The ‘compulsive’ power of Sharon Stone’s art

Sharon Stone throws herself into her art. For years, her chosen medium was performance, but since the Academy Award-nominated actor picked up a paintbrush in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, she hasn’t put it down.

“I just get in this kind of trance,” Stone said of her daily painting practice during an interview with CNN. This week, she displayed the fruits of that labor at her first East Coast exhibition, “Welcome to My Garden,” which is on display through December 3 at C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The show shares a title with one of the 19 paintings on view, a 6-foot-high canvas featuring a ghostly serpentine form coiled around a pair of carefully rendered flowers. “The planet is our garden,” Stone said of the symbolism behind the work. “I think that many people are disrespecting the planet, pretending that there isn’t climate change, there’s no environmental climate crisis. And (they believe) if they just ignore it, that it will go away.”

Many of the works in the show draw on social issues, as well as personal experience. “I created these works to understand the essence of pure creativity that comes from heartfelt truth,” Stone said in a statement accompanying the exhibition. “To let go of the noise, the judgments, and the pollution of our societal pulls.”

One painting, “A State of Affairs,” shows a nest of bloody vipers that Stone compared to a patriarchal society that believes it can just “take and take,” whether it be natural resources or political power.

The contemplative “Jerusalem,” meanwhile, was inspired by a visit Stone made some years ago to the city’s Western Wall, where she prayed for peace. Including it in the exhibition, which opened just days after Hamas’ surprise attacks against Israel, was important to her, Stone said, because “every loss in war is some mother’s child.”

Painting has become a vital form of expression for Stone, who became a ’90s icon thanks to her roles in movies like “Casino” and “Basic Instinct.” The botanical painting, “It’s My Garden, Asshole,” for example, was made for a friend who had struggled to have a baby and suffered a miscarriage before giving birth in her 40s.

When the woman’s father-in-law commented on baby weight she was still carrying a few months later, she was “just devastated,” Stone recalled, adding that she told her friend to stand up to her father-in-law. Stone painted a raw, jaggedly-brushed canvas in her own response. “I was just so mad. I was like a cartoon character,” Stone remembered of the creative process, mimicking tears shooting out of her eyes.

The strong emotion behind Stone’s works is what appealed to gallery owner Tiffany Benincasa, who has been running the storefront gallery space in Greenwich for some 10 years after an earlier career on Wall Street. “You can feel the energy,” Benincasa said of Stone’s paintings. The commitment the actor has made to her art is also evident, the gallerist added. “She’s all in.”

Stone first started painting as a child, taught by her aunt Vonne, who was an artist and had filled the family’s home with murals. She studied art briefly at Edinboro University in her home state of Pennsylvania before quitting school to start modeling and acting in the late 1970s. But a friend’s gift of a paint-by-numbers kit during Covid lockdowns spurred a burst of creativity that led Stone to fill her bedroom with her artworks, before turning a guesthouse on her Los Angeles property into a home studio. Stone now dedicates several hours a day to painting; earlier this year, she staged her first show in Los Angeles, at Allouche Gallery.

Stone now spends much of her time in the studio trying to translate how she sees the world onto canvas. “Since I had a stroke, I started seeing color patterns on the wall,” she said. The stroke was caused by a massive brain hemorrhage, which led to her losing roles in Hollywood, she told CNN’s Chris Wallace earlier this year. But it also changed her visual perception. “I had to take medication to stop it, but I don’t think it ever really went away, because I still see all this extra color everywhere.”

She also experiments with different techniques and materials, from paint rollers to pickleball court tape, to achieve the effects she wants. “I use metallic paint a lot because I do really love that reflective quality,” she said. “I started incorporating spray paint into my paintings because I couldn’t get that kind of hyper-reflectiveness otherwise.”

An “obsession” with Modernist painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró influenced Stone’s more abstract paintings like “Amelia,” a diptych named after the legendary pilot Amelia Earhart. “I thought a lot about what it must have been like for her to be in the plane so long by herself, day after day, hour after hour.” Stone said. “And what she was thinking about and where she was going and what all these endless days and nights were like.”

The 8-foot-wide painting “Giverny” was based on a visit to Claude Monet’s gardens in the village of Giverny, in northern France, where Stone asked the young son of the site’s caretakers to show her all the locations the Impressionist painted from. “So we crawled around through the brush on our hands and knees. And he knew exactly where to get on the bridge and pull (the plants) aside,” she said. “I wanted to paint my own Giverny, and how it looked to me.”

Whatever the starting point, the process is always all-consuming for Stone, who admits that she can be “a little bit of a psycho” when ensuring an artwork matches the vision in her head. “It’s just compulsive,” she said.

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