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| "Smirk" by Tom Wills, graphite, October 2018. |
This beautiful smirk belongs to Grace Slick, who looks like she’s about to do — or has just done — something naughty.
I am probably right about that.
You see, in the late 1960s, Slick was no Petula Clark.
If you are someone under 50 years old, I’m sure that you are Googling both women right now to find out what I’m getting at.
She is one of the earliest female rock stars and had a big influence on other female performers. She had great pipes.
After brief work as a model, her music career spanned four decades with Jefferson Airplane (great), Jefferson Starship (occasionally awesome), and Starship (meh). Throughout, she was bold, loud, sexy —and a little dangerous.
She talked about, and sang about, drugs and sex. Her early song “White Rabbit" is about psychedelic drugs, and she was the first person to say "motherfucker" on television during a 1969 performance. Her nickname? The Chrome Nun. She has acknowledged her alcoholism, discussed her rehabilitation and commented on use of LSD, marijuana and more.
She retired from the music business in the 1990s,, saying: “All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire." So she began painting and drawing, displaying and selling her artwork and attending art shows across the United States. She uses acrylic paints, ink, scratchboard, pastels and pencil among other tools.
This picture is all pencil of various leads and was drawn specifically to fit an oval, antique frame that I grabbed at a summer garage sale. I worked longer on the frame than on the drawing, filling in cracks, shoring up the bubble glass and eventually painting over most of it. I drew a light oval around the drawing as it came together, to make sure that it would fit perfectly.
She's not perfect. She's not supposed to be.
I figured many of you wouldn’t recognize this young face. I also reasoned, if nothing else, it would still be a portrait of a beautiful young woman with a twinkle in her eyes and mischief at her mouth — in a cool frame. But if you don’t know who Grace Slick is, you should. And now you do.
Available, $160.
