A Joni Mitchell signed and numbered limited edition lithograph of her painting Dog Eat Dog, originally painted for the cover of her 1985 album with that title.

This was one of a small group of Mitchell’s works offered for sale at her May 1988 exhibition eclection, at Tokyo’s Parco Gallery. This show was the first and only exhibition during which Joni actually sold paintings.  She attended the opening reception on May 20^th.

In the eclection catalog, Joni noted Dog Eat Dog was painted to be the cover of an album by the same name. The record company suggested I put my face on the cover instead.

In 1984 she told radio station KCSA Well, ‘Dog Eat Dog,’ for instance, had a large canvas, 10-foot-by-5, all dogs, God dog, Jesus dog, you know, and racial dogs in conflict and so on. I sold that painting in Tokyo. [Geffen Records founder David] Geffen told me that, ‘Okay, Joan, we know you’re an artist, but stick your picture on the cover.’ So I did a kind of a collage being attacked by wild dogs, you know, and that was fun to do. So, there were really two album covers for that. But he wanted my kisser on the cover, so I had to give it to him (laughs). The patron, the great patron, spoke.

A 1999 article in Perfect Vision noted For her 1985 album Dog Eat Dog she spent months, sometimes up to 13 hours a day, working on a cover painting that was eventually rejected in favor of a photograph. The reason: “It was suggested to me that I hadn’t put my kisser on the cover for a long time,” she explained to the BBC’s Richard Skinner. The Dog Eat Dog canvas is huge, perhaps 5 by 14 feet, and almost entirely covered in cartoon-like dogs of various dimensions and with various styles of teeth, and in an extraordinary range of hues, few of them naturalistic. The canine forms seem to emerge from the welter of color so that the effect of abstraction dissolves as one approaches the picture and discerns the details.

The lithograph has been signed and numbered in pencil 42/125 by Joni Mitchell.  Below the image ‘joni mitchell’ and ‘eclection’ have been embossed. In virtually mint condition.

Sheet: 14 3/8” x 20 ¼”. Image: 8” x 15 3/4”.

Gifted by Joni Mitchell to a recording engineer friend.

With Recordmecca’s written guarantee of authenticity.