"I'm a painter first, and a musician second," Joni Mitchell said September 8, 1998. Joni Mitchell is well known for her music, but she would rather be known of her visual art. Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort MacLeod, Alberta 1943 and moved to North Battleford, Saskatchewan with her parents right after World War II. When she was seven she had pleaded her parents to let her take piano lessons which lasted a year and a half. Then she also took up drawing and after moving to Saskatoon when she was nine she had gotten polio, but she luckily recovered. She was influenced in grade seven by her teacher, Mr. Kratzman, who told her to express herself in words. When she was a teenager she bought herself a ukulele and played at coffee houses and parties in Saskatoon. After high school in 1964 she went to the Alberta College of Art in Calgary for a year. She decided to leave College and become a performer at a coffeehouse named The Depression in Calgary. She ditched her painting career and moved to Toronto to get success from being a a folksinger. To play in clubs in Toronto though she needed a union card, but she couldn't afford one so she had to work for Simpsons-Sears. Joni was also pregnant from her old boyfriend back home. She gave birth to a baby girl in February 1965. Chuck Mitchell a folk singer, offered to take Joni and her baby in, and he married her. However Joni decided she would give up her child for adoption. Her marriage fell apart however and they went their separate ways in 1967, so she moved to Chelsea in NY. Then she made many songs and collaborated with many artists. She also moved to California with David Crosby and they released her debut album "Song to a Seagull". She joined bands and made more songs and albums with other musicians for a great number of years. She has won numerous awards including Best Folk Performance (1969) and Album of the Year (2007). However throughout the years she never really left painting and drawing. Still today she paints and draws, and she even sings.
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