Her flower painting, which was used to promote the show, was donated to a Las Vegas charity auction in 2017, helping the victims of the Root 91 Harvest music festival shooting.
A year ago, the performer scrapped her Las Vegas residency and announced she was taking an “indefinite” break from music, to focus on her father Jamie’s recovery from a life-threatening illness.
Her dad served as her conservator for 11 years – meaning he was in charge of Spears’ finances because of her ill-health – after Spears was placed in psychiatric care back in 2008.
Last year, he was legally relieved of his duties for “personal health reasons”.
The singer reassured fans over her own wellbeing, following internet speculation that she was being held at a mental health facility against her will. This sparked the #FreeBritney campaign; a hashtag which appears again, ironically, in the promo for the new art show.
In an Instagram video in April, she rejected the theories, saying “all is well” and that she would “be back very soon”.
“My family has been going through a lot of stress and anxiety recently, so I just needed time to deal,” she added.
Paint it black
Spears is not the first musician to channel her creativity into physical artwork.
The Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood is well known for moving seamlessly from guitar licks to licks of paint.
The 72-year-old rocker placed his paintings on display once again at a pop-up gallery in London just before Christmas.
A few years earlier, the former art student described his painting Sad Guitar – which featured in his book Ronnie Wood: Artist – to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme as a combination of his two greatest loves, music and art.
“It’s very influenced by the guitars of Georges Braque and Picasso. Those artists lay heavy with me as influences,” he said.
From The Rolling Stones to The Stone Roses – fellow guitar wizard John Squire‘s latest exhibition, Disinformation, featured at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, also in the capital, last year.
The large-scale oil paintings were based on photographs taken by the artist or found online and then put through a Snapchat filter that the 1995 Turner Prize winner had told Squire about.
The 57-year-old, who was responsible for the Manchester band’s signature Jackson Pollock-inspired paint splash artwork, told The Guardian: “I don’t think I’m a very good guitar player – or painter.”
We’ll agree to disagree on that one, John.
Last but not least, without blowing his own trumpet, it’s fair to say seminal US jazz musician Miles Davis produced some pretty impressive artwork too, late on in his career.
Davis, famed for trailblazing records like Bitches Brew, only began painting in his mid-50s during a break from touring, but soon threw himself fully into it.
“It’s like therapy for me, and keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m not playing music,” he wrote in his self-titled autobiography in 1989.
His influences ranged from Picasso to Basquiat, via African tribal artwork.
After his death in 1991, at the age of 65, Davis’s estate took his paintings on the road, and in 2013, Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork was published.
Look out for the best of Britney’s artwork in book form in time for Christmas 2020 (maybe, baby).
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
