Former Beatle Ringo Starr is opening a new exhibition, ‘Ringo 2012,’ this week. From James Franco to Prince Charles, see our gallery of art’s most unexpected celebrity stars.
FameFlynet; Getty Images (3)
The Beatles legend originally took up making art on his computer as a way to kill time on the road while he was touring. But it’s flourished into a full-time career. Now his work is on display in a show called Ringo 2012 at the Pop International Gallery in New York, marking the first solo exhibition he has had since 2005.
AP Photo; Courtesy of POP International Galleries
James Franco is a jack of all trades: actor, director, student, and an artist. His first exhibition was at the now-defunct Glu Gallery in Los Angeles in 2006, where he showed several large-scale mixed-media pieces that resembled the work of J.M. Basquiat. In an incredibly meta-moment, Franco appeared on General Hospital as an artist named Franco in an episode that was shot at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Most recently, the actor returned to the museum to headline a show, Rebel, which closed on Saturday. It featured several drawings and mixed-media pieces taken from his work called The Dangerous Book Four Boys (in which he vandalized a book called The Dangerous Book for Boys), a giant wooden rocket ship, and large-scale collage paintings. As MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch put it, “It’s one of the most significant things going on right now—not just in art but also in progressive culture—this convergence, the dissolving of boundaries between what is art, what’s music, what is performance ... and it’s also the convergence between a more elevated fine-art culture and popular culture. Franco is one of these people who is leading this convergence.”
He may be Hollywood’s $25 million man, but Jim Carrey has another passion: street art. The actor reinvented himself as a graffiti artist last year, by spray-painting the door of his Brooklyn studio. In January Carrey opened a show called Nothing to See Here in Palm Springs, Calif., where he debuted more than 40 works, including one giant painting called High Visibility and a video projection set to a John Mayer soundtrack called One Last Push. “At best, I think an artist’s work also stops the viewer from thinking, worrying, or dressing what they are looking at with their mood or interpretation, bringing them into presence as well,” Carrey said in a statement.
The real estate of the British royal family includes stately city homes and sweeping country manors—all of which have provided endless inspiration for Prince Charles. The prince has been an en plein air watercolorist for most of his adult life, staking out at his family’s homes at Windsor Castle, Balmoral, Highgrove, and Sandringham, and on vacations to Switzerland, Greece, and Scotland. In 1990 he began producing lithographs of his works, the sales of which go to the Prince of Wales Charitable Foundation.
Tim Graham / Getty Images
Courtney Love may have a noisy Twitter page and an angsty songbook under her belt, but as of last month, she’s an artist as well. The singer-songwriter opened her first solo show at the Fred Torres Collaborations gallery in New York on May 3rd, which she titled And She’s Not Even Pretty. The show featured several fraught (and slightly deranged) sketches on paper, with images of women and phrases like “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,” and “He Is the Love of My Life.”
FameFlynet
His character in The Thomas Crown Affair may have an affinity for paintings—and the real-life Pierce Brosnan is no different. The actor began painting in the 1980s, when his first wife became ill (one of his most famous paintings, Fiji, he painted for her on their vacation in 1995), and he still paints in his spare time. Brosnan reportedly sells the works—which are boldly colorful impressionist canvases—to raise money for a trust in his name, which distributes money to environmental and women’s charities.
Getty Images (2)
With a résumé as jam-packed as Sylvester Stallone’s, it’s difficult to image there would be any room for a hobby. But the Rocky star has had a lively second career as a painter, and works out of his California garage. He has painted everything from self-portraits to nudes—all bright and wildly abstract. In 2010 the actor had a solo show at the Gmurzynska Gallery in Zurich, which featured 30 paintings from his 35-year career. But, he has said, “I’m not just painting for painting’s sake. I want to be truthful.” When his show opened, he wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with rave reviews. “[He] may not want to give up his day job just yet,” wrote the Daily Mail.
You may know him as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, or from the infamous nude fight scene in Eastern Promises, but Viggo Mortensen is also an accomplished photographer-painter. As a kid growing up in New York and Argentina in the 1960s, Mortensen was highly artistic, always with a pencil in hand, and once in high school grew attached to his camera. He has had exhibitions at several galleries worldwide, including the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles in 2003, where he debuted a body of work called Miyelo, which featured panoramic photographs of a Native American tribe’s Ghost Dance. He also showed Sign Language, a collection of street photographs and paintings, at the Track 16 gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2001.
AP Photo
The 85-year-old crooner is both an art collector and an artist, and, as his latest documentary, The Zen of Bennett, illustrates—often sketches during downtime on tour or on set. Recently he made headlines for drawing Lady Gaga in the nude and auctioned it on eBay for $26,900, which went to charity. Like all of his paintings, Bennett signed the work with his real last name: Benedetto.
Fred Duval, FilmMagic / Getty Images
You may know him from Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now, but the late actor was also an accomplished photographer, photorealist painter, and sculptor. He turned to photography in the 1960s, capturing several Hollywood icons in their prime—Paul Newman, Ike and Tina Turner, Brigitte Bardot—which launched his prolific 60-year career. A retrospective of his work was launched at MOCA in July 2010, just two months after the actor succumbed to cancer. The expansive exhibition, which featured his mixed-media paintings and sculptures, also included a video tribute to the actor. “When you see the film compilation,” MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch told The Daily Beast, “you can understand that this is not just Dennis Hopper as an artist. It's Dennis Hopper as a painter, Dennis Hopper as a filmmaker, Dennis Hopper as a photographer, Dennis Hopper as an actor.” The great glory of it is, of course, that “it's all one person.”
EPA / Newscom
You might not immediately guess it, but Dylan, “the Voice of a Generation” has also had a parallel life as a painter. The 71-year-old singer has been known to paint pictures of his far-flung travel destinations—which always garner a fair amount of attention. But last year it was revealed that several paintings from Dylan’s Asian Series, which was shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, borrowed heavily on photographs taken by other artists. But, The Daily Beast’s Blake Gopnik wrote, that doesn’t mean they are works of plagiarism. “Given his subject matter, Dylan’s “appropriations” may be especially cogent. By using old photos to explore the questionable notion of ‘Asian-ness,’ Dylan locks onto the clichés at its heart in a way he couldn’t have done by painting scenes from life.”
Getty Images (2)
Spock, believe it or not, is now a photographer. Leonard Nimoy, the famous Star Trek actor, studied art at UCLA in the early 1970s and later became an “artist in residence” at the American Academy in Rome. His work has been shown at LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Hammer Museum. He recently staged a show at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., called Selves, that featured several sitters posing as their “secret selves” or little-known alter egos: the toy-company employee posing as “secret whore”; the Episcopal priest as tough guy; the children’s-book illustrator as concert guitarist. “I feel like I’ve acted out every possible secret self for the last 60 years,” he says, laughing. “I’ve done vicious people, honest people, porks—I’ve done all kinds of self.”
Michel Boutefeu / Getty Images
In a tweet sent on May 30, Serena Williams said she was taking art classes in Paris ahead of the French Open, and that this piece was from her "Expressions" series and is called "Xpressions."
via Twitter
