Psychedelic OG’s Journey From Owsley Acid to a Vision of Vishnu

Call Gwyllm Llwydd — as he’s known in the art world —  a longstanding member of what he playfully considers the “entheogensia.” He's a painter, a psychedelic collage maker, and the publisher of the Invisible College, a publication brimming with visionary art and poetry that launched in 2006. (The journal's 13th edition will be arriving soon.) His work spans to blotter art, as well — one of his pieces appears in Erik Davis' book Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium. Llwydd also writes and curates a streaming radio broadcast called Radio EarthRites. Some music buffs might know his early-’80s band Grey Pavilion, which he formed with his wife Mary and which featured future Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. For a deeper dive into his sprawling creative universe, see his book Alcove of Dreams: Art & Writings.

Llwydd's journey arcs from precocious '60s teenager exploring altered states of consciousness — as a youthful courier, he recalls ferrying Southwestern mescaline to California and introducing friends in Colorado to Owsley acid — to more recent experiments with Salvia divinorum, which he recounted in his presentation to the Portland Psychedelic Society in his home state of Oregon, which we get into, along with so much more, in the interview below.  

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity

DoubleBlind: What was your first psychedelic experience?

Gwyllm Llwydd: It was either on August 30 or August 31 in 1966 in Berkeley, California. I hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado, up to Wyoming, and caught freight [trains] out to Marysville in California, and then hitchhiked into Berkeley to meet up with friends. I was 14. I was offered LSD at the commune that I was staying at. And we went out to a cafe called the Jabberwock. And, as it was coming on, Country Joe and the Fish were the band playing that night. I went up and sat underneath the organ for a while!

It was an absolute revelation. I realized that most of my life I had lived as a lie, and that I'd been telling myself a story that wasn't true, which was pretty heady stuff for a 14-year-old. LSD has the ability to reveal what's going on internally / psychologically / spiritually. And yeah, there's always the bangs and whistles and all the colors and sensations and stuff, but it really is about the inner work. It will reveal things to you, and if you're smart, you'll work on what was presented to you. So that's pretty much been the experience I've had with psychedelics: It's a tool. It's a really great tool.

Were you a visual artist from a young age?

My first piece of art was a finger painting when I was five years old, and it was a storm cloud with lightning. And I think it was probably my mental state at that point. But my father was a frustrated artist, and he introduced me to different artists, different music. He introduced me to the Beat writer Jack Kerouac on TV when I was eight years old. He saw that I had talent, and he made sure that, when we were living in Colorado Springs when I was 12, I was admitted to the Colorado College for art classes. Of course, you're not allowed at that age to do nude life drawing. [Laughs.] So I never got to that part of art. I did music for many years, but the visual arts have always been my first and foremost love.

Mandalas have been an important part of your artwork. Can you explain how they first came into your awareness?

There was a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, in the '60s, and there was a young man working there: John Chick, from the Bardo Matrix art and lightshow collective. And John had several of his illustrations there. You could buy his mandalas for 50 cents apiece. And I was absolutely fascinated with them. And I started experimenting with mandalas at [a young] age. And by the time I'd reached 16, 17 years old, I was working with pointillism and  mandalas. Mandalas have always been my main focus, art-wise.

It seems in terms of your computer collage work, you often layer mandalas underneath what's taking place on the surface.

It's part of it. I mean, some of my pieces that I've worked on with the computer have up to 180, 190 layers. I have a piece that I've been working on now for, like, 15 years, that still isn't complete. But the idea of the mandala is to try to bring things into focus.

Do you consider yourself a Visionary Artist?

Not like, say, Martina Hoffman or Mati Klarwein or Ernst Fuchs. I do consider myself more of a Surrealist in the school of Max Ernst, Wilfried Sätty, and my good friend Jim Harter, who has now passed. And I try to make this bridge between Eastern and Western art and ideas, all the time. A lot of my artwork is Islamic-influenced, because of my background with Sufism. My art is, on the whole, Surrealism, because I'm trying to evoke a dream state.

But you’ve also worked to capture the altered states you’ve experienced in some of your pieces. 

Oh, absolutely. And I did a lot of paintings and collages of the different states with tryptamines and Salvia divinorum. And the Salvia paintings are some of my favorites because the inspiration is incredibly strong when you come out of that state. I can't do art whilst I am under the influence of something, but I can evoke it afterwards. 

There's a Salvia painting that I did. It's a mandala: The leafing out of different Salvia plants. And each of those plants that are illustrated in that artwork resulted from a separate Salvia experience. When I came back each time, a different plant was what I was supposed to depict. Salvia probably wouldn't be considered a psychedelic in the classical sense, but it is a visionary plant, and it talks just like mushrooms will talk. I was doing lots of work with the plant at that point, and I have a very healthy garden of Salvia now. I haven't gone into that Salvia-induced space for several years, but that doesn't mean that it's still not an ally: She talks, she shows, and she tells stories. 

I'd like to touch on a couple of your DMT pieces. During one experience, you said you encountered a divinity, shall we say, with tentacle-like arms flowing. And you saw that as a representation of the Hindu deity Vishnu. Is that correct?

First, before encountering Vishnu, I noticed some very interesting things with the machine elves whose presence in the DMT space are often talked about. Those entities are meant to keep you on “this side” of “that space.” They are a diversion. But with that Vishnu experience, I broke through: I went down what was like a giant tunnel, and I broke into this vaulted space, and there was the entity sitting there. And it recognized me. I recognized it as Vishnu: that was the way it was presented. We sat there in meditation and stared at each other until I started drifting back and came out through the tunnel. And it was a very special experience.

But one of the amazing things about it was that on the way out, the machine elves were dancing around again. And I took a look at them, and I understood that they were stuck in this state. And I felt my heart open up, and I felt this burst of light go out from my heart to them. And they were dancing in ecstasy that they were recognized for their role. And that stayed with me for a very, very long time. You can't replicate those guys with art.

DMT is an amazing substance. You know, I don't understand how you could do anything like DMT casually, but I know people do. I've actually been in rooms where people are passing a pipe back and forth and just laughing. And that was kind of interesting to witness. But I take this stuff kind of seriously. Maybe I'm too serious about it, but I've never been a trip-for-trip's-sake [kind of person], if you know what I mean.

How did you first get involved in the medium of blotter art?

There was a gentleman called Adam Stanhope, who passed away a few years back, whom I met when I was managing the floor for the Mind States conference down in Berkeley in 2001. Adam saw my art and he really liked it. And I had done a mantis head piece, because I was very interested in mantises at that point. And he loved it, and he had the blotters printed up for me. He distributed, like, four pieces of mine before he passed away. I got into doing blotter art in 2001-2002, and I still continue. I just released another piece that's coming out next week, which is called Peyote Visions. And my favorite piece that I ever did was the one for Alexander “Sasha" Shulgin called The Chemist.

Sasha was a sweet person. I got to meet him and his wife, Ann, several times.

We used to sit and talk. And after he went into decline, I was working on this piece. And I was trying to get it to him before he passed, but he died beforehand. It shows Sasha working in his laboratory — or my impression of Sasha. And so, emotionally, it evokes fond memories for me of him. That's one of my favorite pieces. It's very simple: it's basically black-and-white. I've redone it and put some color into it, but it's not needed.

Did you ever get to sample any of his research chemicals and write up a report for him?

 I did. 5-MeO-DiPT, which was a very interesting experience. I've written that one up. That was an experience. I mean, it wasn't my favorite. It was the last time I did any research chemicals.

I did “STP,” which Shulgin had originally formulated, back in the '60s. It's technically called DOM.

Please explain the setting where you tried that.

I was staying with friends up in Boulder, Colorado, because I was going back and forth to California quite a bit. And these were [Students for a Democratic Society] friends. And we had some of this stuff. And we decided to go down to the concert venue, the Family Dog in Denver, Colorado. And the Buffalo Springfield was playing. And by the time that I got to the door, I didn't know if I was still alive or not, because I couldn't tell if I was breathing. So I laid on the floor, and I kind of had my head propped up, and I was watching the bands play. And you could see the music coming out of the amplifier like molten color. The synesthesia experience was extremely powerful with DOM. And everything was kind of delightful. It was overpowering. 

I used to fly out to California to pick up acid and to bring it back — acid being legal, at that point, except in California. And I would take mescaline out from a group of people in Austin, Texas, exchange it for Owsley acid, and bring it back to Denver. And I didn't get paid money for it, I just got paid lots and lots of mescaline that I passed around and gave away all over the place. I was 15 years old. And then I turned 16, and I stopped making those round trips around October of '67. 

How do you look back on those days now? Do you ever look at your younger self and say, “You crazy fucking kid!”? Or: “You were a brave son of a bitch!”

It's probably a combination of the two. I had a couple of occasions where very crazy people, including police, did stupid things to me. I was in and out of jail quite a bit. I had policemen shoot at me. Nearly died on freight trains because you don't go across the Utah and Nevada desert without water. [Laughs.] The fact that I survived is amazing. I never expected to be the age that I am now. And I'm happy I am. I have a great family and wonderful friends around the world. But yeah, my teens and my early 20s were incredibly wild periods of my life. I prefer now. It's a little safer!

I basically walked out the door when I was 14 years old and didn't come back until I was in my late teens to my family. You know, I lived everywhere; I did all kinds of things. I survived everything that I got myself into. And I have a story that I like telling people...to a degree, you know. I always thought what I was doing was normal. I've had people tell me since then that [what I was up to] was not normal. I've come to realize that while watching my own kid grow up and being protective of him.

How long did your New Wave-era electronic band Grey Pavilion last?

That band lasted for 11 years. I had been doing music from the late '60s on, and I worked with Phil Lithman , the musician known as Snakefinger. So he and I used to play in L.A. together, and we'd do these casual shows at different locations. Anyway, I was interested in synthesizers, and my wife Mary and I brought a keyboardist friend Ley Thompson over from the U.K. The band was originally my wife Mary (who's from Scotland), Ley, and myself. And then Ley had to go back to the U.K. So, then we got involved with guitarist Nels Cline , who's now in [the band] Wilco.

I met Nels at Rhino Records through DD Faye. They got married later on. And I started hanging out at Westwood Music, and we got our synthesizers there. And Rhino Records was across the street. And the band just went from there. I picked up an 8-track recording device. Mary had been a sound engineer in the U.K., so she taught me how to use it. I was tired of singing, so she got that responsibility. And we have an album that's still sitting in a box that never was released. But we worked with Nels and his drummer brother Alex, and we did shows off and on for years.

For this next question, let's set the stage for folks: You're about 23 years old, you're in Venice, California, and you enter a bookstore wearing roller skates. And it's here that this young man in 1975 sees a book that was originally released in 1857. It's a work from a whole different world and time frame — although the book has an otherworldly yet contemporary Surrealist image on the cover. Can you describe what that book was and the impact it's had on you?

Well, the book was The Hasheesh Eater. And it was written by Fritz Hugh Ludlow. And he was the son of a minister in upper New York. And he was introduced to hashish through the local chemist, because you could buy a tincture of hashish or cannabis at that point over the counter. And this book describes his — what I would call — trips. And if you use hashish correctly, you have these experiences that can feel very psychedelic. And the world that he describes is very florid. I mean, he's a writer in the 1850s. He's only 21-years-old when he wrote this. And he explores heaven and hell through his hashish use.

The book that I picked up had been put out by Level Press. And Michael Horowitz was the editor of it. Michael Horowitz was Tim Leary's archivist. And the illustrations were done by Wilfried Sätty.  I was so impressed by this book — by the combination of the art and the writing. And, at that point, hash was my main go-to.

Sätty passed in 1982, so I never got to meet him. But I did get to meet Michael Horowitz, and we have had a wonderful conversation on and off for over 20-plus years.  I decided that I was going to put out a copy of the book myself, and I was going to put my spin on it as a homage to both Sätty and Michael. And I have expanded the book out. It's had two editions, and there are now, I think, 40 or 50 illustrations in it.

What did you hope to bring to the illustrations for the book? And what do you hope your psychedelic artwork does overall for people?

 A lot of the illustrations that are in the book are from my own hash experiences. There are also pieces in there to evoke the different sections. Sätty hardly ever used color, and I like to use color as an emotional texture. 

I'm an advocate for psychedelics, yes,but what I'm really an advocate for is what psychedelics can evoke and what they can bring forward. And that's part of the magic for me. What can we bring forth from all of this that will help change the world? If I can evoke the transcendental in my artwork, then what I'm doing is correct for this lifetime. Even though I may never have great recognition, the art's out there. Thousands of people see it. I like that. You know, they don't have to buy it, but if it sets something off in them that might change something in their life or that may evoke a recognition of the inner self, then it's all worth it.

Bluesky: @gwyllm.bsky.social

https://gwyllm.com/ 

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Gregory Daurer's work has been published by High Times, Westword, CrimeReads, and Please Kill Me. He also records songs as Gregory Ego. Bluesky: @gregoryego.bsky.social

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