True collaboration in the artistic world is a rare bird. Painting, especially, is largely a solo pursuit, with the artist relying on his or her own instincts and inspiration to stoke the creative fires.

But a couple of painters -- one from North Beach and the other from the Mission District -- have been sharing paint and canvas for years now. The fruits of their labor were on display recently at the Live Worms Gallery in North Beach and if there were any doubts that two artists can work side by side on a single canvas and emerge with a coherent vision, that modest showing of eight paintings should have dispelled them.

The interesting thing about the artists, Momo and Will Jaggers, is that they've been doing this for so long now that "the vision thing" often doesn't even kick in until they're standing there, ready to go.

"The stuff kind of just evolves," says Jaggers, who makes his folding money as chairman of the art department at Stuart Hall High School in The City. "We just start working. Sometimes we talk it over, but basically we're action painters. We just attack it. We like the physicality of it."

Jaggers, who keeps a studio out on Guerrero Street, is a product of the Art Institute and enjoyed a showing career during the 1980s. Momo, on the other hand, has no formal training, a fact that Jaggers believes liberates his creative spirit.

"Momo's a great painter because he just goes after it," Jaggers says. "He doesn't think about technique. He just goes after it."

"Going after it" is exactly what Momo and Jaggers do. The canvases are large -- 5-1/2 by 8 feet is typical -- yet the paintings are generally completed within frenetic six- to eight-hour bursts. Maybe it's the way Kerouac would have worked had he been a painter instead of a writer.

What emerges from these stream-of-consciousness sessions are fully realized works, vibrant in their use of color and unified as pieces of art even though one painter's style often contrasts sharply with the other.

Momo does most of the background work and the abstract-expressionist elements are generally his. Jaggers, more of a representational artist, creates the literary, political and artistic figures that unify many of the pieces. At the Live Worms show, Gandhi, Schopenhauer, Artaud and George Bush the Younger (now there's a quartet) were all present.

Jaggers, who estimates that he and Momo have produced around sixty paintings in a collaboration stretching back to the 1970s, defined their style as pop surrealism.

"Because there's writing on it (the paintings usually carry a scrawled political or social message on them, generally inspired by Momo) and because the brushstrokes are expressionistic, the environments are definitely surreal, definitely narrative," Jaggers says.

And definitely pop.

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