About Joe
Joe McHugh (1939 – 2022) was an artist, a seeker, and a master at playing with perception. Trained at Lehigh University and the Rhode Island School of Design, he combined the hand of an artist with the curiosity of a mystic. As a schoolboy, he was once chided by an art teacher for drawing a purple tree, an early sign that his imagination was wired for worlds beyond the ordinary. From an early age, Joe was already seeing through the cracks of consensus reality.
In 1964, while serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox, McHugh met psychologist Bob Hall, who introduced him to the newly emerging world consciousness research and LSD when it was still legal. McHugh’s imagination and intellect were sparked, and what emerged were hundreds of sketchbook drawings, collages, paintings, photographs, posters, folded origami, light experiments and slide shows, each an attempt to translate the metaphysical into the physical and back again.
McHugh’s home was a salon for musicians, poets, and philosophers who gathered to discuss art, the I Ching, karma, and football late into the night. He was as likely to perform a card trick as to quote Gurdjieff, as fascinated by the geometry of a mandala as by the geometry of a perfect golf swing. McHugh saw creativity itself as a path to enlightenment.
In all his work, Joe McHugh remained what he had been from the start, a visual philosopher, reminding us that revelation can hide in plain sight, and that sometimes, to fly, all you need to do is flap your arms.
About Flapping Your Arms Can Be Flying
Flapping Your Arms Can Be Flying began in Joe McHugh’s Army sketchbooks, just after he and his sergeant and army psychiatrist, Bob Hall, discovered LSD at Fort Knox in 1964 while it was still legal. Hall was fascinated by the energy Joe invested in his sketchbooks. The scribbles, drawings, and doodles inspired Hall to write poems to pair with Joe’s drawings.
First published in San Francisco in 1966, just before the Summer of Love, Flapping Your Arms Can Be Flying helped launch the movement. With favorable reviews from Ken Kesey, it became an underground success and a seed that sprouted into East Totem West, a visionary publishing company dedicated to producing high-quality, affordable psychedelic art, or as Joe would say, a “path back without a chemical guide.”
What you see are curious creatures, cosmic symbols, and glimpses of awakening. They’re simple, hand-drawn, and somehow endless, alive with Joe’s love of the metaphysical, the playful, and the profound. We’re not here to overly explain them. We’re just putting them back into the world, to be worn, shared, and understood in new ways.
About The Other Cat Notebook
Well before Joe McHugh’s psychedelic visions took flight, there was this small, unassuming notebook, marked “25¢” on the cover, its humble price tag a clue to Joe’s life before San Francisco, before East Totem West, before The White Rabbit. The pages within are mostly quiet and stark: graphite studies of still forms, dreary in tone, restrained in gesture.
Then, on page 16, out of the gray world leaps The Other Cat, a blue-striped, wide-eyed creature bursting in full technicolor. Joe’s inner world suddenly clawed its way out and onto the page. Like the purple tree he drew in grade school, this cat announces his true vision: imagination unbound, playful and metaphysical, from graphite to color, from intellect to intuition.
Elsewhere in the notebook, a page of cryptic markings hints at an early fascination with the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle that became one of Joe’s lifelong touchstones.
The Other Cat got its name years after its creation, from Joe’s wife Jan, who adored the image. Because Joe’s Cheshire Cat poster had become one of his most recognized works and had hung in museums including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Mori Arts Center Gallery (Tokyo), the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), and the Abeno Harukas Art Museum (Osaka), Jan would refer to this drawing, that sat for years hardly glimpsed by a soul, as, “you know… The Other Cat.” The name perfectly captures Joe’s, Jan’s, and The Other Cat’s sense of humor and metaphysical whimsy.
What we see in this modest twenty-five-cent tablet is Joe moving from the ordinary to The Other, and this T-shirt marks The Other Cat’s world debut!
