Janis Joplin was born January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas. During her school years she broke with the local social traditions during the intense days of radical integration and stood up for the rights of African Americans. Many people equate Janis Joplin as the hard drinking blues mama, which definitely was one side of her persona. She pretended to be just a good old girl, but Janis was also an intellectual who was very well read in literature, philosophy and history. She had a lot a style and a great sense of herself.
A Radical rebel at heart from the beginning, Janis was born into a portion of history that was part of a vibrant, complex and contradictory culture, one of which she also helped create. An apostle of a cultural revolution.

 

For a fragile historical moment, rock transcended those contradictions, but in it's aftermath our rock stars of the 60's found themselves drowning like everyone else in the changes that were taking place in the consciousness of white American, kind of like waking up suddenly to an awareness of a tragedy.

I began painting Pearl with the intention of healing Janis Joplin's spirit. When I was a young teenager coming from years of childhood abuse, pieces of my spirit got lost in my past. This left me feeling alone with very little self-esteem or love for myself.

The first time I heard Pearl, I was 13 years old, baby-sitting, I put in an eight-track tape I had never seen or heard before. On the cover of the tape, was a free spirited, very creatively dressed, tapestry of a woman with feathers in her hair, it was love at first sight for me and when I put it in to listen to her, I was blown away at Janis Joplin singing the blues so very soulfully, free and wild. The sounds she made matched her colorful tapestries she wove in her flashy hippie styled fashion, full of passion. I felt her as an archetype for my own struggle to freedom. She turned me on as no one had ever done. Jim Morrison's poetry was like this for me, but not necessarily his music. I sang it out, every single syllable, every chance I had alone with her. This was the exact same time I'd discovered in my eighth grade art class that I could draw. This too became an inspiration for me to express myself in ways that were safe. I started drawing fanatically every day I got home from school and every chance I could between lessons, at school. Janis was an artist who revealed herself to me, raw and honest with soul and a punch! She had a thorough way of exploring her pain and a devotion to telling it like it is. She had a way of making her voice sound like how her body and her heart felt. In an interview Janis told a reporter, "Oh, yeah, I'm scared. I think, oh, it's so close, can I make it? If I fail, I'll fail in front of the whole world. If I miss, I'll never have a second chance on nothing. But I gotta risk it. I never hold back, man. I'm always on the outer edge of probability."

She was the first woman to achieve the kind of stature she acquired. To be an American rock performer and only second to Bob Dylan, in basically a male dominated scene. She was the only 60's culture hero to create an open book, visible to the public, of a woman's experience in the quest for liberation, an expression very different from men's. I wanted to express my deep inner turmoil in a creative, raw and honest way like her. I loved her daring, adventurous nature. I loved her spirit, I loved that she stood up in the face of racialism and spoke her truth, in a time that wasn't accepted or safe to do. I loved her and I wanted to help her out of her pain.

She was aiming for something beyond the usual, because the usual denied for her, her full humanity. Singing, offered Janis the spoken words she could never have offered by any other definition or to the full expression she committed herself to. Painting has offered me that same kind of expression of unspoken words from my inner-consciousness and soul travels and ancient memories restored. I need not think linearly, I simply feel and let the Spirit move me. Janis' universal reach helped show me how to uncover my own soulful blues of sorrow and find my way.

Janis Joplin used "dope", in her words, "getting high, as singing as fucking as liberation", was in it's more sinister truth, a pain killer and in the end brought her to her death. She died of an overdose of heroine, alone in a Los Angeles hotel room in October of 1970, at 27 years of age, just after completing her most recognize album, Pearl. It's often been said, that her performance showed a stronger sense of self that might have resulted in radical changes in her style, had she lived. Her voice is one of the wisest on this album, no messing around, but truly living inside her songs, shedding every skin that might inhibit her.

For years I knew one day I would paint her, I wanted to offer my gratitude to her spirit and do what I could to heal her tragic death in life. It took me awhile, but when I became ready, she was right there waiting for me. I prepared my studio and myself as I usually do with Prayers and meditation and I burned sacred essences of copal, frankincense and myrrh. I stated my intension to help heal and bring her spirit love, and I called Janis Joplin in, singing her soulful blues the whole time I painted.

In the process of laying out the base paint, I invited her to paint and play with me. The canvas was lying flat on the ground and we splashed and swirled colors of green and maroon paint, while singing "Combination of the Two", "I Need a Man To Love" and "Piece Of My Heart", at one point I walked around and looked at the canvas from the other direction. There she was, Janis Joplin had arrived! I was very excited to see the shape of her image, already perfectly formed from that perspective.

When I began to work on the details of her face, I used a photo I found unusual to most of Janis' images, she wanted to be pretty, she was a Goddess, and I was going to paint her as such! Soon I began to think of her '65 Porsche that she had painted, in psychedelic hues and what a classy expression of her life style and who she personified herself to be. I was reminded just how creative she really was. And so I invited her to paint the whole painting with me.

The first time I began painting stairways was in "Creation's Child". Pearl marks the point in the history of my painting career where they have become a re-occurring symbol in almost all of the pieces I do now. They represent our ascension, always climbing upwards, for Pearl; it was into the mystical Fairie realm.

So Pearl, not only have you had records selling gold, platinum and triple platinum, people in Hollywood are trying to make movies about you. Your "Greatest Hits" is still on the top of the charts on Billboard, several TV. Documentaries have been made on you, and you still have huge fan clubs to this day. Girl, you have people who love and care about you and who have helped you reach higher realms of Spirit where you are free to make love and give love and receive love and have your love received. You are not a lost little girl anymore. Thank you for always honoring rebellion over despair and giving me such inspiration. You'd died by the time I'd found you, but still you're very much alive and I know you'll always be.