“Lumia, the art of light and color, had a sudden resurgence, expansion, and “explosion” during the nineteen sixties, and for two significant reasons. First came the revolt of youth, a sharp break and a full swing away from the amenities and mores of the past. . . . The sophisticated night club, patronized by well-dressed adults, gave way to the discoth’que, the electric circus, frequented by youngsters in dungarees and with bare feet. Rock and roll music, amplified to a cacophonous din, demanded all that the senses could bear—which meant vivid color, flashing light, dizzying motion, stroboscopic vibration. . . .

Second came the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs, LSD, mescaline, peyote, the taking of which produced an immediate and startling expansion of the sense of color. Any number of attempts have been made to describe, in words, this heightened and sensuous response to color. Such effort is futile. As Heinrich Kl’ver wrote in his Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, ‘It is impossible to find words to describe mescal colors.’”

—Tom Douglas Jones, from The Art of Light and Color, 1972.