Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings

Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings by Kerouac, Jack. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781560256212.

This first-ever collection of Jack Kerouacs visual art includes nearly every existing full-color painting collected and preserved by the Kerouac estate in Lowell, Massachusetts. Also included are dozens of black-and-white line drawings, sketches, and facsimile reproductions of Kerouacs notations from his unpublished notebooks. In writing, Kerouacs restless and relentless experimentation—what he called "spontaneous bop prosody"—pushed language to the boundaries of meaning. In painting and drawing he found a complementary means of expression. A friend and admirer of painters Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, and Dody Muller, Kerouac was an ardent and deliberate student who worked to develop and refine his skills and his conception of the act of painting—a conception related to the spontaneous composition he had pioneered in his books. Ed Adlers essay offers an unprecedented view of Kerouac, the visual artist. Rich in anecdote and drawing on extensive quotation from Kerouacs letters, notebooks, and published writings, Adlers essay demonstrates the biographical and thematic preoccupations common to Kerouacs writing and painting, especially Kerouacs struggle to integrate the two spiritual traditions, Catholicism and Buddhism, to which he was devoted. No consideration of Kerouac will be complete without reference to this heretofor- unseen aspect of his life and work.