Although Burroughs is more famous for writing such mind-expanding classics of Beat literature as Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine and Cities Of The Red Night, few people are aware that the author was also an enthusiastic practitioner of fine art. For Burroughs, painting overlapped into writing and, although the two media were worlds apart, opened up new paths of inner discovery for him to explore. "Very often they turn out to be illustrative of my writing," he wrote, "or what I am thinking about writing. So whatever I'm working on in writing will be reflected in painting."

Burroughs's art began in 1982 with his celebrated 'Shotgun Paintings', a series of plywood panels which the artist blasted with his newly acquired double-barrel Rossi 12-gauge shotgun. Upon observation, Burroughs was astonished and delighted to discover that the formation of the shotgun pellets had taken on the shape of a series of tiny pictures: "I saw all sorts of things, little villages, streets of all kinds. I said, 'My God, this is a work of art'."

Acutely aware that his new-found technique was both limited and too reliant on chance, Burroughs decided to take it a stage further by propping a can of spray paint against the panels before shooting at them. This resulted in a splash effect which released a host of "unforeseeable, unpredictable images and patterns". By adding cans of spray paint to his eccentric palette, Burroughs's artistic eye was suddenly opened to the possible imaginary worlds he could create by experimenting with colour.

Soon after he began to produce works on paper and canvas, sometimes using a mushroom instead of a brush. He also incorporated his own cut-up collage technique, where pages from his own novels illustrated with pictures torn from magazines, were stuck down, painted over and shot at. The paintings brought his artist and author side together, supplying his audience with an open doorway into WSB's parallel universe. They are also potent magical talismans in their own right.

Burroughs was aware of the mysterious hidden powers he was unleashing through his art: "I want my painting to literally walk off the goddamned canvas, to become a creature and a very dangerous creature."

The Burroughs painting X-Ray Man (1992) is the cover image on Sonic Youth's NYC Ghosts & Flowers.