| She's especially proud of a Hendrix portrait that uses bold splashes of bright colors against a black background. She also likes a painting of Bob Dylan holding a cross in one hand and a Star of David in the other. |
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| Two portraits of Janis Joplin are in her show at Artrock gallery in San Francisco that runs through December. One is in hues of blue with a smiling Janis holding maracas. Another is a close-up of her face with vegetation coming out of her head. Slick dislikes both works. |
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| "I haven't gotten it yet," she says. "I talk out loud to her, 'What do you want me to do this time, Janis?" |
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| Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Slick and Joplin were the high priestesses of rock-spontaneous, outrageous, wisecracking mamas who grabbed life by the heels and shook it dry. But while Joplin was troubled, fragile in a way, Slick was more centered. She boozed and drugged with the best of them; said anything, did anything and wore anything-or nothing. And she survived, from Jefferson Airplane to Starship to her own short-lived solo career. |
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| Now 61, the aging rocker has adapted an artful look. Her shoulder-length, straight hair is completely white-she says she had been dyeing it since her mid-20s-and sets off her violet-blue eyes. |
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| Striking and statuesque, Slick could be a model once again-a profession she tried briefly before turning to music. |
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| After a foray into pop with Starship in the 1960s, Slick quit the music business a decade ago and became a painter. She loves creating something outside herself, something that doesn't involve her appearance. |
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| Her studio is the dining room in her Malibu home, where canvases litter the floor. "It's the usual nutty-looking slob artist arrangement," she says. She spends an average of about a week on each painting and cranks out about 100 a year. |
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| Slick studies art for a half-semester in college, "not because I wanted to be an artist, but because it was easy. I have some talent in drawing and I was at the University if Miami to play," she says. |
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| But she also never studied music and to this day cannot read a single note. Persistence has gotten her everywhere, she says. |
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| Slick grew up in Palo Alto, the daughter of an investment banker father and singer mother. She was "right in the middle of the WASP caricature of family life," she writes in her 1998 autobiography, "Somebody to Love?" She married longtime family friend Jerry Slick when she was 20, Jerry Slick's brother, Darby, wrote "Somebody to Love," which later helped make Slick famous. |
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In 1965, Grace Slick formed The Great Society and played in San Francisco clubs for about a year until she was asked to join Jefferson Airplane, a band she had admired.
"This was an invitation, an invitation to hold what I'd always thought was a lofty position reserved only for supermodels, movie stars and great physical beauties," she writes. She brought two hits along with her-"Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit", which she wrote. Today, she lives mainly off the royalties from "White Rabbit"-830,000 every time it's used in a movie, she says. |
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Selling her paintings, she says, "pays the water bill."
About 10 years ago, a friend asked Slick to sing at her wedding. The guests made faces at her and plugged their noses as she launched in to The Carpenters "It's Only Just Begun." She begins to sing the chorus for a visitor and it doesn't sound nearly as bad as she thinks it does. |
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| "My voice is built for rock 'n' roll. I can't sing high and soft," she says. "And I can't see getting up and doing old standards." It works for Linda Ronstadt, but she's got a voice that can pull it off, she says. |
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| She understands her limitations. And she knows that serious art critics probably won't like her work. |
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| And they don't. |
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| Critics say Slick's work, priced between $1,100 and $8.700, will sell more because of her name than her artistic talent. |
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| "They're terrible," says David Littlejohn, art critic form the Wall Street Journal who looked at photos of Slick's art on a web site. "No museum would touch it for sure and these prices seem extraordinary…. She looks to me absolutely self-taught." |
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| But Ron Turner of San Francisco's Last Gasp Publications, which publishes collections by contemporary artists, disagrees. |
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| "She's done the hardest thing that an artist can do and that is evoke feeling in her work. She's able to bring that out," he says. "I don’t' think we have to compare Grace with painting masters." |
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| Slick says she's fascinated by the people who but her work. She wonders why they like it, where they hang it. |
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| "If you're famous and you draw and you're not very good at it, chances are people are going to buy it," she acknowledges. "There's a lot of work to be done and I love the process. …I do art because I like it….You don't have to be Rembrandt to make something that appeals to somebody else." |
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