Orpheus Emerged Print

This is actually 5 paintings to be displayed as a cube..some assembly required..Unfortunately, I can only display one image here. It was based on the fictional character of Ray Smith from the Dharma Bums and has Avilokitesvara on the reverse practicing Yab-Yum. Contact me for additional photos of all the paintings. The primary painting focuses on one Ray Smith the main character from "The Dharma Bums." I would display this image on the front or most visible side of the box as I consider it the primary image in the series. Its title is Orpheus Emerged echoing the title of Jack Kerouac’s ‘first’ novel; posthumously published and entitled eponymously. In the novel Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder hike the pipeline to Mt. Tam to Stinson Beach…and this is an image of Ray hiking. The sky echoes Jack’s role as a real life Boddhisattva---Awakener---(see Some of the Dharma, Wake Up)..a theme which seems to be the main theme of the book…with dawn breaking. He is also Orpheus in a real sense if only as a writer…but of course, Kerouac was a great prose poet in the tradition of Whitman. The second painting is entitled The Shrouded Stranger and again is echoed throughout all of Mr. Kerouac’s oeuvre as an embodiment of The Shadow in the Jungian sense and more literally the death that is part of our life equal to our own shadow/absence. They sky is still awakening or is it the sun setting in this image? There is no foliage on the few trees although I still find it a very pretty painting. The landscape itself is shaped like a shrouded stranger(actually multiples) and there is a rock that looks like a skull over the opening in the cliff. Golgotha? Also, a hand-like branch pointing the way. The entrance to the underworld where Orpheus enters in order to bring back his wife Eurydice from the land of the dead. The third painting on the opposite side from the second depicts a renaissance or rebirth…the plants are in bloom and there is even a deer seen leaping in the foreground. It is untitled but something like Printemps would serve well, being this English author only spoke Quebecois, a French dialect, until the age of five. The landscape is slightly surreal and a few of the rocks are markedly phallic shaped as subtle fertility symbols. The fourth painting which would be opposite of the main on the back of the box, is an image of the Buddha I believe that the book was written in honor of…It is an image of Avalokitesvara or Kwannon(sp in novel)…The Buddha of Mercy/Compassion…The Hearer and Answer of prayer according to the narrator. He is shown in union with his opposite in the holy act of communion known as YabYum –Yin/Yang..A form of Buddhist worship which 4 of the book’s characters engage in regularly and at least two regularly. I painted in a traditional Thanka style and added tiger stripes being that numerous times the author is referred to as Tiger. The fifth painting is simply of the sky from the perspective of one on the ground looking heavenwards and simply illustrates Jack’s satori in the book that everything is “awake and empty”…and his famous quote “my witness empty sky”. A recurrent theme in the book is something akin to goofing around in the void and an empty sky reflects that emptiness..Another small poetry book of Jack’s is entitled Heaven so that would be another tie in. Please contact me for additional pictures. or through Saatchi.