“I don’t really call myself a painter…I draw. So I draw my pictures, and then sometimes I paint them in, and sometimes I don’t. I’ve been doing this always, I’ve just never shown anybody. My drawing is like my meditation.
—Stevie Nicks, 2001.
As a child, Stevie Nicks and her family never spent much time in one place. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, the Nicks family would move from Arizona to El Paso, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, making it difficult for Nicks to form long-term friendships. At the age of fourteen, while attending Arcadia High School, she met a girl who would change her life, Robin Snyder. Nicks would call her relationship with Snyder as the “only friendship she ever had.” Snyder would accompany Nicks on tour with Fleetwood Mac as her personal speech therapist. Nicks’ herself credits Snyder with helping her develop and maintain her resonating and unique vocal style:
“She (Robin) taught me how to sing. She taught me how to use my voice.”
The Nicks family would continue to move around, and she would end up meeting Lindsey Buckingham while she was a senior, and he a junior at Atherton High School in California. They would become an item and, in 1973 released the album Buckingham Nicks, a critical flop. But the pair’s fledgling effort was enough to give them visibility, and by 1975 they would be part of a newly revamped Fleetwood Mac. As the story of Fleetwood Mac’s combustible union is well told, let’s simply describe this romantically turbulent period of FM as just that. The band would persevere and produce the emotionally charged album Rumors, and later Tusk. Nicks would soon begin work on her first solo record, Bella Donna. They were doing boatloads of blow and enjoying their collective fame. When Bella Donna was released in July of 1981, it was an instant smash. This was also the year she found out her best friend, Robin, then 33, had been diagnosed with leukemia. She was also six months pregnant, and expecting her first child with her husband, Kim Anderson. Unwilling to terminate the pregnancy to undergo a more aggressive treatment, the baby would be born (by induction) three months prematurely. Robin would die two days later. Completely torn apart by grief, Nicks would marry Robin’s widower three months after Robin’s death, only to file divorce papers three months later.
According to Nicks, prior to Robin’s diagnosis, she had never drawn, much less painted anything. Following Robin’s death, Nicks would start drawing, initially, to help process the pain of her friend’s unimaginable passing. In 1981 she would create a piece specifically for her, “Robin-Rhiannon,” and more would follow. Nicks completed “Robin-Rhiannon” for her bedridden friend so she would always have something to look at when she was unable to be there.
In 2001 Nicks briefly spoke about her artwork, which she has continued throughout the decades, and of the possibility of putting out a coffee table book full of her illustrations and paintings. Until Stevie determines the world is ready for such a treasure chest, we can all treat our eyes to some of the work done by a young Stevie Nicks and her self-described “angels.”
“Robin-Rhiannon” (1981).
“Rhiannon,” another angelic piece by Nicks inspired by her friend Robin in 1982.
More after the jump…
