Leigh McCloskey

Leigh McCloskey is an American artist, author and actor, born in Los Angeles in 1955, who works in painting, writing and teaching. Since 2001 he has been building The Hieroglyph of the Human Soul, a hand-painted, three-dimensional library installation in his Malibu home that also hosts salons; PBS SoCal's Artbound covered its origins and alchemical motifs. A 2024 Malibu Times profile of a city gallery show of his paintings called his work phenomenally intriguing. His tarot cycle, drawn in pen, was collected as Tarot ReVisioned in 2003, and art from his illuminated Codex Tor books was used for the cover and packaging of Flying Lotus's 2010 album Cosmogramma. He has given visual-philosophy talks in the United States and abroad, among them a 2006 Esoteric Quest session for the New York Open Center and a 2012 TEDxMalibu talk about his oil painting Phoenix Arise. In 2024 he spoke at Pacifica Graduate Institute's commencement in Santa Barbara, California.