Tripping With Jim Morrison And Other Friends: With an introduction by Timothy Leary

'You have poems inside your head and you have learned to explode them with firecracker tubes of paint.' Ray Bradbury

To be an artist alone in the world dependent upon one's own art to provide a living is almost the most difficult or the most providential path anyone can choose. Thus Tripping With Jim Morrison & Other Friends is Michael Lawrence's own jaunty Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

The intrepid ex-pat artist's Magical Mystery Tour odyssey travels from Hollywood to Roman ruins via foggy London town, the Spaghetti-Western movie studios of Madrid, Gaudi's Barcelona, Afghanistan, New York and L.A.

'The guys from your UCLA days sent me your way, claiming your memories and stories of Jim are among the most important.' Jerry Hopkins (Co-author of the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive)

'I won’t try to compete with you in the word department except to say how much I enjoy reading yours.' Roy Lichtenstein

Michael Lawrence was born in Los Angeles in 1943 to the Hollywood character actor Marc Lawrence and the screenwriter, poet and novelist Fanya Foss. When Michael was 7 and his sister, Toni, 3, the family moved to Rome after his father had become embroiled in the Hollywood McCarthyism scandal. There, Michael's childhood home became a magnet and natural melting point for Italy's own film community and the film-makers, writers and actors of 1940s Hollywood passing through. This heady mix of Outsiderism, defined by Felliniesque beauty and surrealism, fame, genius and the traumatically self-exiled, emotionally distant, father, famous for playing "baddies" from Ziggy in Key Largo in the 1940s to several Bond villains, provided a rich foundation for Michael's art. After returning to the US as a teenager, Michael studied art at UCLA. There, the formative years of dropping out and tripping with college friend Jim Morrison were followed by the award of a Huntington Hartford Fellowship. This, along with the encouragement of his mentor, the Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, and his vibrant, intellectual mother, had Michael's future set as an artist and writer. His first article, on LSD, LSD, Like Swift Death, was published in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1966. The influence of Lipchitz is evident in Michael's art, which brings together a unique, direct line of influence from the two great Bohemian periods of the 20th Century: the 1920s Montparnasse group of Lipchitz, Gris, Picasso and Modigliani, and the birth of the 1960s Alternative Culture which Michael experienced at such close quarters. After avoiding, along with his friend Jim, the very real threat of conscription to Vietnam, another famous friend, Roy Lichtenstein recommended Michael for a Krasner/ Pollock Grant, describing his work as "vibrant, joyous and colourful". Michael didn't get the grant, but by then he was on his way. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, New York City, Denver, Madrid, Stockholm and Greece. In London he is shown at the Hollywood Road Gallery, Chelsea ( an amusing coincidence). For the past 22 years Michael has lived on the Greek island of Hydra, an outpost of the art world, painting, sculpting, writing and swimming. His works can be found in hundreds of private collections internationally, including those of Oliver Stone, Eileen Getty Wilding, Moderna Museet, LA County Museum of Art and the libraries of Bard College and MoMA New York. His artwork has appeared in several films including The Royal Hunt Of The Sun(1969), The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart/Pigs (1972/1984) and The Doors biopic directed by Oliver Stone (1991).