Hollywood stars that you did not imagine were dedicated to painting (Part I)

There is a small club of stars of the seventh art who dedicate much of their free time to paintbrushes, and you didn't know about them. In this series we will talk about this hidden passion in Beverly Hills....

And being just an actor in Hollywood must be very boring. There's Jaden, Will Smith's son, who has set up his own company to sell bottled water. And he's doing very well. But it's true that this requires a lot of Excel and, in reality, what actors in the city of stars want is, most of the time, to bring out all their artistic side beyond the characters they play.

That's why some people, between breaks in filming or between films (or series, whatever they're shooting), spend their days with their hobbies: there are musicians, like Hugh Laurie; others are into stopping climate change, like DiCaprio; others are passionate about poker, like Tobey Maguire; Judi Dench learned to play 'Dungeons and Dragons' from Vin Diesel;... and there are those who dedicate themselves to painting.

And here there are real and already very well-known artists, with their own style and voice, that we are going to unravel little by little. Not everything is going to be seventh art, there are six more, right?

Lucy Liu

Let's start with Lucy Liu (yes, from Charlie's Angels...) because her story is one of the most curious. Until she studied Fine Arts, the actress was completely fascinated by photography and dabbled in the streets of New York. But she left the camera for paintbrushes and, seeking inspiration in the traditions of her ancestors (she is first generation in the United States, since she is the daughter of immigrants) she began to paint.

Fast forward to 2009: as a successful actress who has worked with Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill and in Oscar-winning films like Chicago, she prefers to keep her work anonymous so that her Hollywood name does not interfere with her art. But that year it is revealed that she is the one behind the pseudonym Yu Ling, her alter ego in painting.

Critics are shocked because his fame and notoriety were already well known in the art world. His paintings and works, which resemble Chinese painting rituals and families like his, had reached 16,000 euros at auction. He had always donated the money to UNICEF. Last January he fulfilled one of his life goals: to hold an exhibition. It was called Unhomed Belongings and was held by the National Museum of Singapore.

Sylvester Stallone

"First I was a painter. Then I became an actor and a screenwriter." These are the words of Sly, the legendary Rambo, the legendary Rocky and many other legendary figures, when he opened his own exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Nice in May 2015.

The exhibition, which was titled The Real Love (because of the painting, in case you didn't catch it) had already been in St. Petersburg and consisted of more than 30 works by the actor, director and many other things that good old Stallone has been painted between 1975 and 2015.

It is true that many have joked about his painting style, which, let's say, is not given to subtleties: large canvases, brushstrokes with echoes of brutalism and little, if any, subtlety. To give an example: one of his paintings is called Finding Rocky and is a large head on a lilac background, a line of houses and urban symbols and newspaper clippings. It came to him when, surprise, he was looking for a figure for the eponymous film. "On that occasion, I was looking for the character of Rocky. I didn't know what he had to be. But suddenly, Rocky took shape on the canvas," he said, adding later: "When I lack the words to express what I feel, I paint."

He estimates that he has between 200 and 300 works in his garage but was afraid to show them until the renowned gallery owner and art dealer Krystyna Gmurzynska trusted him. "I base my art on my life." Pure Sly.

Pierce Brosnan

He met his father when he was 31. "I spent a Sunday afternoon with him and we talked about this and that. I would have liked to know him better," he said. In 1987, his wife Cassandra Harris was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1991. His daughter Charlotte died in 2013. Pierce Brosnan's life, apart from being James Bond, has had very little of the adventures of the secret agent. That is why, despite all these misfortunes and setbacks, he turned to his first vocation: painting.

Although he joined a travelling circus because it was the late 60s (and we all know what happened in those years), Brosnan had just finished his studies at the prestigious Saint Martin's, an art school in London. It was not until his wife became ill that he dusted off his brushes and, inspired by Matisse and Kandinsky, whom he considers his role models, he once again began to paint on canvas, feeling that "pain sometimes manifested itself in colours". "I paint figurative portraits and landscapes in oils, I paint with acrylics.

"Everything is in my own style," he said about what he does in his own art studio that he set up in his house in Malibu and where he usually creates paintings like a profile of Bob Dylan that he achieved at a charity auction (at these he goes all out) for 1.2 million dollars. Go with 007.