having to tell them what actually happened at school that day. so I started telling stories." she said giggling. At me same age she started drawing fashion designs. a subject close to home. Her mother, Sally Kirkland Sr., was fashion editor at Vogue for ten years and Life Magazine for twenty. By ten, I was getting notes from Christian Dior giving me advice." By her late teens. putting oil to canvass. she was already a professional with outdoor shows on 8th Street and exhibits in commercial galleries in New York. "This was my angry period," she chuckles. "I would paint nudes, and instead of painting the outline brown, I would paint it red and let the paint drip. It was kind of ferocious."

"My paintings were all very sad. I was into existentialism." she said in mocking seriousness. "If something wasn’t dark, it wasn’t art My mother would never come to my apartment. She said there was so much pain in my paintings" she laughs. "Then came my impressionist years. I was influenced by Picasso, Matisse and Modigilliani and switched from oils to acrylics, pastels, and water colors. I would stay up all night, put jazz on, I would work intently on two or three things at a time to the point where I was out of my body. I was into the colors and forms, getting stoned on the process. When morning would come, I would step back and say, 'Wow! What is this?'"

The mid-seventies was a time of spiritual transition and art transition. Kirkland switched to magic markers and oil crayons, and a spiritual path. "The late seventies and early eighties were a neat time for me," she said. "I went on the road with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Review. He liked to draw, and we would draw on each other. I have never had patience to do big stuff. I had just managed to paint or draw where ever I was at the moment. Always on the run Sally pointed at a canvass and said. "I just finished that canvass last night I painted it for Michael Masser who composed my favorite song. The Greatest Love of All. It’s a combination of a female Budda and a Hindu Goddess, done in magic markers and oil crayons. I’m really into colors. They give me energy.

Sally the stage actress. has done over eighty plays, from Shakespeare to In The Boom Boom Room by David Rabe, for which in 1981. she won a Drama-Logue Award for Best Actress. Her more recent stage activities include producing and starring in Nonnie Bruce and the Power She Calls Love. as well as producing herself in Twelfth Night and Mad Vincent. In Vincent, she played the noted painter Suzanne Valedon, Toulouse Lautrec’s mistress, Utrillos mother and confidant of Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Sally is also credited with doing the first nude scene ever in New York Equity Theater. It was in Terrence McNally's Sweet Eros. This was in 1968, before Hair and Oh Calcutta. It was the Vietnam era, when shock and changing of values took center stage causing a great revolution in the theater. "The New York Times called and  said, you've just done Shakespeare and Checkov, why are you doing this? I told them; 'you can't carry a gun on a naked body.' This was a about innocence and vulnerability. I was opposed to the Vietnam War.

The most important roles in Sally Kirkland's life is being an ordained minister in the Church of The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, and a yoga master at the Integral Yoga Institute. Both of these roles allow her to impart her acting knowledge and deep spiritual beliefs. She taught for five years at Lee Strasberg's Institute in Los Angeles, and ran the Sally Kirkland Insight Workshops in 16 cities, including New York and Los Angeles for twenty years. She continues teaching and conducting seminars all around the world. Her "cast" of students would justify the insertion of, By Appointment to the Stars, on her business card. Listed among her yoga students are Robert Redford, Robert DeNiro, and Raul Julia. She coached emotional recall acting to Streisand, Minnelli, Rosanne, and at the time unknown actress Sandra Bullock. The spiritual Sally summing up said, "Laughter is the quickest way to God. My addiction is to God."

As for Sally the painter's "wish list" she said, "I'd like someone to layout a studio for me, about a block in size, where I can throw paint at the walls. Cans and cans of paint, and then create and formulate as it falls." To Pasqual Bettio's offer of such a place in the Park LaBrea albeit a bit smaller, Sally Kirkland said "YES!"

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