Eric, I seem to recall that the Joni with deer painting from the TTT packaging was your fave - (mine, too). I loved finally getting to see the "companion" painting with Travelogue.
Here's the background from Joni's KCSN interview at http://www.jmdl.com/articles/view.cfm?id=426 RI: Does this come, by the way, from your imagination, or was this actually a chance encounter with a deer -- or not so chance? JM: This is in Japan an hour before I had to go on stage, and standing behind me are Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis' last girlfriend, who was a French girl, who is a philosophy teacher, and Wayne and a herd of little deer that bowed to you. We were so intrigued you'd walk up to deer and they'd bow to you and the people actually were the crowd that was lining upfor our concert all along the edge of the lake and they were thick. I eliminated a lot of figures. So this was a composite of several different things and then there's a lot of the magic -- you throw away your source materialat a certain point anyway. It's only used as a preliminary sketch and then you're going for a painting, you know, like otherwise, it's just anexercise. It's got to do something to compel you to look at it that a snapshot doesn't. You can get a certain amount from a snapshot, but a painting's got to be more than a snapshot, you know. But,for me, because it's personal it reminds me -- over across the lake is this enormous Golden Buddha, and they hadn't had a festival of music on these grounds -- this was a Buddhist garden for over a thousand years. At that time they invited their enemy, the Chinese, to perform at the foot of the Golden Buddha. This was an international show with Japanese artists, and British artists, Bob Dylan, and myself, and Wayne Shorter, and their "Miles Davis" and, you know, the far-out pink horn, electric-horn guy, that only knew one English word, the F-word (laughs), you know, so it's -- I did two paintings from this, one of Ana Shorter, who is really behind me with deer all around her all dressed inwhite. Ana was, unfortunately, lost -- RI: In that airplane accident -- JM: -- in that airplane accident, so that's the last day that I spent with her and Ana's is quite a beautiful -- to me -- I have that one in my dining room so this is a documentary. It's another piece of memorabilia for me.
