Donna Summer and Pierce Brosnan Top the ARTnews List of Celebrities Who Paint

Pierce Brosnan

With all the things James Bond fans have to disagree over there is one thing they can all can say with certainty. There is only one 007 who wanted to be a painter before he became an actor. 

Brosnan left school at 16 and with no prior experience was hired as a trainee commercial illustration artist in South London. “I was this young man with aspirations to do album covers,” Brosnan told ARTnews. “I’d found my passion. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by artists. They only let me draw the straight lines. I’d make cups of tea and water the spider plants. I was so happy.” Then acting came along. 

After he moved to Hollywood, Brosnan bought a studio’s worth of art supplies, but rarely put brush to canvas. That is, until his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1986. To ease the worry and anguish he made two paintings and hasn’t stopped since. 

Last month Brosnan had a hometown solo show at Control Gallery on North La Brea Avenue comprised of 100 drawings and 50 paintings, including one of the two he made when he restarted his practice 36 years ago. “It’s a much more insular feeling, to show your work as an artist, as a painter,” Brosnan said when asked about the differences between acting and painting. “There are always moments of doubt when you expose yourself in that way, but as in life, all roads lead to ‘if not now, when?”

Alia Shawkat

While most people know Alia Shawkat from her role as the mischievous Maeby Fünke on Arrested Development and her current role in Search Party, Shawkat has been painting since she was 18 years old. Of course, making paintings and getting noticed by the art world are two very different things. Luckily, a friend introduced her to the founders of the subversive art fair Spring/Break Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, who invited her to show at the Los Angeles edition of the fair last year. 

Shawkat says her art practice doesn’t take away from her acting career; rather the two pursuits work together. “They feed each other,” Shawkat told Artnet in 2022. “When I’m not doing one, I do the other. That helps me—otherwise I’d quit. I don’t know if I’d ever get tired of painting, but I’d get tired of acting if I didn’t have a studio.”

Sharon Stone

An art practice is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of actor Sharon Stone, better known for her star turns in Martin Scorsese’s Casino and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (not to mention in Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Basic Instinct). Nevertheless, Stone has been painting since she was a child—when an aunt would give her art lessons—and, as an adult, she studied painting at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.

Stone set aside her brushes after her acting career picked up steam, but according to an interview with The Art Newspaper, fame allowed her to visit museum across the world while they were closed to the public, experiences she counts as among her favorite memories. 

Like many people, Stone found herself with an abundance of free time during the Covid-19 pandemic. A well-wishing friend sent her a paint-by-numbers kit to help pass the time, reviving her interest in painting. “I bought real brushes and I started to regain my control, my brush movements,” Stone told TAN. “I painted and painted and painted, and I refound myself. I refound my heart. I refound my center.”

Earlier this year Stone had her first solo show, Shedding, at Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles.

Jim Carrey

Among the many actors who make visual art, few have received more publicity for it than Jim Carrey, winner of a Golden Globe award for his portrayal of fellow actor Andy Kaufman in 1999’s masterful Man on the Moon. That wasn’t always the case, but in 2017, Carrey introduced the world to his paintings with a solo show at Signature Gallery Group’s Las Vegas location and a six-minute documentary, I Needed Color, which shows Carrey at work in his studio. (By the end of the year the video had been viewed more than 5 million times.)

In a 2017 interview with W magazine Carrey said, “It’s all about that for me now—being completely involved, heart, mind, and soul. Sometimes it’s art, sometimes it’s performance, and sometimes it’s just talking to someone.” He was given a solo show of his political cartoons at Maccarone Gallery in 2018.

Lucy Liu

Once you’ve made your name in film and television, it’s hard to be taken seriously as an artist. It’s for that reason the actress Lucy Liu, who has had a successful career on both big and small screens, shows her work under her Chinese name, Yu Ling. 

Like many people on this list Liu was interested in visual art from a young age. In the 1980s, when she was teenager in Queens, New York, she began taking photographs and experimenting with collage. A 1993 exhibition of her photos at Cast Iron Gallery in New York earned her a grant to explore both her art and her cultural heritage at Beijing Normal University. But it wasn’t until 2007, after studying painting at New York Studio School, that Liu says she found a way to fully express herself artistically. 

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. That felt so good when people showed up and were actually looking at the work, closely and curiously. It made me feel very connected.… It was a way of understanding you are not really detached, and you are part of something.”

James Franco

Throughout his career the actor James Franco has been someone who has avoided being pinned down, preferring to have one foot in Hollywood, another in academia, and his hands in the arts, from performance to poetry to painting. And despite how widely his interests are spread, Franco may be the actor who up to this point has had the most legitimacy-conferring show, at least as far as venue goes. In 2014 the actor’s New Film Stills, a recreation of Cindy Sherman’s groundbreaking “Film Stills” series,  at Pace Gallery in New York. 

That said, the critic Roberta Smith panned the show in the New York Times, and her husband, critic and social media darling Jerry Saltz, wrote in New York magazine that though he loves Franco’s acting, “at this point, George W. Bush is actually a better artist than James Franco.” Cindy Sherman herself had an opinion about the show, saying “I can only be flattered. I don’t know that I can say it’s art, but I think it’s weirder that Pace would show them than that he would make them.”

Anthony Hopkins

Like many on this list, Sir Anthony Hopkins was a creative child, but it wasn’t until 2003 that, spurred on by his wife, the British actor rekindled his love of painting. In a 2020 ARTnews interview Hopkins talks about his return to painting, his art routine during the pandemic, and the advice Stan Winston, a friend who did special effects 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.’” 

Sylvester Stallone

Most of the movie-going public is at least passingly familiar with Rocky Balboa, the fictional boxer played by Sylvester Stallone in the 1977 Academy Award-winning movie Rocky. But few may be aware that before Stallone wrote the career-changing screenplay, about a rough and tumble fighter who gets a shot at the title, he painted a self-portrait of himself as the main character. 

“I made a self-portrait with a more defined ‘pug face’ than I had back then, but to capture his sadness, I switched the brush with a screw driver and carved the eyes, Stallone told Artnet News in 2021, on the eve of a survey exhibition of his work at the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany.

Like his films, Stallone’s paintings are centered on heroic, but often broken or flawed, male figures. “Both in art and film, I looked at figures like Spartacus or Hercules who radiated hyper-reality through their hyper masculinity,” he told Artnet News. Stallone is acutely aware of how easily dismissed an actor who tries his hand at painting can be, and specifically kept his work out of the public eye so that he would be taken seriously as a filmmaker and actor. He’s gone as far as to say that, had he been recognized as an artist earlier in life, his acting would have become mostly an afterthought.

“Painting is where I feel close to a bare-naked truth,” he told Artnet News.

Johnny Depp

There are lots of famous people in the world, among them actor Johnny Depp and those he chooses as subjects for his limited-edition screenprints. Depp’s first one-person show was last year at Castle Fine Art, a UK based prints dealer that has brick and mortar shops all over England.

According to the New York Post, 20 minutes after Depp posted a picture of himself in front of four of his screen prints to Instagram along with the words “NOW AT #CASTLEFINEART” the gallery’s website crashed thanks to a horde of Depp fans and print aficionados trying to buy the newly released art. As complaints about the site began to roll in, the gallery tweeted that all 780 prints in Depp’s debut collection, Friends and Heroes, had sold out. 

The sale was thought to bring in around $3.65 million. 

Friends and Heroes II was released by Castle Fine Arts in March 2023. The subjects were thematically the same (Heath Ledger, Bob Marley, River Phoenix, and Hunter S. Thompson). Like its predecessor, the run of prints quickly sold out.

Lisa Edelstein

Many people, celebrities included, turned to painting during the pandemic. In an interview with Forbes the actress Lisa Edelstein eloquently phrased what it felt like from an actor’s perspective: “One of the first things that I realized in the process of starting to draw and paint was that I didn’t have to wait for somebody to give me the opportunity to do it. And I learned how much I need to be doing things.”

For Edelstein, magic marker drawings turned into watercolors that lean into her Jewish upbringing . Earlier this year “Lisa Edelstein: Family” was on view at the recently closed SFA Advisory.