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

There is a small club of stars of the seventh art that dedicates a large part of their free time to brushes, and that you did not know. In this series we will talk about this hidden passion in Beverly Hills....

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

That is why some, between pauses and pauses in a shoot or between films and films (or series, each one there with what they shoot) spends the day with their hobbies: there are musicians, like Hugh Laurie; others like to stop climate change, like DiCaprio; others are passionate about poker, like Tobey Maguire; Judi Dench learned to play 'Dungeons and Dragons' with Vin Diesel;... and we have those who are dedicated to painting.

And here there are true and already 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, the one from Charlie's angels...) because her story is one of the most curious. Until she studied Fine Arts, the actress was completely obsessed with photography and took her first steps on the streets of New York. But she left the camera for the brushes and, looking for inspiration in her ancestral traditions (she is the first generation in the United States, since she is the daughter of immigrants) she began to paint.

Lucy Liu painting one of her works in her New York studio

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

Critics throw up their heads because their notoriety and fame were already well known in the world. His paintings and works, which resemble Chinese pictorial 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 vital objectives: to hold an exhibition. It was titled Unhomed Belongings and was carried out by the National Museum of Singapore.

Sylvester Stallone

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

"First I was a painter. Then I became an actor and screenwriter."

Sylvester Stallone

The exhibition, which was titled The Real Love (True love, because of the painting, in case you haven't caught it) had already passed through Saint Petersburg and consisted of more than 30 works by the performer, director and many other things that have been good old Stallone painted between 1975 and 2015.

It is true that many have joked about his pictorial style, which, let's say, is not given to subtleties: large canvases, brushstrokes with echoes of brutalism and little, if not none, subtlety. To give an example: one of his paintings is called Finding Rocky (Finding Rocky) and it is a big head on a lilac background, a line of houses and urban symbols and newspaper clippings. It occurred 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 how it had to be. But suddenly, Rocky took shape before the canvas," he said, later adding: "When I lack words to express what I feel, I paint."

He estimates that he has between 200 and 300 works in his garage but that he 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

She met her father when he was 31 years old. "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, who would die in 1991. His daughter Charlotte died in 2013. Pierce Brosnan's life, beyond being James Bond, has had very little of the adventures of the secret agent. For this reason, for all these misfortunes and setbacks, he resorted to his first vocation: painting.

The actor Pierce Brosnan with some of his works.

Although he joined a traveling circus because it was the late 1960s (and we all know what happened in those years), just before that Brosnan had finished his studies at the prestigious Saint Martin's, a London art school. It wasn't until his wife's illness that he dusted off his brushes and, inspired by Matisse and Kandinsy, whom he considers his references, he brushed the canvas again, feeling that "pain sometimes manifested itself in color." "I paint figurative and landscape portraits in oil, I paint with acrylics.

Everything is in my own style", he assured about what he does in his own art studio that was set up in the house he has in Malibu and where he usually makes paintings such as a profile of Bob Dylan that he won at a charity auction (in these they are roll up) for $1.2 million. Go with 007.

Pierce Brosnan posing next to his portrait of Bob Dylan

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