Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Forest cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Isaac Abrams was born and raised in New York City. He is a self taught artist who started painting in 1965.
Based in upstate New York, he continues to paint every day.
He first discovered psychedelics in 1962. He then discovered psychedelics again and again.
He decided there had to be such a thing as psychedelic art and founded the Coda Gallery, the first gallery of psychedelic art in New York City in 1965.
He had his first one man show in 1968 at Galerie Psychotherapy in Zurich.
And he has other memorable moments include climbing a tree with Timothy Leary to discuss business, meeting Salvador Dali shooting a film at Mickey hart's ranch in 1971 featuring Jerry Garcia and the new writers of the Purple Sage, Reality One group and David Crosby. He has worked across several mediums, from oil to acrylic sculpture, from animation to brushes to airbrushes, canvas to board, glass and bronze.
Isaac, welcome to the Brainforest Cafe. We're delighted to have you.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: I'm delighted to be here and I always love hearing my biography because I can always. No, it was this and it was that. It wasn't this year and it wasn't the first gallery of psychedelic art in New York. It was the first gallery of psychedelic art in the world. And that is what the Tate Gallery said I accomplished.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: So your biography that I have for you is very brief and it doesn't really do you justice. You've had many encounters over the years with major figures in the psychedelic world and I've been reading some of this background information you kindly provided. But rather than try to interrogate you in some linear fashion, just tell me what your life has been. You've hung out with amazing people in the early 60s and when all this psychedelic revolution was just beginning. So you know Timothy Leary and Alpert and Howard Lotsoff and all those things. Tell me about your encounters with some people.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Well, I'll start with the first person who ever turned me onto a psychedelic. His name was Jerry Jophin. And Jerry was a son of a rabbi. Son of a rabbi. Son of a rabbi. Rabbi of the Scholastic School of Judaism in Krakow. And was preserved, the bloodline was preserved by sending them across Russia away from the Nazis, and they came through Shanghai and ended up in Brooklyn, of course, where everyone ends up in Brooklyn. I was born in Brooklyn, right, And some of Brooklyn is in me. Anyway, how I met Jerry, I had graduated and I graduated with a creative writing degree which didn't exist. But I. That's what I decided what it Was. And I went out to get a job. So I went to someplace called the Journal of the American Waterworks association, okay? And I went there and the guy was charmed by me and he was about to hire me when he looked down and realized I had misspelled Wednesday.
I didn't know how to spell that. And I still don't know how to spell. You see that when you read my work. But on the way home, walking down 3rd Avenue, I saw a place called the K Gallery.
And I was kind of interested in it. And I went in and I liked what I saw. I liked the art and so on and the whole atmosphere.
And later I got to know Jerry much better. And the K Gallery was named after Kafka. And when I look at a picture of him on the Google or whatever it is, he looks like Kafka after a hard weekend. It's dark stuff like that. But the thing about him, he was totally brilliant, magnificent mind and a tragic person. He was heavily drugged out and everything like that for a whole range of drugs.
But he told me never to shoot drugs, never do those drugs and so on, right? Because I had a special quality about myself and it should be preserved. I think he was looking at who he could have been or was or what, you know. In any case, he said to me that I got some psilocybin. I had never smoked marijuana.
I had, however, knew about psychedelics because when I was a youngster, I got a job with a hipster who was a musician.
And this guy told me about mescaline and psychedelics. And what he said was, the color of every leaf in a tree will be different than every other one. And I read Doors of Perception five years later, Jerry came forth.
And I have to give credit to Charlie Mack. He was the musician. He took me as a 16 year old to the city with my parents. And we lived in Great Neck, upper middle class Jewish neighborhood.
And we went. I saw many, many, many people play. And it was. They all knew him. And I became kind of a mascot, you know, which was quite fun. But, you know, to me, people like, you know, that was the heart of hip hop. Not hip hop, but something else they called it at the time, anyway, Bebop. Not hip hop. Bebop.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Bebop.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: And he said we could take the psilocybin. And we took it.
And it was amazing, Amazing. The ceilings moved and all kinds of stuff. But the most amazing part of it, in a certain sense of the word, was we decided to go to Manhattan while we're tripping and so we went out and we got a taxicab. And taxicab, as I describe him, what I wrote, he was an African, an American of African descent, right? Bald headed, shining bald head, broad shouldered, and pulled out from the curb and drove all the way to the Charles Theater on Avenue B in Manhattan without stopping for a light. Without. It was just like. It was a perfect taxicab ride. Absolute thing only a thing could only happen when you're on psychedelics and you're quite right experience.
And next thing you know, I'm looking at movies by Van De Beek and Anger, you know, and Kenneth Anger and a whole bunch of people that I mentioned in there, including the absolutely amazing Charlie Harry Smith, who is as magnificent a mind as Cherry Joplin and as damaged a human being.
He was completely damaged, but he was unbelievable, right?
And he did Cat's Cradle. He was a master of East Ukraine. He had Easter eggs, American Indian issues and stuff like that. And he was fantastic rocks. And so we went on this trip and these films I saw while tripping were like nothing I had ever seen and probably weren't that good. But I was really receptive.
And subsequently Jerry took me to the country and we took mescaline.
And I had several really incredible experiences. And I'll start with one.
I walked under a leaping beech tree. It's like a big tree with lots of leaves. It's not like a willow tree covered with leaves. And I'm standing under there and I begin to feel this warmth and wetness and all of this is happening. And then I start becoming aware of this incredible electric energy.
It's building and building and building. And I'm standing under the thing, getting into this incredible energy field. And then I open my eyes and realize I'm closed. I'm covered with baby flies.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Oh, no.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: The whole place is full below a probably a million baby flies. I realized, get out of here. And I left. And they didn't follow me out because I had come into this place which I think was capital city of baby flies. Boston county, you know, where I was. You know, just go wherever it was that I was. And that was just part of the thing, you know, And I. But I experienced music, Sufi call and response music and other things that were put out by the UN and Laotian music. And I understood it was about a boat ride down a river. And I'd look down and I'd find they're singing in Laotian. I look down and it says on the big river, down the Metcal or whatever. It's called Mikao or something. It was incredible transformation, transformational experience capped at the moment when she took out marijuana and smoked it. And I was shocked because that was a drug. All right.
I had never smoked such a thing as marijuana.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: You kind of started at the top end and worked out to marijuana. But let me ask you, you talked about your previous experience with psilocybin, one of your initial psychedelic experiences. How in the world did you get psilocybin in 1965? It wasn't exactly common at that time.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: There was only one place to get it from and that was through Harvard. And somehow this Jerry, he was a person who was well known as being something special. And I can only suspect that it came that way. Suzheering. And there was other people I knew a man named Gerd Stern who I met later. And Gerd was a teacher at Harvard and he was later at a thing called usco and they did multimedia such overload. So it could have come in, but there it was.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Was it mushrooms or a pill?
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Pill, A pill.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: So somebody had some high level connections there, apparently maybe to Harvard. That would have been about the only place you could have found psilocybin at that time, in that place.
But anyway, I was just curious about that.
So when was the first time you encountered Timothy Leary? What was the circumstances of that?
[00:12:03] Speaker A: I know you read what I wrote, so you're going to take advantage of it.
And what I did after, I had lots of different psychedelic experiences. I had never actually had LSD and I got it, it was on a sugar cube with a little brown spot. But it certainly was a really good experience. And I had quite a few interesting experience before that. And I came off feeling there had to be such a thing as it was such an extraordinary experience and so clear, you know, and which I really liked acid. I liked acid quite a lot, especially when it was from Switzerland or someplace like that, you know.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Right. There's a lot to like about it. Yeah.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: And I ended up meeting Owsley. I met, you know, when I was hanging out with the Den and I met Owsley and I met Nikki Sands, who was a big. Who mainly made a lot of dmt, which I go back to in a minute. But so I called up and I told them what I wanted to do and they said, well, come on up.
I was there on time, I was always timely and I am a member of to the manor born. But I'm very timely, like that kind of thing apparently.
And I get there and I say, where's Dr. Leary? I refer to him as Dr. Leary. And they pointed up in the air and they said, he's up in the tree.
Like 25 years old. I had been. I was an acrobat and a dancer. Climbing a tree for me was as natural as.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: And one of these. Not a pine tree, but kind of tree with leaves that loses its leaves.
And the thing is, I go up there, and we're sitting in a place up in the tree where two people can hang out. We talk for 45 minutes, maybe an hour. And I said what I wanted to do was this psychedelic art gallery and find people on psychedelic arts. And so I'd come up here to talk to you because I'm sure you might go. Some people says, I do. I do, and I'll help you. And they did, and they were very helpful. And it led to the opening of the Coda Gallery, which didn't last very long, partly because my funding ran out.
And it ran out. And when it ran out, it ran out thoroughly.
My father wasn't exactly.
My father made shoe polish.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: He did what?
[00:14:46] Speaker A: He made shoe polish.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: He had a very popular brand of shoe polish he and my uncle owned.
And he's a Jewish businessman born of Romanian Jewish parents, the first of his siblings born in America. And I told him what it was and what I was doing. And he said, you know, the kind of knowledge that you're involved with has always existed, but it's for very few people. And it's kind of like almost a secret knowledge like that. It's a very dangerous thing you're doing, you know, like. But because it's. It could draw energies, I said, what the hell? And it did do all of that. Good energies. And sometimes things that, you know, I found myself in difficult situations, and I walk through them like they weren't really existing.
So that's how I met Tim. And then I went into business with a guy. I was introduced by a psychotherapist named Arthur Eaton, who was a highly. He was a very radical man. Not communist radical. It was as a psychologist, right. And I basically turned him onto acid. And he turned me onto this guy who was my partner. It was 1965, and my partner in the thing was a black guy.
So my attitude was, getting the vote's important, but being in business really is important.
A capitalist family. Don't just be political, be political. And also. And someone asked me if my father was political, and I said, not political, I'd say, but he likes politicians.
In other words, if he could meet up with a politician, that would get something done right. Get a commission or whatever he likes. Politicians and baseball. I spent a lot of time as a kid in Ebbets Field and a box between home and first. And I met Jackie Robinson, I met Joe Hodges. And it was unreal. And the thing was so funny because when we drove up to Evans Field, the home of the Dodgers, the true Dodgers, the Brooklyn Dodgers, before Walt got rid of them and traded them to la, the cop would come up with a gold badge and my father would give him the car keys. I thought police existed in order to give me. Came out.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: I see you were taught to distrust the police.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: No, to trust them. They park the car for you? You know, I've never distrusted police. I just was very straightforward. I always said, you know, I found things that were illegal, but I've never committed any crimes.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Right, right. Yes, they were. They were not even illegal at that in those days.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Later, like, you know, stepping on cocaine with an adulterant, now that's a crime.
They would laugh and they'd leave me alone because, you know, I never did anything naughty.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Did you encounter Owsley? You say you got the psilocybin through Owsley initially, or.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: No, I don't think the Owsley. The psilocybin came through some unknown sorts and was only when I went out to California.
Then I meet Owsley and turned out that Owsley's mate lives on the same street. Lived on the same street in.
Just on the borderline of Woodstock. This woman.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: No kidding. That's interesting. That's. That's convenient.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Right. And across the street was a woman named Susan Weed, who's a well known, notorious herbalist.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: You know, I know her.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: And she's very intense. My wife is studying with her and I've known her since then. And they had the psychedelic attention in New York and I had the psychedelic gallery and then I'm, you know. And then here's Ronnie Stanley, Ozzie Stanley. Strangely, how could we all live within like a half a mile of each other on the same road?
Well, I don't ask questions. It just happened, you know. But it was interesting. But between LSD and that, I had quite a few encounters, right. And I wrote some. I wrote them down for my remembrance sheets, but that's too complicated.
I also knew Lotsoff.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Lotsov. Yes, tell me about that.
When did you meet Lotsov? He's another iconic character with an interesting life. So what was your experience?
[00:20:02] Speaker A: I met him and got masculine hydrochloride white mescaline from him about 1963.
And 4. And we were doing really good and had a wonderful time with it.
And he had. Howard had lots of labs, and the Fed showed up and said, where's all the cats and dogs and rabbits and not mice living in an apartment on 11th Street?
And I think they began to suspect that he was up to something that might not be straightforward and. But he was. You know, you could buy a. You could buy a jar of mescaline for like a hundred dollars. A jar of it. Right. Well, Howard came across a thing called ibogaine.
And subsequently, when he ran away, he ran away to Holland and opened a clinic.
But when he first got it, he and I looked at. It looked like mescaline.
It's the chemical patterns similar to mescaline.
And we decided that we would try it. And to the best of my recollection, we Both took around 500 milligrams.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: 500 milligrams of pure ibogaine.
That should have been a sufficient dose. Yeah.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Yes.
It was hypersufficient. But the thing about it was, I would say that I could claim with Howard to be the first two guys in North America that ever took ivory chain. And the experience was absolutely spectacular because we had taken it in someone else's house and we were sitting on the couch. At a certain point, I stood up and I said, I don't. Nothing is happening. However.
And when that happened, my astral body went something up through my body, and then another astral body went up and another one. And I ended up with my head on the ceiling looking down at everyone in the room. This was not a hallucination. This was really happening.
So we decided we better go back a couple of blocks away across Avenue A, because this was A and B across Avenue A.
And we did. But getting there was an adventure because when we came to the avenue, we could not agree.
No, first, what happened was the first, another hallucination was I reached for the doorknob, shining gold doorknob.
And there was no doorknob there. It was on the other side, and it was an old brass one.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: That happens, right?
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Wow, that's kind of a thing. That could be a problem.
I was conscious, but it was like. And so we get to Avenue A, and we cannot. We cannot agree on what we're seeing, because things are really very odd. And finally a woman with a baby carriage came, and we followed her because we agreed we saw that and we got to the other side safely and got to his apartment.
And when we got there, we went in and there was an extra bedroom and had a bed in it. It had a window. It had a venetian blind, you know, with those little blinds at the.
And I sat down on the bed, and when I sat down on the bed, what happened was I sunk into the bed and I fell back. Oh, no. The blinds started going. I had an Adam sink, right.
And. And. And I fell back into the bed. When I fell into the bed, I'd go.
I threw my head down into my body and there I was. I was inside my body.
Subsequently on psychedelic like psychedelics like DMT and acid or them combined, I also had in body experiences.
Out of body, yes, but in body experience.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: So ibogaine gave you the in body experience.
When you took ibogaine with Lotsov, that was the first time that he had taken on.
That's when he. His heroin addiction on that occasion.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Yeah, he might have. I didn't know if he had heroin addiction, but at that. It seems to be what I've heard, right?
[00:24:46] Speaker B: And he tells the story that he was experimenting with ibogaine. He was experimenting with anything he could get his hands on, but he was a serious junkie. And when he took ibogaine, then the next morning he woke up and he had no wish to take heroin.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: And it was funny because many years later, one of my sons went to a talk by him shortly before he passed away. He described a specific experience with the whole experience, Right.
And my son walked up to him and said, my father told me about that. His name is Isaac Abrams.
Is he still alive?
And my son said, yes, and then went off somewhere and I found out that he had died shortly thereafter. You know, I know he was, you know, like, there were a lot of people around who took drugs. I never took drugs, I just took psychedelics. Except for a little time that I was involved with cocaine.
And that's something I told my children.
Don't really get involved with it very heavily because it makes you feel smart.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Makes you feel smart.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah. The problem is really smart people often feel dumb because they realize that they misunderstood a situation or something. But really stupid people don't feel stupid. And cocaine makes them feel smart and powerful, and they end up. And I saw guys go through Lehman Brothers down a ladder into obscurity of the. The market, you know, And I frankly had a little bit of time with it and enjoyed it, but when it came time to stop, I stopped. I just stopped.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: It's a decision. I mean, it's.
I've never been addicted to cocaine, but, you know, I can see where a person might get habituated but unaddictive.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Like tobacco, right?
[00:26:58] Speaker B: It's not like tobacco. It's completely different.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I wrote all these things on paper, but now I called it the Disintegrated Magician. And it was about being attacked by Masons. Not Masons, like in the. Like guys with the hats on. But.
Well, maybe I won't find it, but it was really funny.
And the thing was, mesons spontaneously disintegrated. And so it was all about becoming attacked by Masons and escaping from them by riding on a J porpoise or something.
But it was like. But quadrillions of enormous mesons who were subatomic particle. But it's your turn.
Oh, but that's the thing I told my. That was one thing I told my. I tell young people about heroin.
I was a friend of mine who was. He was a notorious criminal attorney and he was also a great pool player and an incredible cocaine user. So calls me up in San Francisco and says, I have something for you. And I come and what this something has for me is a beautiful woman who is a sex worker.
And there's this stuff on the table, right? And I thought it was coke, and I took a snort of it. That's funny. Coke, Is it Not coke. It's heroin, okay? And here I am. So now here I am with this tall blonde and these words. I couldn't get it up, I couldn't get it down, and I couldn't get it off, you see?
And I decided never again because it was against my rules. You know, if something like you did something that they cut you off from your feeling body and your sexual body and all that kind of stuff, and you sleep and your dreams, right? Then it's. And gives you constipation.
I don't think it's very good to.
To do that.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Was. That was your only encounter with heroin?
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Well, I took it once and it was boring. And nothing.
Mine was that, and that was enough.
And people say, well, psychedelics are drugs. I say, don't say that. Your psychedelics are an entirely different thing.
When I had met the musician and I read Doors of Perception, and then when the word came that I could get psychedelic, I was ready and willing and I was going to do it. My wife said to me, if you're going to go and take a trip somewhere, I'm going with you. And we did.
And I did a painting, which somewhere in the world called I Can Ricky Take a Trip. And we took a trip. We got married before any of us did anything like chemicals.
And we we were in England, we got married on the day the Russians started the Berlin war. And five days later we were in Berlin on our honeymoon.
And this was the honeymoon, watching Russian tanks and American tanks 200 yards from each other, like with the guns going this and that, going, oh, gee, here we are, we just got married and we can exceed the beginning of the Third World War. It didn't happen incidentally, but it was, you know, it was a remarkable experience driving all the way to Berlin from Cambridge, you know, and so on, it's that kind of thing. But I think some of the experiences I've had with psychedelics have, like going in your own body, I think have helped me health wise.
I know I once had my carotened carotid arteries and I heard them and I said to the person administering it to see if. I said, I have heard that before. And he said, what? Really? I said, yeah, I was high on acid and I heard that. I could hear that in my body. I could hear the things happening in my body. It was like swimming inside my body. And it was a very distinct experience, you know, and between that and the appreciation of nature, you know, and really.
And that was what, you know, what Albert Hoffman said, He said it isn't religion, you know, there's no. It's to reacquaint ourselves with the natural world, which it did for me. And very much so.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: You admitting people, that's one of the insights that psychedelics give people is a realignment with nature and perhaps a realization of how estranged we become from nature over time. So in some ways I think psychedelics are evolutionary catalysts to bring us back alignment with nature. That's just me, that's just my.
I have a question for you though about a specific drug. When was the first time that you encountered DMT and what were your impressions of that?
[00:32:38] Speaker A: It was a house that was on that. We used to call the guy Henry Allstate because we were in good hands with Henry and Nick Sands, who's now gone, was the guy who made the damn tea, right?
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Okay. His name is coming up everywhere, right.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: Found out it comes out of the natural sources like that and it's the underlying chemical link with something else in the one down South America.
And you know, I loved dmt and then he couldn't get it, you know, because the thing was that when they made acid illegal, suddenly the same base that could make $25 worth of DMT, right? You could sell it for $25, I guess, you know, that much of it you could make that much LSD that you could sell for $200,000?
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Yeah, as a business model, DMT is not so good. But certainly in terms of as a business model, I mean, you can get, you know, out of a gram of dmt, you could get at most a few dozen doses. It doesn't make sense. LSD is much, but there's nothing in the psychedelic world that's quite like dmt.
I'm reading this very interesting book by Andy Gallimore. I don't know if you know his work, but he's focused on DMT as an alien something or other portal to other dimensions. He's got a book called Death by Astonishment and it refers to something my brother said about dmt. Someone at one of his seminars asked him, can you die from taking dmt? And he said, only if you can die from astonishment.
And it's sort of, I don't know.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: What went up my nose. Yeah, it's so funny.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: So dmt, was it a big influence on you?
[00:35:03] Speaker A: It was because it was what I was using for what I was doing.
And sometimes I would. I had bred Tolkien, probably, something like that. I did DMT and I became the Dark Lord like that. And sometimes it was pure light and like that. And I remembered turning on a guy from some publication, well, what does this stuff do? And I was up at another place. This was not a little place in Brooklyn with black walls. And you know, it was a different end of the spectrum of, you know, this was on 10th or 11th street and it was like the top, it was a garden in it and everything. And I turned this guy on to the mpmt.
Oh my God. Then he ended up getting involved. And then I also turned on a guy who was one of the designers of the book, Psychedelic Art.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: I had painted a painting after I was done with the Coda Gallery and I'd gone through peyote. I drank 825oo capsules of ground up peyote. I learned how to drink peyote tea really fast. And I told people, don't sip on it because it's quite bitter.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: No, you just have to bolt it down.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: You have to bolt it down just to, you know, cold and fast. And then you realize how bad it tasted but it's too late, you know. And then also we. When I took capsules, sometimes I would take air sickness pills so I wouldn't throw up. Well, it would work for like two to three hours and then I'd throw up. And I was pretty high, but when I threw up I really got high.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: And so I went through all that. All that kind of stuff, you know, and dmt and, you know, a couple of times I had pcp. Oh, okay, that's bad. I broke tooth on it from grinding, you know, like, really.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: I've never tweaked it, but I have no desire to, really.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Well, it's not a psychedelic. It's a psychic. And what it does removes your psychic power, the boundaries of your psyche to all kinds of crazy stuff. And people would say, well, you know, there's a lot of crazy people in New York. I said, no kidding? There's 7 million, even if it's 1% to shade the same. So I. I think your. Your instinct of not using it was a very good one.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: I was.
I was never reckless. I was always curious, but I was very careful about my approach to these things.
I wonder if, back in the day, in the early 60s, was there ever any ayahuasca around? Did you ever have a chance to take ayahuasca in those days?
[00:38:26] Speaker A: It was something. They used to use a different name for it.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: What's.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: That was a vine. South American vine.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think it was around, you know, and you had to go to the jungle to get it. You know, I think Burroughs wrote about it, so on.
[00:38:45] Speaker B: Exactly, Burroughs. And because of Burroughs, there was some around, you know, Ginsburg also because Burroughs went to South America, wrote this amazing book called the Yahe Letters.
And there's a whole backstory about Burroughs and Schultes. Burroughs was actually the one that gave Schultes the clue that it was an admixture plant that was most important to Ayahuasca's pharmacology because it was the admixture plant that contained the dmt, the visionary component, made the tea from the vine without the admixture. It was mildly psychoactive, but hardly psychedelic. And it was Burrow's observations that led Schultes to look into these admixtures. Did you ever encounter Schultes? Did you ever meet Schultes?
[00:39:45] Speaker A: What's his full name?
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Richard Schultes. He was a director.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: I never met museum at Harvard, but Jerry Joffen. I met somebody whose name escapes me at the moment.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: He's a very iconic figure, and he was an early. He was an ethnobotanist. Spent years in the Amazon tracking down all these psychoactive plants, of which ayahuasca was one of his main focuses. I just wondered if you might have run into him or different circumstances, although you were in New York mostly. He was of course, in Boston when he wasn't in the Amazon. But he knew many of the people that you knew, Leary and Ginsburg and so forth.
So your art, talk about your art, I mean, was. It obviously must have been greatly influenced by your different psychedelic experiences. But it's interesting because, I mean, maybe I'm stepping across the line here because I'm certainly no art critic, but it's not typically psychedelic art as you think of it these days, but it was one of the earliest forms of psychedelic art. So talk about how psychedelics and art came together in your life.
[00:41:10] Speaker A: Well, someone came, he smoked DMT with me and I told him, you know, and he got some acid to take it and he sat down with a 4th century plant and they don't bloom. And while he was tripping, the plant bloomed, which to me is pretty typical. I'm psychedelics. And so I became temporarily the father of psychedelic art.
But then I look at a lot of stuff that people call psychedelic art. I have disowned. They're not psychedelic art. It's something that people call psychedelic art, you know, And I thought a lot about this when I was going to talk to you or we're going to talk to each other.
And I'm kind of the uncle of people like psychedelic artists or close to it. Lawrence Fuch took psychedelics, but not lsd. He took peyote, he was in New York, did that kind of stuff, peyote and stuff. Ernst Fuchs. That was quite a bit of time before.
What I thought about being a psychedelic artist was if you point yourself at my work, it's not a brand, it's not one thing like that with the same thing over and over. And the gallery says, good, I can keep doing these and I can sell these. And I, you know, like that. I walk in and they always say, look, it's incredible, but I don't know how to sell this because you do two of one and you do three of them. You do 29 drawings in a month and a half. Drawings are called welcome to the Enchanted Forest and they're white on black. And then I've gone on to create color things about them and so on, you know. But I'm just too damn irregular, you know. But I'm a psychedelic artist because I have multiple personalities that were created. And what we say about, you know, the difference between psychosis and psychedelic is very. People say it's a psycho tropic thing. Meaning it makes you crazy.
No, you know, and you know, it doesn't make me a schizophrenic. Schizophrenic, loosely speaking, is multiple personalities at war with each other. You know, psychologists, you know, is being multiple personalities that work and play well together.
And I really do feel that way, you know, that this kind of thing.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: You know, psychedelic is such a slippery term. You know, it means whatever you want it to mean. It means mind manifesting, you know, literally. So any kind of artistic expression in some ways is psychedelic, but there's a certain, you know, genre associated or style. But as your work illustrates, there's a great sort of spectrum of what can be considered psychedelic art.
So you were a pioneer of all this back in the day because psychedelics were just beginning to diffuse into the culture. They were not so well known before that.
Well, I thank you for your conversation.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Here, but I would say more about my paintings.
The biological groups of them, gardens, all kinds of things. And we'd be happy to help you see some of the things I do because there is such a variety of things I've done whole periods when I did dots, pure dots, energy paintings like this, you know, and then I did different kinds, so many different kinds of things, you know, and they go. There they are. And then I go onto something else and onto something else. It's intense. And right now I'm combining done some pieces that are like combination of dot painting, but something else. So I did all these white paintings, white on black. And then I started to color in some of them and then just started to flower, explode in another direction.
And then this one behind me, which is called.
It's like an homage to Caravaccio or famous Italian painter. Beautiful blacks. And so I've done this piece. I love this piece. It has depths and explosions of energy. You know, it's like kind of psychedelic in the sense that it reminds me of floating smoke, glial mind, my glio brain and coming upon neuronic events, sending waves of energy through the glio things.
I think we know a lot through experience, but we don't know a lot through explanation.
[00:46:23] Speaker B: We appreciate the chance to learn about it. We put links on our podcast website to some of your different galleries so people can.
So people could look at that and appreciate the evolution of your art. You've lived a very long and interesting life, Isaac. I thank you for sharing some of it with me, with us and our audience. We're looking forward to posting this and really appreciate your time.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Thank you.
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