'Count of Passaic County' is gone, but his art will live on, thanks to a local professor

A Paterson staple, Beat Generation artist Don Kommit, has more to give.

The city native, who died in June 2022, left behind nearly 1,600 sketchbooks filled with original drawings and poems spanning seven decades.

Most of the work has never been seen. It may not be. Joseph Coco, a professor of art and music at Centenary University, aims to change that.

Kommit was "talented, gifted and persistent, with a huge legacy for being a teacher for the entire Paterson community," he said. "I couldn't go to my grave knowing I didn't do anything."

Boxed and inventoried from Kommit's Paterson home, the sketchbooks contain more than 75,000 original drawings, according to Coco's estimates. Each captures what Kommit called his streams of consciousness.

Though a relative unknown even among Beat Movement experts, Kommit was recognized by those who mattered: Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, whose father, Louis, taught Kommit's English classes at Paterson Central High School.

In the years before his death, Kommit lived in a former brick factory on the Passaic River end of Cianci Street. Many of his drawings and paintings are scenes of the city, its industrial centers and its underground poker rooms. An artist in the all-encompassing sense, Kommit lent his hand in the production of plays, movies and events. The so-called "Count of Passaic County" wrote his own poems and helped organize the Silk City Poets, a former poetry reading group.

About two dozen of Kommit's sketchbooks were given to interested friends and colleagues after his death. The new owners have been asked to select some images for anthologies Coco plans to have produced. The remaining sketchbooks are in storage or in the process of being combed and archived by Coco and an intern. In their first two weeks, they captured about 250 images from just 10 books.

Coco has set a late-April deadline to collect enough images to fill one or two books. Still, Coco is not the executor of Kommit's estate. The books could find their way to an art broker by then, he said.

"There's no way to get through the books before they are gone," Coco said. "You do what you can."

Born in the city in 1937, Kommit came from a long line of tradesmen who moonlighted as performers. Kommit's father was a tap dancer. His aunt and uncle were in a Yiddish theater troupe.

Kommit was an artist and a teacher.

Most notably, he taught at Newark State College after attending William Paterson University, Rutgers and the University of California-San Diego. Yet he was also a substitute teacher in the area and spent a spell teaching art to local high school students, Coco included.

More:In Allen Ginsberg's hometown, a poet keeps the Beat Generation alive

Kommit's sketchbooks are accordingly laced with images of students in various classrooms.

"Every day, he'd be at it," Coco said. "He was just automatic with it."

Before he became a teacher and fully devoted himself to his art, Kommit was a U.S. Marine. Belonging to a collective suited him, he said, but the absence of poetry and drawing did not. When he returned to Paterson in 1960, Kommit donned a blue beret and started visiting Greenwich Village in search of art, adventure and women.

He found himself among Beat Generation founders, stars and upstarts. He did what they had done since the 1940s and put his thoughts on paper. He continued for the rest of his life — in later years buying his notebooks from Paterson’s Supermundo discount store.

“There were years when I didn’t put it down, and I was angry and miserable,” Kommit told NorthJersey.com in 2017. “Once I started putting it down, religiously, I just was so much happier.”

Staff Writer Christopher Maag contributed to this article.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Paterson's own Beat Generation artist is gone, but his art lives on