g. Gustave Moreau, Samuel Palmer, Jean Delville, Ernst Fuchs, the French Symbolist Odilon Redon, Brion Gysin, Max Ernst, Stanley Spencer, Edward Burne Jones, Adolf Wolfli, Fred Sandback, William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, and Henry Darger).
Visionary art can be incorrectly defined as a category of primitive art (art of those not formally trained) rather than describing people who have used their visions (or dreams) to create their paintings. Salvador Dali is one artist who would exemplify visionary art that is neither religious nor primitive.
- Celestial Visitations The Art of Gilbert Williams (Pomegranate Artbooks) ISBN: 0-517539-00-4, 1979
- Carlo McCormick Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, Inner Traditions International, 1990
- Joseph Nechvatal William Blakeand Visionary Art
- Metamorphosis: 50 Contemporary Surreal, Fantastic and Visionary Artists (beinArt) ISBN: 978-0-9803231-0-8
- John Maizels,Raw Creation: Outsider Art and Beyond (1996). ISBN: 0714831492
- Elka Spoerri, Daniel Baumann and E. M. Gomez, The Art of Adolf Wolfli (2003). ISBN: 0691114986
- Geiger, John (2005). Nothing Is True - Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin. The Disinformation Company, 130. ISBN: 1-932857-12-5.
- R. Todd Wise The Great Vision of Black Elk as Literary Ritual, in The Black Elk Reader, 2000. ISBN: 0815628366
- Fantastic Art (Taschen) ( Schurian, Prof. Dr. Walter) ISBN: 978-3-8228-2954-7 (English edition), 2005
- Metamorphosis (beinArt) ISBN: 978-0-9803231-0-8, 2007
- Cosmic Art Ramond & Lila Piper (Hawthorne Books) ISBN: 0-8015-1774-5, 1975
