Alex, who was raised in Columbus, Ohio, says he was haunted by nightmares
and began drawing pictures of skeletons at 5. He continued to make pictures
of dead things. When he was 9, JFK was assassinated, and he also watched his
grandmother turn yellow with jaundice and die. He painted a vivid Grim
Reaper.

In the 1960s, when the drug was still legal, he did a junior high report on
LSD. "They talked about a drug that would open the imagination and give you
access to visions of another world. I was fascinated," he says. But when
classmates tried it, he passed. "I was pretty depressed as a teenager," he
says. "I thought it would make it worse."

He grew consumed with the questions of imminent adulthood, "with wondering:
Is there a God? Is there only a material world? Are we only supposed to make
money and croak?"

For two years he studied at Columbus College of Art and Design and immersed
himself in polarities: good and evil, light and dark. He pondered dead and
decaying things. He dropped out and got a job painting billboards. He shaved
off half his hair for half a year, and he went to the North Pole to "feel
the polarities" of the Earth's magnetic fields. In 1976, he went back to
school for a year at Boston's Museum School. That's where he met Allyson, a
Baltimore native.

He says he was out with an art school professor when she invited them both
to her house for a party. The professor came to pick up Alex and had a
bottle of Kahlua and LSD. "I had just come back from the North Pole and I
thought, what the hell, I can do anything."

He drank half the bottle, Allyson drank the rest. They talk about that trip
as the one that changed things. Allowed them to know they were supposed to
be together. Allowed Alex to see.

"It was a brilliant living light. It was a light you wanted to go toward. It
was like the light of God. Prior to this, I had struggled with the whole
idea of God. I did not believe there was such a thing."

The couple moved in together. He took a job preparing cadavers for the
anatomy department of Harvard Medical School and she continued in art
school. Later he became a medical illustrator, then devoted himself full
time to his art. They continued to trip together.

Allyson, who had taken LSD recreationally, says she began to feel a
spiritual component in her trips with Alex. "I was raised in the Jewish
faith, I went to temple and Sunday school and [observed] all the holidays.
But this was the first time I had the experience of God."

Between them, the Greys have 10 paintings in "High on Life." They are
grouped with yarn paintings from the Huichols, a people indigenous to Mexico
who use the psychedelic cactus peyote in religious rituals.

Their works attempt to render the knowledge they say "entheogens" have
brought them. Drugs bring them visions of a "higher level of
interconnectedness and love and things beyond speech," says Alex.

"The Bible is filled with messages from the visionary world," he says. He
cites Christians writing of angels. "Ezekiel saw the wheel. Moses saw the
Burning Bush."

They say their daughter, an actress who had substantial roles in the movies
" Snow Day" and "Max Keeble's Big Move," doesn't do drugs. They are prepared
for her to one day make a different choice. They hope it is an enlightened
one.

The Greys speak out against a society that makes marijuana and crack
similarly illegal. They teach workshops on visionary art and attend
conferences on links between spirituality and psychedelic drugs around the
world. This fall they hope to open a chapel of Sacred Mirrors in Manhattan
and fill it with Alex's paintings.

"I'm trying to create a portal into the mystical dimension of reality," he
says.

High on Life: Transcending Addiction runs through August 31 at the American
Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy., Baltimore. Hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for students and
seniors, and free for children under 4. For information call 410-244-1900 or
visit www.avam.org

© 2003 The Washington Post Company