Pablo Amaringo - Ayahuasca Visions

Review

"Publication of these outstanding paintings of ayahuasca visions experienced by a native medicine man, Pablo Amaringo, and interpreted by the distinguished anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna permits us to understand the unworldly psychic effects of the ‘vine of the soul.’"
-Professor Richard Schultes, Director, Botanical Museum of Harvard University

"Pablo Amaringo and Luis Eduardo Luna are to be congratulated for their collaboration. It has yielded a book that is both beautiful and sure to be an enduring contribution to the ethnography and art history of shamanism. The visions and vanishing lifestyles of the ayahuasqueros of Amazons are presented with wonderful integrity and sensitivity.”
-Terence McKenna, author of The Invisible Landscape (with Dennis McKenna) and True Hallucinations

Product Description

The mythologies and cosmology of Amazonian shamanism materialize in fantastic color and style in this unique, large-format volume, representing the fruit of several years of collaboration between a Peruvian folk artist/shaman and a Colombian anthropologist/filmmaker.

- http://www.pabloamaringo.com/

Pablo Amaringo was born in 1943 in Puerto Libertad, in the Peruvian Amazon. He was ten years old when he first took ayahuasca--a visionary brew used in shamanism, made from the plants Banisteriopsis caapi (yagé) and Psychotria viridis (chacruna). A severe heart illness--and the magical treatment of this via ayahuasca--led Pablo toward the life of a shaman, and he eventually became a powerful curandero--learning the icaros, or healing songs, that the ayahuasca brew taught him.

In 1977, Pablo abandoned his vocation as a shaman. He became a painter and art instructor at his Usko-Ayar school, where there was no charge for the students to learn painting from Pablo.

Pablo painted and described numerous of his ayahuasca visions, some of which appear in his book Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Before he passed away, he was working on paintings of angels, as well as paintings that documented the flora and fauna of Peru.

Artcards and gicleé prints of Pablo's work can be purchased here: http://www.yashpal.com/store/artcards/amaringo/

Additional paintings and gicleé prints on canvas are for sale via a United States representative. Please see http://guariadeosa.com/photos/pamaringo/paintingsforsale/

More of Pablo's art can be seen here: http://www.egallery.com/artists/?id=34

Pablo occasionally spoke about his life as a shaman and artist, and provided art instruction, at seminars and conferences. Events where Pablo appeared included the Mind States conference in California, the Guaria de Osa Centre in Costa Rica, and the Ayahuasca Healing Retreat in Brazil.

Pablo passed away on November 16, 2009, after several weeks of illness. Because of his declining state of health, he was unable to attend the recent opening of a Venice Beach, CA exhibit of his works. The exhibit runs until December 31, 2009 at The 99 High Art Collective. For more information, see http://amazonconvergence.com/index.php/home/54.html

Don Pablo, you are missed!