"What I saw of Hendrix over the years was this myriad of personalities," Slick said. "I've drawn about 10 different pictures of Hendrix. One is very straightand serious-looking, which occasionally he was. Another one was very bright and concerned, with him looking directly at you. Another one is in the music vein. It just depends what mode I'm thinking of at the time.

"The problem with being close to those people in the rock 'n' roll business is that we all sort of got popular at the same time," Slick said. "We were all on the road and didn't get to see each other much."

Deceased Grateful Dead guitarist Garcia, however, was one of Slick's good friends over the years. She has drawn six pictures of Garcia, in part because she always hated how dopey he looked in photographs.

"I knew him as very bright, funny and very intelligent," Slick said. "And the photographs I've seen of him made him look sort of sloppy. But if you smoke dope, you tend to look even dumber than you are. I've never seen a really good photo of him, so I drew him as I knew him, which was very alert and not the least bit stupid. I'd even used drugs with the man, but I never saw him looking that stupid."

Slick uses acrylic paints for some of her work, such as "Golden Gate Bridge," which shows a fellow jumping off the San Francisco landmark. But Slick prefers working with oil pencils because of their flexibility and wide palette.

"They're not messy," she said. "You don't have to sit there and mix colors because they come in about 175 colors. You just grab one, so whatever you're feeling right now you can do it 'right now.' When I want something, I want it right now. I don't want it in an hour."

As for Slick, 60, returning to music, don't count on it: "I don't like old people on a rock 'n' roll stage. What you're pretty much doing is imitating yourself at the age of 25, and there's basically nothing more pathetic."

So that leaves Slick with her oil pencils and brushes, and that's fine by her. Drawing and painting require a solitary artistic process, which in some ways is more fulfilling than singing, she said.

"Making music is more social because you're doing it with a band," Slick said. "But you have more control if it's print art because there aren't six different people wanting it six different ways."

Slick describes her most recent work with the type of tart and forthright language she's always been known for. "Saint Hermaphrodite' is either a man or a woman," she said. "it's both. It has a halo on and it has its head thrown back in ecstasy. And it is either giving birth or masturbating. All that's up to the viewer. So you can see, my brain will go anywhere."

How does Slick describe her artistic style? "I don't have one," she said. "Every artist wants to get a style, but I want to consciously stay away from that. Some artists lend themselves to very specific, very detailed lines. I would rather have the subject of the art direct what the style is. (At the showing) it'll look like the work of about 10 different people."