Pulling his sketches from the same dream imagery that fuelled his writing, Burroughs originally intended the drawings to illustrate Naked Lunch, as he explained in two consecutive 1959 letters to Alan Ginsberg: "I am enclosing some of the illustrations I have done for Naked Lunch.
“Automatic drawing,” where the hand is freed of rational control and allowed to move randomly across the paper, was seen by the Surrealists as a means of expressing the subconscious, an area of particular interest to Burroughs. Inspired to try his hand at visual pieces by the artist Brion Gysin-who was assisting Burroughs in the organization of the book, and would later become a long-time collaborator-the drawings arrange loose circular spirals and diagonal scrawls, respectively, in rows and columns over the entirety of each page, and echo much of the grid-like work Gysin had been producing in oil at the time.
A pair of Burroughs’ “automatic drawings” from the cycle of Surrealistic experiments he created in Paris while his 1959 novel Naked Lunch was being prepared for publication.
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