Joni Mitchell

However, she struggled with the sense she was a poorer artist than her grades indicated. She said, "I found that I was an honor student at art school for the same reason that I was a bad student – an equal and opposite reason – because I had developed a lot of technical ability... I found that I seemed to be marked for my technical ability so that in free classes where I was really uninspired, my marks remained the same standard. Whereas people who were great in free class, who were original and loose who didn't have the chops in a technical class, would receive a mark that was pretty similar to their technical ability. So I became pretty disillusioned."

Mitchell was also coming to realize that her art was out of step with trends at the time, a movement to nearly total abstraction. Influenced by post-impressionists Van Gogh and Gaugin and by Picasso's work, she was still interested in painting landscapes and people, representing real things she saw. Figurative artists like herself were being directed to advertising and commercial art, which didn't at all appeal to her. At art school, to support herself, Joni kept gigging as a folk musician on weekends, playing at her college and at a local hotel. After a year, at age 19, she dropped out of school and kept playing. Mitchell took a $15-a-week job in a Calgary coffee house, "singing long tragic songs in a minor key." Read Less