And while songwriter Joni Mitchell's earlier canvases had their moments, her current works feel generic. Her gift is in her music, Sarah Milroy writes

To have to criticize Joni Mitchell on any score is a dismal duty, but her current exhibition of new paintings at Toronto's CTV building, Green Flag Song - part of this year's Luminato lineup - leaves me no choice. Allow me to confess here that I spent the lion's share of my adolescence and young adulthood with my hair in a centre-part playing my guitar cross-legged on an Indian bedspread in the hope that I might end up being one-10th as cool as Joni. Actually, more like one one-100th.

Well, the years spin by and now the girl is 50, and a Lady of the Canyon I ain't, but Mitchell remains the musical captain of my soul. But her visual art leaves me cold.

Mitchell has been painting for years with what has seemed like an amiable lack of pretension. Her earlier van Gogh-inspired canvases had occasional passages of lusciousness, usually describing her domestic realm in buoyant colour. (She used some of them to illustrate her record jackets.) They were light, but they had a nice touch.

These more recent works are "digitally printed and hand-brushed archival ink on canvas" - photo-transferred images tinted green and pink, a mechanical process that leaves no sense of touch on the canvas. This in itself is not a problem, but it becomes one in the absence of a clearly defined sensibility at work.

Mitchell, we are told, has photographed images from the screen of her faltering television set, gathering pictures of war, human suffering, biological specimens, the American flag and the like, and then assembling them into vertical triptychs. But her image choices feel lazy and clichéd, as if to replicate an image of war is to comment on war.

This is not the case. Media-based appropriation art, as we have seen over the past 40 years, generates meaning out of the precision of the edits - what is taken - and how that image is combined with other images and with other factors to constitute the canvas. But there is no comment here, just pointing at the TV screen.

Is it fair to have expected more? Not really. Visual talent and musical talent rarely go together. Mitchell has been one of the great musical innovators of our time, and the hallmark of her style is her ability to make visual images collide in the mind of the listener, shifting gears, too, with her multiple and complex key changes to create dramatic planes of sound. You could never mistake her music for anyone else's, or the intelligence and fundamental sanity of her insights about the world. You'd think that might translate into the visual medium. But her visual compositions feel generic. Anyone could have made these.

I found myself wondering if it was really Mitchell who deserves the criticism here, or whether in fact the organizers of Luminato should shoulder the burden. After all, it was their decision to mount the exhibition and their promotional material, promising "sharp and candid insights" that leads the public to inflated expectations. It's surprising to see the event has been developed in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario, given the museum's mandate is to be a standard-bearer for artistic excellence (as opposed to, say, a celebrity fluffer).

All this being said, while I was taking my notes I discovered a woman on a gallery bench sobbing into her cellphone to a friend. "I don't know why these images are hitting me so hard," she said. She had been a peace activist in the sixties, she said. Now her son's best friend was serving with the Canadian forces in Afghanistan. "I just love this line," she said, reading to me the lyrics from Mitchell's 1988 ballad about a young soldier named Killer Kyle, posted on the wall: "They want you - they need you/ They train you to kill/ To be a pin on some map/ Some vicarious thrill./ The old hate the young/ That's the whole heartless thing. The old pick the wars/ We die in 'em/ To the beat of - to the beat of black wings."

A precise vision conveyed in language and in sound; this is where her gift lies. If making these works helps her artistic process, I'm all for it. But let's not call this great art.

Green Flag Song continues at CTV Queen Street, 277 Queen St. W. in Toronto, until June 19 (http://www.luminato.com).