Almost nobody knows this part. The voice you know, the performances you know, the feather boa and the Southern Comfort and the banshee wail that stopped 7,000 people cold at Monterey. All of that you know, but before the voice, before Big Brother, before Cheap Thrills and Pearl and the cover of Time magazine, Janis Joplin was going to be a painter.
She painted her entire life. She drew her entire life. She was, by the assessment of every art teacher who ever saw her work, genuinely talented. Not talented in the encouraging way that teachers describe students they like, but talented in the way that stops a professional in their tracks and makes them say, “This person has something real.” She chose music.
The world got the voice it will never forget, but here is the question that has never been fully asked. What did the world lose when she put down the paintbrush? Port Arthur, Texas, 1957, Janis Joplin was 14 years old. She was already wrong for Port Arthur, too loud, too visible, too interested in things that Port Arthur didn’t value.
But in the art room at Thomas Jefferson High School, she was right. Her art teacher, Dave Moriarity, recognized it immediately. He would say later that she had a gift that went beyond technical skill, a visual language that was entirely her own, a way of seeing the translated directly onto the page without getting distorted by the process.
She drew, she painted, she filled sketchbooks, she decorated everything around her, her room, her books, the margins of her school notebooks. Moriarity told her to take it seriously. He told her she could pursue it professionally. He told her she had something real. She heard him. And she kept painting, and she kept singing in the church choir, and she kept absorbing blues records in her bedroom, and the question of which one she was going to be, the painter or the singer, was not yet answered.
She went to Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas in 1961. She enrolled partly to study art. She took formal classes. She developed her skills. She was, by the accounts of people who were there, one of the most serious students in the program. She was also, by that point, playing music in the folk and blues bars around Beaumont and Port Arthur.
Sitting in with musicians, finding that her voice could do something that not many voices could do. The choice was forming, not a dramatic single moment, more like the slow turning of a compass needle, gradual, almost imperceptible, until one day you look up and realize you are facing a completely different direction than you were before.
She left Lamar. She went to San Francisco for the first time in 1963. She came back. She enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. She tried being ordinary. She tried being the student her parents had hoped for. She kept painting. She kept drawing. And she kept singing. In 1966, Chet Helms called her back to San Francisco.
Big Brother and the Holding Company needed a singer. She said yes. That was the moment. Not a decision announced in any room. Just a yes that meant everything else became secondary. She never stopped painting. Read that sentence again. She never stopped. In San Francisco, she painted the walls of her rooms.
She decorated every surface around her. The Porsche came later, but the impulse was the same one she had as a teenager filling the margins of her school notebooks. She made a self-portrait. It is one of the most honest images of her that exists. Not because she was a technically accomplished portraitist, but because she was painting herself with the same honesty she brought to every other thing she did.
No feather boa, no performance, just the face she saw when she looked in the mirror, rendered in paint by her own hand. In 1968, when R. Crumb was hired to create the Cheap Thrills album artwork, there was a specific conversation between him and Janis about visual language. Crumb was one of the most accomplished visual artists of the underground scene.
He looked at her work and recognized something. Not a hobbyist’s work, the work of someone who had been developing a visual intelligence for years. He said later that he was surprised by the seriousness of it. The evidence of a person who had been thinking visually for a long time.
Two visual artists in a room talking about what the album cover should look like. The fact that one of them was also the most famous female rock singer in America was almost incidental. At 13 years old, she had made a painting. It was a portrait of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane made for her Sunday school class at a Port Arthur church.
She left it there when she left Port Arthur. It went into a closet. It stayed in that closet for more than 30 years through Monterey and Cheap Thrills and Pearl and everything that followed. In 1991, 21 years after her death, someone cleaning the church found it. A 13-year-old girl’s Sunday school painting in a church closet in Port Arthur, Texas made by the person who would become one of the most famous voices in the history of recorded music.
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It is now at the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur on display next to the photographs of her on stage with the feather boa and the Southern Comfort. The painter right there next to the singer. Both of them the same person. Her brother, Michael Joplin, in the months after her death, went through her belongings.
He found the visual work, the drawings, the sketches, the small canvases, the self-portrait. He found evidence of someone who had been making images throughout her entire adult life, quietly, without an audience, without a career built around it, just because it was something she needed to do. He said later that going through her visual work was one of the most surprising parts of processing her death.
Not because he didn’t know she painted, he did, but because of the quantity of it, the sustained, consistent, lifelong practice of someone who was also doing everything else. The touring, the recording, the performances that left audiences wrung out and exhilarated, and in the private hours, the paintings.
She was always both things. The world only saw one. Here is what this story asks you. What is the thing you do privately that the world doesn’t see? Not the performance, the practice, the thing you do in the hours when no one is watching, not because it will become anything, but because you need to do it.
Janis Joplin had a voice that stopped the world. She also had a paintbrush that nobody saw. Both of them were real. Both of them were her. Dave Moriarity told her she had something real when she was 14 years old in a Port Arthur art classroom. He was right. He just didn’t know yet which of the two real things would be the one the world came to know.
She chose the voice. The world kept the voice, but the paintings are still there, in museums and private collections and a church closet that held one of them for 30 years without knowing what it had. The painter who became the singer who was always still the painter. That is the whole story. That is the part almost nobody knows.
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