For Jen by Rachel Andrews

I love visionary art, and I'm especially drawn to the way the visual arts were being practiced by the Russian avant-garde in the first few decades of the last century.

I am particulary drawn to the works of the artistic set around Matiushin. The Ender siblings produced stellar art in that period.

There was an abundance, almost a surfeit, of strange philosophies prevalent in Russia in that period of time (well when isn't there this in Russia; look at what passes for medicine there often today!). Science blended with art in some of Matiushin's ambitious and often otherworldly experiments, which were actually funded by the Russian government, which at that time had faith in the various Polytechnic institutes. Mathematical ideas blended with art in the brilliant, theosophically-inflected writings of Ouspensky.

Theosophy and theosophical ideas inflected the work of many visual artists, and this work is often strikingly twenty-first century in feel.

Rachel Andrews often touches on just the sort of ideas many of these Russian visual artists were reifying.

I think that art holds up very, very well.

There were many prefigurative (precognitive?) images in those works of what the future was indeed going to look like.

And then were eldritch images of different states of consciousness and auras, visual effluvia of various conscious states. Andrews is clearly very invested in that.

I can never pass by a book by Annie Besant or Charles Ledbetter either, Rachel lol.