Altmeisterliche Psychedelik
The FIRST EDITION of NFT ART by Norbert Lösche is a limited edition of 9x9 artworks.
The edition was named by Norbert Lösche as „Altmeisterliche Psychedelik“
This is a German term – but how can we understand „altmeisterlich“ to begin with?
The word is an adjective that is often used in the context of art analysis. This word has almost died out in today's language and can no longer be found in the German dictionary. The term is often used in the following context: "old master style".
For paintings it means that the work of art was created in a painting style from the early to late Middle Ages. The word can be composed of "old" and "master". So it means that the styles of the old masters, between the 13th and 18th centuries, have been used. Accordingly, an old-master artist is someone who addresses the styles of the artists of the time or adopts them.
The works of art at that time were mostly religious, while later old masters were based on secular and figurative motifs. In the painting style, colors were often alienated and objects deformed.
The old masters painted in both glazing and opaque painting techniques and layered a large number of paint applications on top of each other.
Painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, but also Salvador Dalí created the finest color transitions and nuances with the help of the composition and depth of the image.
With the glazing layered painting method, the light penetrates the transparent layers of paint and is reflected from the background as so-called deep light, illuminating the colors from behind.
Due to the many layers, the brush stroke fades and each layer has less meaning. Any small errors are corrected by other layers and disappear. With the help of layered painting and its depth of image, wonderfully perfect color transitions are created. Even dashed color transitions blur through other glazed color applications, so that they are hardly noticeable.
With this in mind the viewer will see how Norbert Lösche transferred this approach into his computer art and created a style like no other digital artist.
And how can we understand „Psychedelik“?
The images of the edition are painted in a style that was called psychedelic art as defined by Masters and Houston in their seminal book Psychedelic Art in early 1968, bringing one back to the late medieval Hieronymus Bosch, including living masters such as Mati Klarwein or Ernst Fuchs et al. The authors wrote: „The psychedelic experience is experience, not injected talent or ingested inspiration, although the artist may draw inspiration from any thought or perception, whatever the situation of its occurrence“. Or as Stanley Krippner stated: „Paintings or other forms of artistic expression show the effects of psychedelic experience, usually chemically induced” and whose work may have been produced “as a result of psychedelic experience, during psychedelic experience, or in an attempt to induce a psychedelic experience“.
The word „Psychedelic“ consists of the Greek words Psyche and Delos – briefly translated as the process in which the Soul of the individual appears. Masters and Houston proclaimed this art to be “Dionysian, ecstatic, energetic”, “religious, mystical, God manifest in All, but especially in the primordial energy that makes the worlds go, powers the existential flux…
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern (William Blake)