Over the course of her 67 years, Grace Slick has been a model, a popular rock singer with Jefferson Airplane in the 1960s and ’70s and Starship in the ’80s, a student of biomedical research fraud and — for the past decade — an accomplished artist.
Just not all at once.
“I’m not a multitasker — I do one thing at a time,” Slick says. “I know Jerry Garcia used to take his paints on the road and Miles Davis and all these people, but I do one man at a time, one car, one house, one child, one job.”
Fans of her from her rock days have the Jefferson Airplane albums, with hits like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” yet art aficionados have the chance to own pieces of her art or at least lithographs (“So you don’t have to throw $25,000 at everything,” she quips) when her work is shown at three area Wentworth galleries next week. Slick displays her pieces — including acrylics, pencil sketches and scratchboard works — often in New York, Washington and North Carolina, a repertoire that includes a wide variety of subjects, from animals to rock icons.
Slick has painted portraits of The Who’s Pete Townshend, Sting, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and the Doors’ Jim Morrison — the latter a few times, with the very dark “Sacrifice to Morphius” and the lighter “Pretty Boy.”
“That’s one of the things that got in his way,” Slick says. “That [pretty-boy aspect] bothered Morrison. He’s 25, 26, 27 years old, and he got all fat and had a beard and everything, and I think he might have done that on purpose.”
She’s also done several self-portraits: One was inspired after a hospital stay last year where she painted what it feels like coming out of morphine, having been in a medically induced coma for a couple months for a tracheotomy and other procedures. It depicts a tiny person in the middle of a large canvas, all curled up with complete chaos around it.
“Its body is going crazy but the essence of a person remains the same,” she explains.
She also draws “Alice in Wonderland” characters and animals a lot because for one, she loves both, and also people request white rabbits all the time, for obvious reasons. One woman commissioned a a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from the viewpoint of China Beach, and wanted a bunny in it. (It’s riding a bicycle.)
“I don’t mind it. You want a bunny? I can draw bunnies out the ass. I’m getting real good at bunnies,” Slick says with a laugh.
A native of Illinois,” Slick used to draw before she entered kindergarten (“I’d draw an angel and my parents would make a Christmas card out of it or something”) but — because she’s never been able to multitask — focused on schoolwork until she left college to be a model. Then in 1965, she went to see Jefferson Airplane play in San Francisco and thought being a rock singer was a lot better than being a model.
Does she have one more career change in her?
“I really don’t care, as long as it’s in the arts,” Slick says. “But if I’m not doing anything, I get crazy. I have to be interacting with whatever the art is and people — otherwise I get just goofy.
“I don’t see the point of anybody taking up space on the planet just sitting around.”
Grace Slick
Grace Slick’s artwork will be on display and for sale at three Wentworth galleries:
» Fashion Center at Pentagon City
Address: 1100 South Hayes St., Arlington, Va.
Phone: 703-415-1166
Hours: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday
» White Flint
Address: 11301 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda, Md.
Phone: 301-816-7974
Hours: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Jan. 12
» Tysons Galleria
Address: 1731 M International Drive, McLean, Va.
Phone: 703-883-0111
Hours: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Jan. 13 and noon to 4 p.m. Jan. 14
Slick agrees with ‘Awesomely Bad’ label
When Blender magazine named the 1985 Starship hit “We Built This City” the No. 1 Most Awesomely Bad Song Ever, Grace Slick’s first reaction was “Right on!”
While RCA Records gave Jefferson Airplane creative freedom in the late ’60s and ’70s, it wasn’t that way with Starship (“a sell-out band,” she says) in the ’80s. When the producer would do things his way, including he wanted to have them record “We Built This City,” penned by Elton John collaborator Bernie Taupin and featuring an annoying Rick Dees traffic report.
“It’s a song about the clubs closing in L.A., written by a British guy, sung by a San Francisco group — just for starters, that’s off — and then, there isn’t any city built on rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll is too new,” Slick says. “If he’s talking about L.A., L.A. is built on oranges and oil and the movie industry. San Francisco is built on gold and trade. And London has been around for 2,000 years.
“No city was built on rock ‘n’ roll. Sorry. So it’s a dumb [expletive] song.”
She also was never a big fan of the group’s other chart-topper, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”
“Dumb song — 52, 56 percent of people get married and get divorced. Yeah, plenty of things are gonna stop you now,” she cracks. “Reality is gonna stop you, just for one.”
– Brian Truitt
