Sharon Stone Finds New Life in Art
In a return to herself, Sharon Stone embraces her second act as a visual artist.
Photography Eric Michael Roy
Styled by Paris Libby
Sharon Stone, the luminous 65-year-old movie star–turned visual artist, has a problem that’s relatively unique in the art world. “It’s packed when I have a show, and they won’t go home,” she tells L’OFFICIEL from her Beverly Hills home in March. She is a vision of loose and cheerful elegance, all gauzy knitwear and glowing skin. “I think that’s an extraordinarily good sign that something is right with my work.”
A painter from her early years, after a major Hollywood career–length pause, Stone picked up her brushes again during the pandemic and hasn’t put them down since. Her first gallery show, Shedding, at the Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles, is awash in idyllic abstract landscapes inspired by her dreamy early childhood, her resolute connection to nature, and the influence of artists she admires, like Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Here, she tells L’OFFICIEL about why she started painting again, what she learned from Tony Duquette, and why she stopped listening to misogynists a long time ago.
L’OFFICIEL: When did you first start painting?
Sharon Stone: I started when I was little, because of my aunt, Vonne. She had a master’s in painting, and she had a master’s in English. She lived next door to my grandmother; I lived with them [in Oil City, Pennsylvania] on all my school breaks. They were an enormous influence on me. My aunt was very much a woman ahead of her time, and so was my grandmother. My father’s side of the family was very matriarchal and very cool. They had great style, and were robust, hilarious, very individuated, very liberated, funny, and raucous women. My aunt was the kind of woman who, if she didn’t know what to do with a wall, she’d paint a mural on it. My grandmother’s house was three stories, and my aunt painted murals down the staircases. That was just a very normal thing, for the walls to have those big landscape paintings. I think that really influenced me. Nature is a big aspect of what I like to paint, these kinds of magical landscapes. I think it comes from that. There was a gigantic round table in my grandmother’s kitchen, and I used to spend a lot of time under it. The adults would talk, and I would listen and look at these paintings on the walls. I think that was a big, magical part of my childhood.
L’O: It sounds like a good place to become an artist.
SS: Yes. They were just these incredible characters. My grandmother stole the silverware and the stuff off the tables in restaurants, and taught me how to pickpocket. She used to say, “They wouldn’t put the name of the restaurant on it if they didn’t want you to take it.” My grandfather was one of the first oil drillers in Oil City. They were very, very wealthy. Then the oil rig blew and just killed everybody. My great uncle died, and then my grandfather died four months later, and then everybody lost their fortunes. It was a kind of a crazy family atmosphere. My dad worked very hard, lived in people’s barns, and eventually bought the family house back. Then, the whole family moved into it when they were adults and married.
L’O: And you started painting.
SS: The acting thing got in the way for a while. I didn’t really have time to paint. When the pandemic came, I started painting again. I started with a paint-by-numbers so I could get my brushstrokes together, and then I started painting every single day. I still do. Usually, I paint somewhere between four and 17 hours a day. I painted just to paint. I gave a painting to my friend Anastasia [Soare] for her birthday. It was at her house, at a party, and people there just started lining up asking me for commissions. I couldn’t deal with it, so I went home. About 10 days later a gallery called me.
L’O: That is a Hollywood story, if you weren’t already a movie star. Why did you call the show Shedding?
SS: I think we’re in this time when we’re shedding our false personas, we’re shedding people, we’re shedding tears, and we’re shedding a life we had before Covid. We’re in a new life, finding a new self.
L’O: This must feel dramatically different as a practice for you. You have been making a type of art for years—performance—that requires other people.
SS: You can touch [a painting] and feel it and see it. Someone else doesn’t get to change it after I make it. It wasn’t a collaboration; it’s just me alone, which is very healing and nurturing. I feel that I really got to get back to my core and I got back to my own personal goodness, my own personal kind heart. Back to my own peace of mind, my own gentle centre. All of that defensiveness that you get from being too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too blonde, too brown, too white, too black, too–fuck that . [Laughs.] I got to simply be myself in a room with my art. My art was always good enough. It just was so nurturing and restorative for me, and I’ve been able to be a much more generous, loving, kind being. My well is refilled. Fame is a vampire.
L’O: So you’re going to keep painting, I’m assuming.
SS: Oh, my God, yes. No matter what happens, I don’t care. I’m not doing this for some altruistic construct. This is for me. Colour is a wavelength like everything else. I think being a colourist is my actual talent. I think the colour is my real talent. Colour talks to me. I’ve decorated everyone’s houses, and I mix their paint. I go and pick their fabrics and the rugs and everything for people and then get a designer to put it all together.
L’O: Another career for you if you want it!
SS: At a certain point I thought maybe I would do that. Tony Duquette was my next-door neighbour for 20 years. I learned a lot from him. He was so ahead of his time; such a genius artist. He came into my house, and my living room has 17-foot ceilings. He was like, “This is the sky. This is not a dead zone. It should be a colour. The sky isn’t white. Paint it a colour.” Who tells you to do that? Who tells you to paint the ceiling of your house a colour? “Paint your ceiling blue, paint it plum, paint it green, paint it anything you want, but paint your ceiling a colour.” In my whole life, I never thought, Oh, the ceiling gets to be a colour. Wow. Right?
L’O: Well, in a way, that’s also what you’re doing. You don’t have to just be one thing. The ceiling can be the sky. You don’t have to just be a movie star. You can also be a painter.
SS: When I came to Hollywood and I wanted to write song lyrics or I wanted to paint, or I wanted to do this or I wanted to do that, they’d always say, “Stay in your lane.” What they mean is, Stay in your place. [An attractive woman is] not allowed to be more than objectively intriguing. “Shhh. Why do you have to ruin it?” How many times have I heard, “Why do you have to ruin it?” Even sexually: “Why do you have to ruin it? Why do you have to talk?” “Ugh. Why do you have to talk now?” I don’t want to hear that ever again in my whole life.
L’O: I don’t want anyone to hear that.
SS: Exactly. I don’t want anyone to hear that. If I can do anything in this world to help, that’s what I want to do. If it’s painting a picture or writing a book or singing a song, or I don’t care what. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I don’t want to hear unqualified men tell me what to do with myself, my qualified self.
L’O: What does it mean that you are painting now, at this time in your life?
SS: Maybe I’m a bit of an existentialist, but I believe there’s a certain journey that we all take, and that we get to choose with how much integrity we do it. Meaning our destiny. Now is the time for me.
HAIR Teressa Hill
MAKEUP Amy Oresman
