Hungry for more fame? Or just hankering for more personal space? Last month, ArtsHub revealed some of those Hollywood stars who also like to write in their spare time. Now we’re checking out the A-listers who are also visual artists – the ones who have a studio practice and, sometimes, exhibit their work.
Who are they?
1. Johnny Depp
Last month, culture writer Mim Chen took a look at Actor Johnny Depp’s exhibition in Chelsea, New York. Titled A Bunch of Stuff, the show is billed as a ‘multilayered immersive exhibition’, and is delivered by cultural experience producer BAUART, in association with Pantheon Art and TAIT, which created a 13-minute animation within the exhibition.
The exhibition even has its own website, pushing ticket sales, and a shop. (Does it really need to be a money-making exercise?) Could it just be part of a grand marketing exercise to coincide with Depp’s Amadeo Modigliani biopic, which he directed and is currently doing the film festival rounds?
Chen wrote: “One enters the show through a winding path draped with lush red curtains, before being released into an area dubbed the White Box, featuring dozens of thematic works. Another room called the Black Box plays an animated film, while outside of it are pieces of furniture from the artist’s studio and a wall where visitors can leave messages for the star. You exit through a gift shop stocked with merchandise and silkscreen prints.”
This is not Depp’s first foray into the visual arts world. During the Johnny Depp verus Amber Heard trial (mid 2022), ‘Depp painting’ trended high on Google. It was followed by his first one-person show last year (March 2023) at Castle Fine Art, a print dealer that has ‘art shops’ all over the UK.
According to the New York Post, within 20 minutes of Depp posting himself in front of his work on Instagram, the gallery’s website crashed. All 780 prints sold out, raising an estimated US$3.65 million (AU$5.6million). The subjects were largely his buddies and heroes – Heath Ledger, Bob Marley, River Phoenix and Hunter S Thompson.
While the critics are yet to comment on Depp’s latest exhibition, it is clear this other pursuit for Depp is here to stay.
2. Brad Pitt
In September 2022 Brad Pitt made his debut as a sculptor, showing his sculptures for the first time in a show with Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave and British artist Thomas Houseago. The A-lister chose Finland for his soft landing, at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, with the exhibition We.
The exhibition was also a debut for Cave.
Pitt turned to art during his bitter divorce from Angelina Jolie in 2017, starting with ceramics. He then created a sculpture studio at his Los Angeles home. The take-up is not entirely surprising. Pitt has been a major collector for about 15 years.
Speaking to the Finnish publication Yle, Pitt said of his sculpture practice: “For me it’s about self-reflection… It was born out of ownership over what I call a ‘radical inventory of the self’. And getting really brutally honest with me and taking account of those I may have hurt and the moments I’ve just gotten wrong.”
His works in the exhibition included a coffin-sized bronze box depicting hands, feet and faces attempting to break out and sitting on timber sawhorses, a semi-submerged plaster wall-hanging sculpture, which depicts a gun fight between eight figures, and a miniature house made out of tree bark, crudely held together with tape.
3. Sir Anthony Hopkins
When one thinks of giants of contemporary cinema, Sir Anthony Hopkins is one of those at the top of that list. But few would know that he is also an accomplished painter. His works have even been exhibited beyond the UK. But Hopkins tries not to blur the two disciplines, keeping a low profile when it comes to his studio practice. “There’s no meaning in it … I just paint,” says the actor in a YouTube reel. “I like to do things fast… I have no concept of the result.”
In other interviews, Hopkins has talked about how painting serves as a form of therapy for him – to delve into his emotions. He only started painting in 2003, encouraged by his wife.
In a 2020 ARTnews interview Hopkins talked about his return to painting, his art routine during the pandemic and the advice the great special effects master Stan Winston (a friend who did the SFX for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park) gave him after seeing his work.
“He said, ‘Who did these?’ And I pulled a self-deprecating face and said, ‘Well, I did.’ He asked me why I had pulled that face and I told him that I had no training. And he put his hand in mine and he said, ‘Don’t. Don’t do any training. Don’t take any lessons because you’ll kill it. You’re an artist. You’re a painter.’”
4. Lucy Liu
Less as an add-on indulgence, Lucy Liu has been making art since she was a teenager and it has been very much a parallel to her acting and directing. While she started with a love of photography and collage, self-taught and inspired by New York’s streets – she even got a grant to explore her cultural heritage, through her art, at Beijing Normal University.
In 2007 she took classes at the New York Studio School, and moved to painting. To keep her two identities separate, she paints under her Chinese name, Yu Ling. In 2019 she exhibited her artworks in Unhomed Belongings, a two-person show with Singaporean artist Shubigi Rao at the National Museum of Singapore.
“It was probably the most significant moment as an artist that I’ve had,” Liu told Artsy. “What I really loved was that there was no exchange, it wasn’t about selling, it was about sharing… It was a way of understanding you are not really detached, and you are part of something.”
A lot of Liu’s art is about her childhood experiences as an immigrant.
5. Sharon Stone
Will Sharon Stone ever escape being identified by Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Basic Instinct? Probably not. But alongside her screen career, this A-lister has been painting since she was a child. Her aunt gave her lessons and then she formally studied painting at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
According to an interview with The Art Newspaper (TAN), fame allowed her to visit museums across the world while they were closed to the public, experiences she counts as among her favourite memories.
While her film career took over, Stone revisited her painting during the pandemic. Stone told TAN that a friend sent her a paint-by-numbers kit to help pass the time. “I bought real brushes and I started to regain my control, my brush movements. I painted and painted and painted, and I refound myself. I refound my heart. I refound my centre.”
Her first big exhibition, titled Shedding, was presented at the Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles in 2023.
6. Pierce Bronson
Like Stone, Brosnan started his career in the visual arts. After he left school at 16, he was hired as a trainee commercial illustration artist in South London, and later studied at at St Martin’s School of Art. He told ARTnews that he wanted to design album covers. But acting interrupted that dream.
Brosnan bought a studio’s worth of art supplies when he moved to Hollywood, but didn’t use them. It was when his wife was diagnosed with cancer in 1986 that he turned to painting. Again, on the backside of COVID, Brosnan held his first exhibition at Control Gallery, Los Angeles in May 2023. It was big – 100 drawings and 50 paintings.
“It’s a much more insular feeling, to show your work as an artist, as a painter,” Brosnan told , when asked about the differences between acting and painting.
7. Laurel Holloman
While she may not be quite as well-known as an actor as the Pitts and Depps of this world, Laurel Holloman’s acting career goes back to 1995 when she starred in the adorable indie feature, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, but her lasting screen fame comes from her role as Tina Kennard in the hit TV series, The L Word. By the time that show was revived for a new audience, morphing into The L Word: Generation Q, however, her participation had been cut right back, and her online bio was describing her as a painter, actress – rather than the other way around.
Holloman studied painting and sculpture at UCLA and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is generally large-scale, bold, abstract and colourful. It is said to be influenced by Mark Rothko and “her paintings betray a a distinctly literary spirituality” according to Wikipedia.
She has had around 10 solo exhibitions in Europe, including in Venice, Paris, London and Berlin, plus been included in several group shows, across Europe, and both North and South America. She’s also won awards, including first place in painting in the 2014 Contemporary Art Biennale of Argentina.
8. Viggo Mortensen
Danish actor Viggo Mortensen is a true Renaissance Man – a painter, poet, musician and actor. He composed and performed music for films including The Lord of the Rings soundtrack, and has collaborated with guitarist Buckethead on several albums.
With part of his earnings from The Lord of the Rings, Mortensen founded the Perceval Press publishing house – named after the knight from the legend of King Arthur – to help other artists by publishing works that may not find a home in more traditional publishing venues.
When it comes to his paintings, they are usually abstract, and often contain fragments of his poetry and photographs within them in a collage genre. A curious fact – many of the murals and paintings of the artist he portrayed in the 1998 film A Perfect Murder are his own.
His work has been shown at galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Greece. In 2002, blogger Ken Hall wrote of his Track 16 Gallery exhibition in LA, “60 photographs and 15 paintings were on display, small photos were selling for $350, while paintings and large photos were fetching up to $5000,” adding that Mortensen is a prolific painter.
9. Silvester Stallone
Silvester Stallone has long been a major collector of art. But it is also known that Stallone will often paint his characters before playing them – as a way to get into their psyche. “It’s a fight with the canvas and rest assured, he knows how to work a palette knife,” described Artnet News in 2021.
“Stallone was friends with Warhol in the 70s, but his paintings owe more to Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat with a style that bleeds frenzied 80s machismo. Naturally,” the US arts source added.
He began showing his own work in institutions in 2013, first at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, and then at the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice two years later. In 2021, he had a survey exhibition of his paintings presented at the Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany.
His paintings have a tone of hyper-masculinity. He even has a dedicated website and Instagram page for his art.
He says: “I think I’m a much better painter than an actor. It’s much more personal and I’m allowed to just do what I want to do.”
10. Jim Carrey
The funny man on screen is also a funny man on paper. Carrey has taken a backseat as a movie star for the past decade or so, largely turning to painting.
In 2017, a short, six-minute documentary about Carrey’s career as a painter, I Needed Color, surprised everyone and “blew the internet’s mind,” wrote Steph Eckardt for W Culture. That same year, he staged his debut exhibition at Signature Galleries at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
“And you might not necessarily think about Vegas and art in the same breath, but I love the idea because it gives me an opportunity to not only let people who want to spend money on art see the stuff, but also real people who walk in who might not go into the Gagosian or whatever it is – not that I have that option yet. It’s accessible, and I love that,” says Carrey.
Plus Carrey has gained a name for his satirical political cartoons, especially those of Donald Trump. He has also been a long-time collector and, in July this year, he offloaded part of the collection with Bonhams Auctioneers in LA.
11. Val Kilmer
The youngest student ever admitted to the drama department at Juilliard, Val Kilmer has gone on to dominate the screen as a true A-lister. What many don’t know, however, is that when Kilmer was at Juilliard he co-wrote the play How it all Began, based on the true story of a West German radical. He has also written two books of poetry.
He turned to the visual arts during the production of Ron Howard’s Wonderland, and started photography. It blossomed into a project with creative partner Ali Alborzi, with Kilmer’s photographs exhibited in several cities in the US, Japan and Europe.
He likes to paint and leans toward enamel paint on metal. His debut exhibition was at Woodward Gallery in New York, titled Valholla (2017), and since then he has been seeking validation as a legitimate artist.
More recently he started the Web 3 project Kamp Kilmer (again with Alborzi) – a place to collaborate, explore NFTs and produce pop-up exhibitions. In 2020 he opened the art space and studio, HelMel Studio & Gallery, creating art and mentoring artists.
12. Macaulay Culkin
Macaulay Culkin, the star of Home Alone, spends a lot of time making art. In 2012 he began using his New York apartment as a painting studio. He collaborated with mates artist-musicians Toby Goodshank, and Adam Green – under the name 3MB Collective – to deliver a body of work for The Gallery at LPR (Le Poisson Rouge) that year, titled Leisure Inferno.
In a Huffington Post interview Culkin said, “There are no mistakes in a show like this.” Describing his style as ‘low-brow’, he added, “It’s not necessarily about technique, it’s more about the ideas. It’s more about just what you want to look at.”
