Grace Slick’s bizarre daily routine: “I have three deadly diseases”
Most people, when they think of Grace Slick, imagine the counterculture icon who captured the spirit of an entire generation in her music. Fewer people give credence to Slick’s prowess as a painter, and how those visions revealed more about her expression than her music ever did.
Slick’s entire career is often condensed into her popular 1967 psychedelic track ‘White Rabbit’. The reasons why it became so popular had little to do with its arrangements, as it wasn’t exactly what Slick even considered to be a true portrait of the cultural zeitgeist at the time. It was a risk, but one that endeared itself to audiences by leaning into the right kind of strange.
As she once reflected, “Why it got so popular is amazing because it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. It is a Spanish march. The music is weird.”
Beyond the music, Slick was a counterculture icon due to her audacious personality and attitude, embodying not just the unease of the era’s psychedelic haze but the malaise that came with the end of an entire movement. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland might have been a “blatant” source text, Slick argues, but it provided the perfect canvas for culture’s unsettling dissonance and the constant yearning for childlike innocence and wonder.
Slick also mentioned once that one of the main themes is curiosity, a facet that stretches into her artwork. The singer has painted Alice and her accomplices a handful of times, many of which are styled with a mix of pastel colours and obvious exuberance – mirroring the loud, surreal tones of the source material and the associations that those flourishes create with reality, adventure, and striving for truth.
When Slick paints, the conditions have to be just right, as anything less will likely interrupt her flow or the colour palettes that reveal themselves whenever she feels inspired. As she explained in an interview with the Recording Academy, “I can only work at night, unfortunately, if I already know what colours I’m going to use. But I wouldn’t choose them at night. Incandescent bulbs and LEDs, and whatever else goes on are not good light. It depends on the light, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the weather, really.”
She also elaborated on her odd routine and how painting fits in sporadically around it. “I have the weirdest life,” she said. “I sleep for an hour and a half, get up for two, sleep for one, get up for three, sleep, get up for half an hour. It’s up and down for 24 hours. I haven’t slept for even four hours straight in I don’t know how long. And it has to do partially with being an old person, and also I have three deadly diseases, so they may contribute to it too.”
Despite her health problems, Slick remains focused on her art, mixing various styles depending on where the mood takes her, and this is a freedom she didn’t always enjoy in the music world, especially with most people seeing her successes as only one specific form or achievemen, but in her visual art, she enjoys a more limitless approach, using mixed techniques that range from acrylic paints to pens and pencils.
That said, her best-selling prints are, of course, her white rabbits and those of her musical peers. But through these visuals, her audiences can see a side to her they never could before, one completely free to explore however she sees fit, products of someone whose art is only ever made from real love and passion, rather than the pressure to conform to any preconceived ideas of standards or expectations.
