Show & Tell: 10.2

 There are lots of books about psychedelic art, but a recent one called The Electrical Banana is a favorite of mine because it's one of the few who recognized Marijke Koger as being a monumental influence upon the style of the time. She was a founding member and creative director of the Dutch design collective known as The Fool, a group who made a huge splash in the British music scene in the late1960s. With Koger at the helm, they designed numerous album covers, worked with the Beatles to design and decorate their London Apple Boutique, designed and manufactured outrageous clothes for all the then-famous rock wives, painted murals and musical instruments for George Harrison and John Lennon, and somehow found time to record their own musical endeavors. Although much of the photography that documents these works makes Koger and her peers look as though they were leading opulent, affluent, and lavish lives, they worked extremely hard and for very little money. Koger in particular was extremely prolific at that time, and I think of her as being an unsung hero in the lexicon of psychedelic visual innovators. She admits to doing a fair amount of drugs in her youth and attributes the seemingly endless array of rainbows in her work to the effects of LSD. Although I don't feel a burning desire to experiment with hallucinogens, I would love to have a better understanding of the things that influenced her visual sensibility.  I also want desperately to raid her closet, but that's neither here nor there....