“Nice and loose,” was how Mr. Hathaway described Mr. Sharp’s work. “It really did give a good conveyance of what taking LSD or speed was like — where it was very, very busy and great.”

“Disraeli Gears” reached No. 5 in Britain and No. 4 in the United States. Mr. Sharp had already drawn music posters in his Chelsea studio, but “Disraeli Gears” took his art to a much wider audience. Posters he had drawn of Bob Dylan, Donovan and Jimi Hendrix (one of his most famous, “Explosion”) became emblems of the era.

Image His illustration of Bob Dylan that ran on the cover of Oz magazine.

Yet instead of trying to ride the rock wave to greater fame, Mr. Sharp headed back to Australia in 1970. Over the next four decades he became one of his country’s most prominent artists, making posters, paintings and collages that focused on Australian culture, politics and an unusual performer who played the ukulele and sang in a falsetto voice. His name was Tiny Tim.

Mr. Sharp saw him for the first time in London in 1967.

“I’d eaten a bit of hash or something, but he just amazed me,” Mr. Sharp recalled in “Electrical Banana.” “I’d been doing a lot of collage work, like a van Gogh figure within a Magritte landscape. I was fascinated by the language of art, and mixing and connecting things. Tiny was working with songs in a similar way. He had a quickness and breadth of songs that was breathtaking. I knew the language he was using. He was such a modern artist.”

Mr. Sharp made many portraits of Tiny Tim, who was born Herbert Khaury in New York in 1932 and died in 1996, and he spent years working on a film about him, “Street of Dreams,” which he never completed.