A Burroughs self portrait. Burroughs spent the latter part of the 50's in Paris. During that time he lived next door to a painter named Brion Gysin who influenced Burroughs' painting and writing. Of Gysin's work Burroughs said, "I see in his painting the psychic landscape of my own work. He is doing in painting what I try to do in writing. He regards his painting as a whole in the texture of the so called "reality" through which he is exploring an actual place existing in outerspace. That is, he moves into the painting and through it, his life and sanity at stake when he paints."

"It is to remember that all art is magical in origin - music sculpture writing painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more that Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end by itself. Like all formulae, art was originally functional, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formula. Take a porcelain stove and disconnect it and put it in your living room with ivy growing over it... it may be a good-looking corpse but it isn't functional anymore. Or take a voodoo doll full of pins - authentic West African, $500 on the 57th Street - and hang it on the wall of your duplex loft. It isn't killing enemies anymore, and the same goes for a $5,000 shrunk-down head, which a fashionable shrink bought for his consultation room. Writing and painting were one in cave paintings, which were formulae to ensure good hunting...

The painting of Brion Gysin deals directly with the magical roots of art...the picture constantly change because you are drawing into time travel on a network of associations. Brion Gysin paints from the viewpoint of timeless space."

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