The Merriest of Merry Pranksters: Author Ken Kesey’s Art
Writer-Artist Three: Ken Kesey
The Merry Prankster
The merriest of the Merry Pranksters, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Sometimes a Great Notion, icon of the counterculture, Ken Kesey told me he’d been an artist since his youth and that in 1965 during a five-month imprisonment for pot possession how he’d combined his artwork with text.
Ken Kesey’s Artwork: Loose
Published posthumously in 2003 as Kesey’s Jail Journal: Cut the M************ Loose, freedom must still have been in the forefront of his mind when he sent me “Loose!”, an appropriately acid-colored painting for inclusion in The Writer’s Brush.
Unfortunately, it never made it into the book and it is presented here for the first time.
To find out more, check out The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers for more than 400 plates of artwork by great writers and the stories behind them.
Read previous Writer-Artist posts here.