Bøker av Spencer Kansa

From the late-1950s until his premature death in 1977, Burt Shonberg was one of the most highly admired artists in Los Angeles. During this period, his eye-popping murals graced the facades and interiors of popular coffeehouses and hip clubs on the Sunset Strip; his paintings adorned several notable rock album covers, and his haunting portraits featured prominently in Roger Corman’s film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Premature Burial.     Soon after he settled in L.A., Shonberg became the lover of the legendary occult artist Marjorie Cameron who turned him on to the teachings of the Edwardian magus Aleister Crowley and introduced him to the mind-warping properties of peyote. Shonberg also embraced the Fourth Way system of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and his canvases began to reflect the mystical illumination inspired by his higher states of consciousness.In 1960, the artist was chosen by Dr. Oscar Janiger to participate in his groundbreaking study into the effects of LSD-25 on the creative process. Although Shonberg regarded himself as a magical realist, his remarkable renderings of his hallucinogenic visions led many of his acolytes to regard him as the preeminent psychedelic artist of the era, and in the words of his friend and fellow painter Walter Teller, “Burt was the artist of Laurel Canyon.”Yet despite his popularity and status, Shonberg’s artistry has been criminally overlooked in all historical accounts of the Southern Californian art scene, until now. Out There redresses this injustice and brings some long overdue recognition to L.A.’s greatest lost artist, in a book illustrated with rare examples of his incandescent artwork.  

2020 Edition features fascinating new revelations, as well as over a dozen rare and new images In the first-ever biography written about her, Wormwood Star traces the extraordinary life of the enigmatic artist Marjorie Cameron, one of the most fascinating figures to emerge from the American underground art world and film scene.Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in 1922, Cameron's uniqueness and talent as a natural-born artist were evident to many of those around her early on in life. During World War II, she served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and worked in Washington, D.C. as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at the Naval Research Laboratory. But it was after the war that her life really took off when she met her first husband, Jack Parsons. By day, Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist; by night, he was Master of the Agape Lodge, a fraternal magickal order whose head was the most famous magus of the 20th century: Aleister Crowley.Gradually, through the course of their marriage, Parsons initiated Cameron into the occult sciences, and the biography offers a fresh perspective on her role in the infamous Babalon Working Enochian rituals Parsons conducted with the future founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard. Following Parsons' death in 1952 from a chemical explosion, Cameron inherited her husband's magickal mantle and embarked on a lifelong spiritual quest, a journey reflected in the otherworldly images she depicted, many drawn from the Elemental Kingdom and astral plane.Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron became a celebrated personality in California's underground art world and film scene. In 1954, she starred in Kenneth Anger's visual masterwork, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, stealing the show from her co-star Anais Nin. The filmmaker, Curtis Harrington, was so taken with Cameron he made a film study dedicated to her artwork entitled, The Wormwood Star. He then brought her powerful and mysterious presence to bear on his evocative noir thriller, Night Tide, casting her alongside a young Dennis Hopper.Cameron was an inspirational figure to the many artists and poets who congregated around Wallace Berman's Semina scene and in 1957, a group show held at the Ferus Gallery was shut down by the authorities due to the sexually charged nature of one of her drawings. Undaunted, she continued to carve a unique and brilliant path, although recognition only came in the latter part of her life.A retrospective of Cameron's work, The Pearl of Reprisal, was held at L.A.'s Barnsdall Art Park in 1989, and following her death, some of her most admired pieces were featured in the Reflections of a New Aeon Exhibition at the Eleven Seven Gallery in Long Beach, California. Cameron's famous Peyote Vision line drawing made its way into the Beat Culture and the New America retrospective held at the Whitney Museum in 1995; and in 2006, selections of her work were included in the touring Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle show. The following year a survey dedicated exclusively to her own work was held at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.With so much of her life and artistry shrouded in mystery, Wormwood Star sheds new light on this most remarkable artist and elusive occult icon..