It represents the kind of health conditions of society itself.” “It's what I call ‘the smallest billboard,’” McCloud says, of blotter art. Not just because of his death/rebirth experience, not just because he has so much of it plastering the walls of his museum, but because he sees blotter paper as one of the most potent forms of American art that exists in our culture, today. Since then, LSD has been a huge part of McCloud’s life. He finally got his hands on some window-pane acid a few months after that and his life changed forever. His first trip was with mescaline (peyote) at the tender age of 14. “I was just in the right place at the right time,” he says. As he puts it: he went from the tango to psychedelic rock overnight. The first few years of his life he lived in Argentina, then he moved to California during the peak of the Summer of Love. Images courtesy of the Institute of Illegal Images Today, the Institute of Illegal Images, the only blotter art museum on the planet Earth, contains over 33,000 blotter sheets - each divided with around 1000 hits. “It wasn't until I framed a few that I realized, ‘Hey, you know, by framing these, I prevent myself from eating them,’” he says, chuckling. “So, as the quality of the blotter and the art improved I got more and more interested keeping examples of it.”Īt first, though, he admits, it was difficult not to eat into his own collection. Prior to this, acid had been put on sugar cubes, in Ken Kesey’s venison stew, or just on plain white blotter paper. And at that time, blotter art was just starting to become a thing.
He’s also a lifelong artist, he tells me. “I was a numismatist as a kid, collecting little finely made things,” McCloud says. So, he started collecting sheets of blotter paper. McCloud, convinced that he now owed his life to this chemical, decided he needed to do something to give back to it he needed to somehow spread the love and light of LSD. That was when the Institute for Illegal Images was truly born - or, at least, the moment when it’s seeds of conception were planted. The experience of that moment, he describes as “rapture” - as a death/rebirth event that changed the very fabric of his being, revealed his purpose and gave his life new meaning. But, he says, “only because I was on acid.” Then, it happened: McCloud slipped, or tripped or was nudged by God himself, and fell out of the seventh-story window of his dorm room. Things were getting weird the trip was peaking and his doors of perception were opening wide. Mark McCloud was a student at Santa Clara University and he had just dropped some fire orange sunshine acid.
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