Lanny-yap: Bryan Lewis Saunders | Under The Influence

11 January 2016

Bryan Lewis Saunders | Under The Influence

Huffing

Meth

Nitrous and Valium

Pruno (Prison wine)

Bath Salts

Pot

DMT

It’s a topic that’s inspired endless debate—the link between art and creativity and brain-altering chemicals. Usually, the drugs are a lifestyle choice of "creative" types. In the case of artist Bryan Lewis Saunders, they were a key part of the process and end product.

Saunders, a performance and visual artist, undertook a high profile experiment in creativity, starting several years ago whereby, according to the artist, he created a series of self-portraits, each one done under the influence of a different substance—pretty much an A to Z assortment, from prescription meds like Abilify and Xanax to crystal meth. Over the weeks he’d create amazing pieces, suffer mild brain damage and end up hospitalized—all for the sake of art and creation.

... While this was all done in the name of art, Saunders is quick to say that the drug use is nothing to be proud of. "To be honest I’m not proud to be on any drugs in any pictures. I think drugs make me look really ugly. And I’m really a six trick pony, but the world only likes one of my tricks. Each year 500,000 kids around the world discover drugs and so the virus never dies." Saunders, who started creating a self-portrait a day in 1995, has done over 8,600 self-portraits ...

More at FastCoCreate | Bryan Lewis Saunders

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Absurdity, ambiguity, anomalies, bacon, behavior, bonobos, brain science, consciousness, conversation, design, evolution, expressive arts, extremes, food, frontiers, gadgets, hermetics, humor, ingenuity, irony, maps, martinis, mental health, monkeys, mysteries, mysticism, nonsense, oddness, paradoxes, phenomenology, rocks, semantics, sf, social justice, spirituality, technology, tilt-shift and time-lapse, the visual presentation of data, anthropo-, bio-, eco-, etho-, ethno-, psycho- and sociology

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11 January 2016

Bryan Lewis Saunders | Under The Influence

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