Laura Joplin Quotations

Anglo-Saxon America dealt with the emotional aspects of life by hiding them, ignoring them, or defining them as problematic. Janis rebelled against those habits, yet there was no guidance beyond the rambling of Kerouac's novels. Releasing one's feelings from years of bondage was a righteous and dangerous experiment.

The younger Janis was a painter, a drawer. She was a very serious art student for a number of years. My family memories of Janis are really more about her practicing the craft of visual art, sketching, constantly sketching.

It was especially important that someone who has been subjected to such an incredible amount of interpretation be allowed to speak for herself,

The biography was a personal quest to understand Janis and to sort what was real from stories that were embellished,

Purity of action guided Janis's behavior. If she was going to be good, she was very, very good. If she was going to be bad, she let all the stops out. Anything less than full commitment to an idea of activity was 'hypocritical', the worst adjective anyone could hurl at another.

I think that there's a strong crossover in that Janis, studying the visual arts, was learning how to break it down into details and see how to get the expression that we wanted. And her visual art is emotionally expressive as her singing was. And, I think, when she switched over to singing, she already knew that it was something serious that you broke into pieces so she developed the ability to break it down and learn little riffs that she could throw in here and there.

She spent hours drawing on her own, trying to perfect her craft. And when she got into music, she had that same diligence in developing her own style as well as perfecting the craft of singing. I don't think that is part of the normal assumption of who sh