MELANCHOLY MIRTH

At the University of the Arts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, a group exhibition called "Angels Without Wings" presents despair, tension, and disquiet, with a sense of urgency on the side. The gallery's online description notes that "in each work, dexterity is less important than an almost palpable and unbearable sense of isolation and emotion."

That captures the work and life of John Lurie, one of the show's three artists, to a T.

In the '70s, '80s, and beyond, as the leader of New York City's quintessential downtown act, the Lounge Lizards, saxophonist/composer Lurie brought angst and humor to the jazz world's avant-garde.

His brooding good looks and lanky frame made him an effortless icon of remote, cinematic cool when he starred in director Jim Jarmusch's seminal 1980s indie flicks Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, which paved the way for his appearances in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and, in 2001, HBO's Oz.

The angular humor he brought to such dynamic musical projects as 1999's "The Legendary Marvin Pontiac - Greatest Hits," a collection of work by a wholly invented African-Jewish musician, can also be found in the Lurie-created, -hosted, and -directed cable series Fishing With John, in which he and guests Dennis Hopper, Willem Dafoe, and Tom Waits, um, fished.

In a perfect world, Lurie, now 58, might have popped up at the recent Sundance Film Festival, or be seen at the looming Academy Awards - he scored the Jarmusch films he appeared in, as well as Steve Buscemi's Philly-filmed Animal Factory, and was nominated for a Grammy for his soundtrack for the comic-crime blockbuster Get Shorty.

But many things fell by the wayside in the late '90s when, he says, he was diagnosed with advanced Lyme disease and related neurological disorders. Illness made him something of a recluse, yet also led him to develop the painting skills that he'd displayed long ago on the covers of several Lounge Lizards albums.

The result has been a dreamily colorful brand of privately symbolic cave painting with such absurd titles as Anchor is stuck. I cannot go anywhere. Time for a sandwich and My horse must think it queer, both in the Rosenwald-Wolf show. In his best, boldest works, oblong bears, big-eared bunnies, and the randy adults who love them roam sometimes pastoral, sometimes barren landscapes.

In 2004, as his growing confidence led him to start presenting his works publicly, Lurie also found himself the subject of psychological warfare - first by a former close friend who he says continues to stalk and harass him, then by a much-commented-on August 2010 New Yorker article about the situation that implied a happy ending, and that he felt gave his tormenter a pass.

"I don't think you can put much stock in that article," he wrote during a recent e-mail correspondence. Having interviewed him in the past, this writer hoped for, and found, the trust Lurie previously had proffered. But he is wary of reporters and drained by illness.

"The situation is far more serious and it is still going on," he says. "I was driven from my [Manhattan] home 26 months ago by the maniacal threats of someone that I believe, with good reason, to be unstable and extremely dangerous."

Between that - he says he lives in hiding and is forced to relocate often - and his physical illness, he is exhausted. Moving makes new painting improbable and getting medical attention difficult. "I am not able to work now, as the situation just makes it impossible."

Thus the painful sense of isolation and emotion described in notes on the "Angels Without Wings" show.

It wasn't always like this. Lurie is an untrained artist, despite the fact that his mother taught art. "What she did that was best, and I am not sure how she did it, exactly - she enabled me to keep that childlike thing," he says, and you can see the instinctual, kidlike wonder in works such as I am out of chocolate and The Judge was hypnotized by alcohol. "My paintings are a logical development from the ones that were taped to the refrigerator 50 years ago."

Lurie says there's no easy way to categorize what he does and he has no idea where to start. "Not with the paintings, not with the music, not even with Fishing With John."

While his more abstract expressionistic paintings can be found on the Lounge Lizards' No Pain for Cakes (1987) and Queen of All Ears (1998), his newer animalistic works - including those that dot the UArts show as well as those collected in A Fine Example of Art, published by Powerhouse Books - seem touched by Miro, Basquiat, Richard Prince, Sigmar Polke, and Red Grooms, to say nothing of those who embellished the walls at Lascaux.

Lurie only cops to the cave painting.

"The others, no. I started getting serious about this so late that I was already formed as an artist; it wasn't like music, where I would listen to Hendrix, then Coltrane, then Ellington, then Stravinsky. I had tons of influences but it wasn't like I studied anyone in particular. I studied everyone, all the time."

When he tried to harness his instinctual process, he felt dishonest. "Any time I have an idea and try to work that idea out in stages, it seems to come out contrived."

His illness was a factor. He says it made itself felt slowly, starting at the end of the '90s. Something was wrong for a long time - he would be achy and dizzy in fits and starts, then it would stop for months. "In 2002 I began having severe neurological attacks. Symptoms became violent. I didn't find out for certain it was Lyme until much later."

The disease seemed to change his work from the abstraction of the past to something more cartoonish and symbolic. "The Lyme certainly seemed to bring color combinations to my head. I would be lying on the couch and four colors would just present themselves and almost compel me to get up and work."

In spring 2004, he had his first show, at Anton Kern Gallery in New York. As a musician, he found himself wondering how painters did it. "Your stuff that you put your heart into is now hanging on the wall. There is nothing to do, no way to expend your nervous energy, no way to fix it now with an inspired solo."

But the paintings sold immediately; more galleries, in the United States and elsewhere, showed his work, and by 2008 he began feeling better. Many of the paintings in the Philadelphia exhibition were done in Turkey in 2009.

Of those who think of him as an artist rather than any of his past personas, he says, "I think it's better if they don't know. People in the art world who have reacted most strongly to the paintings are people who had no idea who I was before."

For all his progress, he says the headaches and hassles brought on by the New Yorker story and the subsequent buzz have put him in a physical and psychological tailspin, unable to concentrate enough to work. "The situation just makes it impossible," he says.

Yet there's still a glimmer of humor, dark and light, in his estimations of what he does and who is he. Ask him if there's a secret within his paintings and he says, "There are large bundles of heroin hidden in the frames."

Remind him about being used to criticism as an actor and musician, and ask whether the painter John Lurie has the same thickness of skin, and he muses that it all depends. "Funny how it goes with this," he says. "When you start out, they love you. Then you get better at it - music, art, whatever - and they hate you. Then they like you again. But not as much."