After posting my last blog, Celebration of Female Artists VII, I wanted to delve deeper into a few of the artists, one of them the incomparable Joni Mitchell. Many Joni Mitchell paintings and self-portraits have made for unforgettable album covers, enhancing her very visual songs.
I used the article written by Jeanette Leech, November 2022, to expand.
https://thisisdig.com/feature/Joni-Mitchell-paintings-self-portraits-album-covers/
“In the early 1970s I used to carry a sketchbook around with me everywhere I went. The drawings were becoming more important to me than the music at that time.” Joni Mitchell, 2019.
Over the years, many striking Joni Mitchell paintings and self-portraits have been used as album covers. Mitchell saw her devotion to painting as necessary for her artistic balance. “I am a painter who writes songs. My songs are very visual. The words create scenes. ”
A teenage Mitchell attended the Alberta College Of Art In Calgary for a year. Visual art has remained a constant. She continues to produce paintings, primarily for herself.
Clouds (1969) is the first Mitchell album to feature a self-portrait on the cover. Mitchell offers up a prairie lily, the floral emblem of Saskatchewan, the Canadian province where Mitchell grew up. For the Ladies of the Canyon, a simple line drawing encases a colorful representation of Laurel Canyon – at that time, Mitchell’s home. Many of Mitchell’s contemporaries lived nearby. “It was just a personal neighborhood statement.”
She chose to appear in photographic form on the 1971 album Blue and For The Roses (1972) but returned to painting for what would become her most successful album, Court And Spark (1974). The work was painted in Vancouver and, “done in a moment of whimsy.”
Mitchell has had a tempestuous relationship with touring; escape and travel are frequent themes of her songs. The tour which resulted in the Miles Of Aisles double album was Mitchell’s first with a full band rather than as a solo performer. The artwork for Miles Of Aisles is an embellished photo taken by Mitchell at Michigan’s Pine Knob Music Theater.
Just as on Ladies Of The Canyon’s album cover, Mitchell’s own house is visible on the sleeve for The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, but this time it is not an idyll but an urban, moneyed vista.
Mingus (1979) is deeply entangled with the jazz great Charles Mingus. “I like the cover myself,” Mitchell said at the time that Mingus was released. “I’ve always done much more commercial covers – by that, I mean to distinguish it from my very personal, private painting. It’s the first time I decided to put that out because it seemed to suit the music.”
Featuring a self-portrait in which she reimagines herself as Vincent Van Gogh, complete with famous bandaged ear, Turbulent Indigo (1994) is perhaps Joni Mitchell’s most celebrated album cover. Hypocrisy has always been a central theme of Mitchell’s music and, on Turbulent Indigo’s title track, she uses Van Gogh to explore it. Mitchell identified with Van Gogh in another way, in terms of a frustrating lack of recognition. Though very critically lauded throughout the late 60s and during the 70s, the following 15 years had been trickier for Mitchell and her irritation was building, but Turbulent Indigo won a Grammy for Best Pop Album.
From Turbulent Indigo onwards, Mitchell started to frame the self-portraits she used on her album covers. This effectively put her paintings in a gallery, declaring them artworks first, album sleeves second.
At the time of Travelogue’s release (2002), Mitchell stated that it would be her last studio album. She revisits her own back catalogue, recasting the songs with her lower, slower, nicotine-scarred voice. On the album’s cover, however, Mitchell is sprightly, with shining hair, Vermeer-esque pearl earring, and smoke swirling upwards from an unseen cigarette.
Of late, gratefully, we have seen this fine artist (pun intended) receiving the accolades she deserves. including this year’s winner of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress, only the third woman to receive the award.
May she have healthy, happy years ahead!
And thank you!
