KEROUAC - Banners 2

 I thought this photo of Jack Kerouac, taken with his mother near the end of his life, was a nice counterpoint to the previous banner which showed him young and ambitious. Also the natural light and shadow immediately lent themselves to the kind of graphic representation I was going for.

I used slogans from the Beat Generation at clock-points around the room. Using ordinary Letraset Type I set up the "Beatific" lettering.

 All of the artwork for these banners was projected onto the pre-primed canvas and traced onto it with a charcoal pencil. I had to rent the Art-O-Graph at a cost of $75 a day, a whopping sum for me back then! So I had to work quickly, sketching each banner off and then on to the next, so that I could return the machine before the shop closed and not have to pay for another day.

Here JOHN MURPHY as Kerouac and MYSELF as a Critic play out a scene under the two banners sketched out above. The elder Jack loomed above the desk and typewriter of his alter-ego on stage, while the serene but somewhat larger image of Kerouac's mother dominated the scene. We are all our mothers in some ways, after all....