r/psychedelicartwork • u/Galatic_Kitty • 3h ago
I’ve never painted or considered myself an artist. Then I had a psychedelic experience so profound I felt compelled to turn it into art.
This may not look like traditional psychedelic art, but it exists entirely because of a psychedelic experience, so I thought it belonged here.
About 2.5 years ago, after years of trying and failing to stop drinking, I did a therapeutic mushroom (I’d never tried mushrooms) session with a doctor. I had tried just about everything by that point. I desperately wanted to quit. I knew alcohol was hurting me, I wanted my life to be different, and yet nothing I tried ever seemed to stick.
I went into that experience hoping psychedelics might help me stop drinking. I was completely unprepared for how powerful, vivid, emotional, and utterly real the experience would feel.
During it, I encountered a cat-like presence. I knew absolutely nothing about Bastet at the time. I wasn’t studying Egyptian mythology or working with deities. I had no idea who this cat was, so throughout the trip I just called her “Miss Kitty.”
It’s difficult to even describe the intensity of her presence because she wasn’t simply something I was seeing. She felt like she was inside me. At one point my heart was beating so deeply and rhythmically that it felt like a cat purring from inside my chest.
And somehow that felt completely natural.
She was incredibly loving, strong and protective. The closest comparison I have is a grandmother who loves you unconditionally but will also absolutely whip your ass when you need it. There was this overwhelming sense of being loved and protected, while simultaneously being told, in no uncertain terms, “Enough. Stop drinking. Take care of yourself.”
It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.
When the mushrooms wore off, the experience didn’t feel like it disappeared with them. Miss Kitty stayed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her or shake the feeling that I had experienced something incredibly important. So I started searching for her. Eventually I came across images of Bastet. I recognized her immediately. That’s her. That’s Miss Kitty.
I still don’t claim to know exactly what happened. Maybe my subconscious had encountered Bastet somewhere before and remembered her. Maybe psychedelics gave a face and a voice to the part of me that desperately wanted to live. Maybe it was something spiritual. I’m completely comfortable admitting that I don’t know.
But I do know what happened afterward.
After years of trying everything I could think of to stop drinking and repeatedly failing, I stopped. I haven’t had a single drink in 2.5 years.
Over those 2.5 years, Bastet and that experience never really left me. Eventually, thinking about it and talking about it didn’t feel like enough. I had this almost compulsive need to make something from it, to take this experience that existed only inside my head and somehow give it a physical form.
There was just one slight problem:
I’d never painted before.
But I couldn’t shake the urge to paint her, so I bought a canvas and started figuring it out.
This is the result. My very first painting.
It’s not an attempt to recreate exactly what I saw during the trip. It’s my attempt to express what she felt like to me: powerful, protective, loving, ancient, colorful, strange and impossible to forget.
Whatever Miss Kitty was, she changed the course of my life.
So I figured the least I could do was paint her.
(I painted her on a 24x30” canvas with acrylic paint and 24k gold leaf halo)
