Joan Baez’s Portraits of Peace

After retiring from touring, the folk icon took up painting, using her artwork to honor friends and heroes who have helped envision a fairer world.

IN THE YEARS leading up to her 2019 farewell trek, Joan Baez would often sit on her tour bus and paint before shows. “I wasn’t paying any attention to the concerts, really,” the folk icon, 80, says over Zoom from her home near Palo Alto, California. “I would paint up until the last second, and then I’d walk out and I’d sing.”

Baez turned her preshow focus back to music as her final concerts approached, but since saying goodbye to the road, she’s gotten more serious about her lifelong love of sketching and painting, spending three to four hours each day working with acrylic paint and wood panels in a small studio at her house. “I just get in front of the canvas and start hurling things and seeing what comes out of the mess,” she says. Her specialty is impressionistic portraits of real people — some she’s known well, others she’s admired from afar — using a self-taught method accented with tips from visual-artist friends. “A guy showed me how to paint [eye]glasses, [and] it took years off of what I would have to do experimenting on my own,” she says. “Aside from that, there’s not been formal training. It’s the same as the music.”

Many of her subjects, who include Bob Dylan, Colin Kaepernick, Kamala Harris, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Greta Thunberg, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, connect to her passion for justice. “It turned out that everyone I was painting had to do with nonviolent change and social change,” she says. “My painting is the best I can do at the moment to try and encourage people towards a possibly better world. I’m just really lucky to be able to do that.”

Baez’s portraits are a hit on Instagram, where she paired them with captions that encouraged voting in the fall’s election, and her latest solo exhibition, “Mischief Makers 2,” is showing at the Seager Gray Gallery in Marin County, California, through February 14th. “I don’t have regrets,” she says of her decision to trade a guitar for a paintbrush. “It allows me to say that I retired from touring, but obviously not from life.”