Jim Morrison Art.

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Jim Morrison had artistic ambitions that went beyond music and several examples of his drawings exist.

This pastel sketch of his sister Anne was done whilst in his teens.



Signed sketch date unknown.

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When Jackson Pollock was helping abstract expressionism take the world by storm, a young Jim Morrison was making his own artwork inspired by the movement, as seen in this pen drawing done by the future Doors frontman, circa 1954.

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Morrison sketch with the rather obscure title 'Old man Masquarading As Cardinal Nino de Guevara.' which obviously comes from the painting by El Greco



The El Greco painting Portrait of a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609), ca. 1600
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, 1541–1614)
Oil on canvas


Morrison sketch with the title '2 Women Hiding A Secret.'

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Morrison sketch entitled 'Dancer With Blue Hair'

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Morrison cartoon strip.

[gizmo]

i have to say that he was a pretty neat drawing artist, i asume he just did it for fun and didn't put to much effort in it like a real painter does.
i'd love to have one of those on my wall, but i guess they're pretty expensive as well.

[adam]

the cartoon strip is fucking weird!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Well Jim was hardly a doyen of normality now was he?
That of course is a rhetorical question.

I shows that the guy was certainly not your one dimensional Hollywood style rock star.
He obviously had an interest in art and was well up on poetry and not just some dumbass.
You make such a point in your other posts.
This guy was not always piss drunk and spent a lot of time doing stuff outside The Doors which even His Rayness has no idea about.

[adam]

i'd almost be dubious that the cartoon strip was his work, the syle is so much different from the others... but i'm not dubious when it comes to morrison, he still continues to surprise me :-)

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Feb 4, 2011 16:45:58 GMT adam said:

i'd almost be dubious that the cartoon strip was his work, the syle is so much different from the others...

I know what you mean but there is a lot of stuff like that on DCM site. Maybe he was bored one week and decided he had had enough of stick men.

[adam]

stylistically it's like a pop at charlie brown? kinda mad magazine style, which he apparently liked... if he'd been british it would have been viz i guess !!!!!!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Exactly.....he was well into MAD magazine.....
Not something I cared much for 50s and 60s sci fi and fantasy was my bag as a kid.

Something quite anarchic about it. Maybe it was a finger to what his dad represented.
It does not say when it was done but he was into art as a teenager so maybe it's a parody of the sugar coated cartoons that newspapers were full of in the 50s and 60s such as Blondie and Marmaduke or more likely as you say Peanuts.

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Jim spent a lot of time making entries in his personal notebooks, painting and drawing and watching art house films. He also perfected his ledge walking in Hanes Point by scaling across an old piece of a pier that jutted out over the Potomac River. His friends who witnessed this feat claim that if Jim had fell there would no way he could have ever recovered.

According to Andy Morrison, Jim would make collages.
– “take a magazine with a color photo and pour lighter fluid on it and he’d make a circle of what he wanted to the back side and take a ball point pen and go back and forth over it.
It forced the ink out of it.
He made his own collages out of anything he wanted.”

In later years there are reports from UCLA friends that Jim had several collages hanging on his walls at the one room apartment he lived in.
All of the original art work and notebooks were destroyed when Jim left Alexandria for Clearwater Florida on August 13 1961.

Art House Films that Jim saw while living in Alexandria:

Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein 1898-1948
1. Battleship Potemkin 1925
2. Alexander Nevsky 1938

Morrison friend Jim Merrill:

“We would go into D.C. to this very small theatre that would show these art films and things from Europe and here’s Morrison, a 16 year old, who knows about Eisenstein and these types of movies. I never heard of this stuff and I didn’t hear of it again until it was shown at the Maryland Institute in the mid-60’s. Morrison understood this stuff and loved these movies.”

Sergei Eisenstein was noted for his belief that in cinema, certain elements of time and space could be experimented with and rearranged to create different meanings, with his montage theory emerging a s a highly unusual approach to film given the ear in which he worked.
He incorporated unconventional ideas onto the screen and made a practice of juxtaposing images in his films, as opposed to just linking them together as other filmmakers did.
Jim Morrison was supposedly fascinated by the creative editing of Eisenstein’s films and made mental notes on the techniques he observed for his own future film work.

The high point of the film “Alexander Nevsky” was the famed thirty minute “Battle On Ice” sequence where Nevsky’s army takes on the Germans on a frozen lake.
It served as an incredible visual presentation where the powers of image and music were coupled to evoke strong varied emotions from the viewer, a technique that Morrison very likely reflected on in later years when he went to work on his own visual presentations.
Eisenstein when questioned about his theories on film, once compared the art work of the film director to the craft of the Shaman.
Without a doubt, it was an unusual idea for its time that Morrison must have found endearing and probably lead him to search out more of the directors’ work.

French New Wave Films
La Nouvelle Vague 1958-1964

Francis Truffaut

1. 400 Blows 1959 – a film about a youth in Paris who tried to survive despite his parents neglect.
2. Shoot The Piano Player 1960 – a movie that told of a former concert pianist who fell on hard times and ended up playing in a Paris’ Café where he sought anonymity, but became entangled in the dealings between his brother and a couple of thugs.
The personal new wave style employed by Truffaut in the movies, especially the long takes with the hand held camera and the prevailing theme each film delivered, impressed Morrison greatly and simmered in his thoughts when he began formulating his own experimental film ideas.

From The Lizard King Was Here
By: Mark Opsasnick 2006

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What follows are the famous Jim Morrison drawings from the 1957/58 Alameda High School era artwork reproduced exactly as they were drawn. They give us a tiny insight into the mind of a teenage Jim Morrison.

You can see tiny thumbnails on sites like DCM but here they are full size. Enjoy!

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There is no doubt Jim's mind was a weird place as a teenager but then I am sure none of us were completely normal at that age either.

Thanks to Darkstar for the excellent scans.




Interesting one which shows Jim was interested in film even then.


A highly prophetic drawing. Wonder if he knew something even back then.




I thought he did not know Ray Manzarek until UCLA.
Another prophetic drawing which still resonates to this day.

[casandra]

Thanks, Those drawings are very interesting.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

This one is rather prophetic.
'Jim' sitting astride a huge beast which is a metaphor for The Doors. Notice it has three teats.
One for each ex Door to milk and have a nice living without actually having to do anything.
Beats the shit out of having to work for a living.

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Jim's scribbles from American Prayer album.

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Jim Morrison Scrapbook

Check out the Morrison Scrapbook here.