The blog A Journey Round My Skull posts amazing rare art and book illustrations. You've seen them here before, when they featured a collection of oddly far-out prints from French science textbooks. Now they've got another set of images up that I'm completely fascinated by—art created by teenage drug rehab patients in Germany between 1960 and 1980. Blogger Will Schofield writes:
The Prinzhorn medical archives of Heidelberg has catalogued the collection and exhibits the illustrations from the drug patients of Hamburg's Hanswilhelm Beil. The images were collected between 1960 and 1980. Psychedelic forms and colors were par for the course during this time, and they were also utilized by these young drug users. The young patients, who left their works behind at the hospital, were not professional artists. Rather, they were kids looking to display their state of consciousness, or the unraveling of their personalities, through art—and to work on their global sense of perception. The book contains 74 illustrations and descriptions of drugs and culture in the 70s, as well as reports from the former patients.
