Robin Anderson: the angel in Stevie Nicks’ artwork
When Bella Donna came out, Stevie Nicks should’ve been celebrating. It was an assured debut album, one that allowed her whimsical writing to fully unfurl, backed by industry heavyweights like Tom Petty and Don Felder. But when it shot to number one in the charts, the record was completely clouded by personal tragedy. Nicks’ lifelong friend, Robin Anderson, was diagnosed with leukaemia right as album sales hit the three million mark.
Nicks has often spoken about the cruelty of getting that news at the same time Bella Donna became a hit, saying it was almost like the universe had introduced that balance by design. At her most successful, creatively and financially, she still couldn’t save her friend.
The pair had met as teenagers at Arcadia High School, and since Nicks was 14, Anderson was a permanent fixture in her life. Anderson was the one who taught her how to sing and, maybe more importantly, had known her years before that voice made her a household name. In various interviews that touch on their friendship, Nicks described her as someone who could light up a room. “She was breathtaking,” Nicks would profess. “And that’s why it’s so wild that she could possibly have died. It just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Before Anderson passed, Nicks took to drawing. “They’re all angels,” she wrote on her website. “I only draw angels”.
She’d never drawn anything before Anderson became unwell, but she was motivated by giving her something beautiful to look at. “I drew Rhiannon for her, to stay at the end of her bed so she could see something when I wasn’t there, so that she would have something to stare at,” she said. Rhiannon was a vision of an angel surrounded by bright pinks, purples, and yellows.
The palette feels intentional. Nicks knew it would sit at the foot of her friend’s bed and imbued it with a radiant positivity. All of her drawings from this time are touchingly childlike, from the sun drawn in a corner to the rudimentary faces with cartoonish eyes; they’re all touched by a kind of innocence. Although the reason they were created was bleak, they could conceivably be sketches done by a teen girl – which feels like Nicks’ ode to the time they became friends.
In the painted script of Robin-Rhiannon, the “i” is signed with a star, the same way a teenager would dot it with a heart in a journal.
“I just draw little creatures, and little people and little bits of my drawing has gone out over the years,” Nicks told WSRS in 2001. She’d been talking about wanting to put together a book of her art, which would include clippings from her journal and some poetry. “I’ve been doing this always,” she said. “I’ve just never shown anybody. My drawing is like my meditation.”
