#BEST COVER PORTRAIT PAINTER PROFESSIONAL#
Those around her are mostly men: some of them lovers (Graham Nash, David Crosby), some friends and professional barometers (Neil Young, Bob Dylan), but for their cheery, empty impersonality, they might as well be strangers. The ’60s paintings are almost exclusively portraits of those around her, often drawn from reproductions of sketchpad drawings made on the road or in recording studios. She started painted extensively in the ’60s and has never stopped, save for a few brief, ill-advised forays into photography in the ’80s. Less known-more easily ignored-is how diligently she kept working on the paintings and drawings discarded by the press, by the men in her life, even by her fans, as dilettantish, a foil for her “real” efforts. Instead, she left after a year to play three nights a week in a bar called Depression.įrom there, it’s a familiar story: the child she would give up, the move to Toronto, Detroit, New York, the steady ascent to stardom until 1974’s Court and Spark would inviolably confirm it.
While Martin would eventually come to resist any suggestion that her work represented landscape, weather, light, any natural phenomena, replacing these allusions with nominations of “universal” experience (happiness, innocence), it’s impossible to not see, if you know, the crepuscular blankness of the prairies in her symmetrical compositions, and tempting to think that Mitchell, who had found minimalism imperiously prescriptive and impersonal, would have recognized something of herself in Martin’s tremulous lineaments. Would things have been different if, during Joni’s brief time as an art student at the Alberta College of Art and Design, she had been shown works by Agnes Martin and not, as she told New York, Barnett Newman? Martin, born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, five hours from Mitchell, had, by 1964, developed the rectilinear grids that would become her signature. While it seems obvious now that the way out would be through her singular five-octave mezzo-soprano, singing was at first only a side bar, a hobby “for smoking money,” and so she did what most aspiring musicians people do, which is to go to art school and hate it. But then there’s the flip side: with no one recognizing her as a painter, there was no one to avenge but herself.īorn a Scorpio, and as Roberta Joan Anderson, on the grand, desolate Saskatchewan prairies, Joni wanted what all children want: an escape route. She didn’t-or she didn’t have the option to? No one, including her, has said-show in a major gallery, unlike many of her male counterparts from the ’60s, who parlayed their music success to art world mediocrity ( here’s looking at you, Bob Dylan). Of her 19 studio album covers, 12 are paintings by Mitchell, and most of these are self-portraits. “A painter derailed by circumstance.” What if we were to, for once, take her at her word? It either infuriated or amused everyone that she called herself a painter, not least of all because (1) it was hers alone, and (2) she didn’t care who was looking: a pop star needs a public, and the public expects the star’s surrender. Always have been,” she coolly informs Jian Ghomeshi in a 2013 interview, ashing a cigarette in his general direction. If the photographs were simultaneously what she had to give and how she wanted be perceived, her self-portraits-private, ignored-could be how she saw herself.įirst and foremost, how she saw herself was as a painter. It became harder to square and separate her persona from her private life. she had wanted to be a celebrity, but by the time holding a dulcimer and wearing long dresses the color of crushed lilacs became an obligation, not a game, her celebrity was no longer solely her decision. “I had no image of myself,” Joni will say of this early period, which, considering the hundreds of doe-eyed photographs that Googling “Joni Mitchell young” brings up, I can only take to mean “I couldn’t see myself in any of these images.” She had wanted to be a producer and a product-i.e. Mitchell’s 1969 self-portrait “Untitled” was the cover of her album “Clouds.”
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