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Janis Joplin, kickin' ass, singing live, and showing why she was the queen of bluesy rock in the late 1960's. My #sharpiescribblestyle drawing for a couple in NorCal. 18" X 24"
In late 2015, 7 1/2 crazy years ago, I started trying to really sell my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings. I had been living with my mom in a small town in central North Carolina, after my dad's death. I was struggling with serious depression for a few years, partly because I couldn't find any "real" job after taxi driving died off in California a few years earlier. I applied for 140 different local jobs in a couple of years, and didn't get any of them. That had never happened to me before. We were living off my mom's social security check, which she didn't manage well. One night just trying to figure out some way to make a little bit of money on my own, I decided to try selling some of my Sharpie drawings.
My Sharpie Scribble Style technique was something I invented while living in an indie art gallery in 2005. I had tried drawing a mural with markers back in 2002, in this tiny, dingy room I lived in. I kept playing around, trying to find a technique to shade different colors with markers, to get beyond the basic 12 or 24 colors. The layering of different colors of scribbles to get different hues and to blend colors is something I stumbled upon while living in the AAA Electra Gallery later on. I had been drawing different things, on and off, for ten years, using the style. But nothing really cool.
Janis' name, hand drawn style inspired by actual Big Brother & the Holding Company concert posters, from the late 1960's. The name is surrounded by song lyrics and song titles in the background, with colors over them.
When I decided to step up my art, and try to sell something, I spent about three hours one night looking through all kinds of art, trying to answer one simple question, "What could I draw that I would want to put on my own wall?" I dug through work, from Picasso and Monet to Banksy and Shephard Fairey. I decided on a simple stencil drawing of Bruce Lee. That's how I started drawing people. A couple weeks later, I sold a drawing for $25 to someone on Facebook. I kept drawing people. Within a couple of months, I decided to draw Johnny Cash, a favorite of mine from childhood.
I showed the drawing to a woman who had a little Amish food store and sandwich shop in downtown Kernersville, NC, where we lived. She asked what I'd want for the drawing. Jokingly, I said, "Lunch for me and mom would be cool." She replied, "What do you want?" So I traded my first musician drawing, Johnny Cash, for a couple of great sandwiches and drinks. A week or two later, we were back in the shop, and Jo, the owner asked, "could you draw Janis Joplin for me?" That was my first musician drawing request. My skills were much less developed then, but I drew a pretty good rendition of a popular Janis photo, with with lots of shadows, which made drawing easier. That was in early 2016, and I've been drawing musicians ever since, mostly by request. I've lost track, but I've sold around 100 original drawings since 2016.
Close up of the latest Janis Joplin drawing.
For 7 1/2 years now, I've been drawing nearly continuously. My drawings went from taking 12 to 15 hours to draw a 12" X 18" drawing, to 40 to 45 hours or more to draw an 18" X 24" drawing. During the drawing process, I watch all the interviews I can find about whomever I'm drawing, as well as listen to their music (for musicians), and watch any documentaries about them. I try to understand the person or group as much as I can. As the years passed, this has been one of the coolest parts of the process for me.
I love Janis' music, I used to listen to the Pearl album, in particular, quite a bit, years ago. It was great to dig into her story while drawing this piece. I knew she died from a drug overdose, and was part of the now infamous "27 Club," artists who died at the age 27. That group unfortunately included Jimi Hendrix, who died shortly before Janis, Jim Morrison, and more recent musicians like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
I didn't know that Janis didn't start really singing until high school. I didn't know that she was part of a bluegrass folk band early on, or that she was bisexual. I also didn't know that she died accidentally of a heroin overdose, while recording the Pearl album in Hollywood. I thought it was just crazy, excessive partying. Her life and career was really on an upswing at the time of her death, and she had quit using hard drugs months before. Hendrix had died of an overdose just over two weeks before she OD'd, which hit Janis hard. The people around her seem to think she was just feeling down, struggling with the the long periods of alone time during recording, and decided to get a bit of heroin again just to take the edge off the sadness, and she wound up with really pure stuff. It was enough to end her life, to everyone's surprise. The band finished up Pearl, and it was released just three months after her death. This is one of my top 5 favorite drawings I've done, it came out better than expected.
Here are some of the best videos I came across of Janis Joplin while doing this drawing.
Janis- "Ball and Chain" Monterey Pop Festival- This performance really thrust her into the limelight as an up and coming performer.
Janis: The Way She Was documentary -1974- 25 minutes
Little Girl Blue documentary - 90 minutes
Melissa Etherige and Joss Stone tribute to Janis, introduced by Kris Kristofferson, who wrote "Me & my Bobby McGee"
