McCloud, known to some as the "Prince of Paper", is the owner of the
largest original "blotter art" collection in the world branded "The Institute
of Illegal Images". These framed blotter sheets, festooned with incredibly unique
psychedelic and pop culture images, are a testament to the pervasive and artistic
subculture of LSD. Senior museum and gallery officials have long concluded that
McCloud's work constitutes an unrivalled and entirely unique form of folk art.
McCloud has recently collaborated with digital artist Dana Dana Dana to produce
high quality prints in limited editions of fifty under the name Blotter Barn.
Each image is a photographic enlargement of a selected item from the collection,
and depicts that item in every detail, revealing tiny elements that are normally
invisible to the human eye. The gallery presented an exhibition of these prints
in December 2005. Amassing such a unique and controversial collection of art has not however been without its
drawbacks. McCloud has been subjected to two criminal trials over the past fifteen years
and acquitted on both counts. The FBI spent considerable time and money on a surveillance operation of
his home in San Francisco. ArtNet News ran the following article after his acquittal in September 2001:
After a two-week-long trial in federal court in Kansas
City, Mo., San Francisco artist Mark McCloud -- notorious
in the annals of psychedelic art for his 25-year-long quest
to compile a complete collection of LSD blotter art -- was
acquitted by a local jury of felony charges of conspiracy
to distribute LSD. A guilty verdict could have carried a
penalty of life in prison. Federal drug authorities spent
millions in their effort to nail McCloud, 47, conducting
phone taps, monitoring his mail and conducting surveillance
from neighboring apartments before the SWAT-style raid by
an FBI-DEA task force in early 2000. Police seized his collection
of almost 400 framed LSD blotters, which range from a print
of Peter Rabbit from the early 1970s to a recent example
from Europe showing two lesbian aliens. Authorities also
seized 33,000 sheets of McCloud's own blotter art printed
on rag paper. None of the material had any traces of the
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