‘We don’t need more small-penis energy’… Sharon Stone on why she swapped acting for art – The Guardian

One day a close friend of Sharon Stone’s went for dinner with her family. The friend’s father-in-law counselled that she should not choose pizza, since she had just had a baby and ought to lose weight. This incident inspired one of Stone’s paintings, It’s My Garden, Asshole: a gorgeous acrylic on canvas depicting a shimmering impressionistic garden held together with an undulating ground of salmon and De Kooning-esque pinks.

So the father-in-law was the asshole, I ask? Not quite, explains the star during a video call from her California home. When Stone came to make the painting, a drone was hovering over her home. You can see a black smudge top left of the canvas. “I was like, these people need to get the fuck out of our garden. They’re so busy trying to spy on us that they don’t even have any idea what’s really happening.”

So this is angry painting, expressing outrage at patriarchal power and the erosion of privacy? “No! It’s a love story!” Stone explains that her friend had long struggled to have a child. “When she had finally got her baby after going through so much, naturally she was upset at being told by some old white man to lose weight. I said to her ‘Go tell him it is his last chance to be a grandfather and that you want him to love that child after everything it cost you.’ And she did! And now they’re best friends!”

Stone, 66, started painting during Covid when a friend gave her a paint-by-numbers book. Three years later she paints as much as 17 hours a day. She currently has a solo exhibition at a gallery in Berlin, and another opening in San Francisco next month. If that makes you feel like a slacker, console yourself with the thought that Stone would probably not have got gallery space were she not already famous. “Probably not,” concedes Stone, “but I would be more valuable if I were dead. If there is the possibility of a shorter life expectancy, that’s a winner for female artists.”

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Wait, what? She recalls taking her portfolio to a meeting with a New York gallery. “After two hours I finally said, ‘Are you gonna even look at my work?’ And you know what he said? ‘Are you planning to die soon?’ So I said, ‘I’ve been sitting here for two hours listening to you and your friends for nothing?’ ‘Yes.’”

Stone knows she could make big bucks if only she gave galleries what they wanted. “Johnny Depp is printing pictures of people, putting some paint over it and signing it, and making a fortune,” she says. (Two years ago, Depp’s debut art collection Friends and Heroes, consisting of 780 screen prints of the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards, sold for an estimated $3.65m.) “I had galleries approach me and say, ‘Could you please make prints of your face?’ I think it’s my duty not to do that. It’s my job to open a window for other women and hold it open further.” That is what she did as an actor, she says, and is now doing as an artist.

She tells me she is asking $40,000 a piece for some of her paintings. Apart from anything else, buyers will get a lot of surface area for their money. Stone often works on a grand scale. Take her 2023 abstract diptych Amelia. A vertiginous neo-geometric composition, it was inspired by what it must have been like for the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart “to be in the plane so long by herself, day after day, hour after hour”.

A cool $40,000 is certainly more than the 25 bucks Stone used to charge for the paintings she made as a teenager to put her through school. Little Sharon got the art bug from her Aunt Vonne in smalltown Pennyslvania. Her parents, Dorothy and Joseph, were, their daughter relates in her memoir The Beauty of Living Twice, not so much “lace-curtain Irish” as “kitchen-sink Irish”. “My parents didn’t come from a loving parental home. My parents came from being child slaves,” she says. “My father lived in a barn from the age of four; my mother was given away when she was nine to be a housekeeper, laundress and cook.”

Their tough upbringings shaped Stone’s own childhood and character. “You got your work done before you got to play, before you got to eat. And if you didn’t, you got your butt pulled out of bed and you got knocked down the stairs.”

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Aunt Vonne offered an escape from that harsh world and catalysed Stone’s lifelong love of art. “Painting was just another language I grew up knowing, like if you grow up in a musical family.” She studied at nearby Edinboro University, but gave up art for modelling. “I didn’t get the impression I was going to be able to survive as a painter. I was offered modelling jobs at $5,000 a day. So I was thinking: 25 bucks or 5,000?”

Modelling took her to New York and made her part of the Studio 54 crowd. Then one day in 1980 she stood in line to be an extra in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and got the non-speaking role of “pretty girl on train”. Her breakthrough came 10 years later, in Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi head-scratcher Total Recall. Two years after that, she worked with the Dutch director again on the endearingly silly erotic thriller Basic Instinct – even though he incessantly called her Karen.

“Remember what Marilyn Monroe said,” says Stone: “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” The quote is probably apocryphal but it’s obvious why she likes it. The most intriguing characters on Sharon Stone’s CV are ambitious women who don’t so much want to be equal to men as to kick their asses. “I was playing pretty big characters,” she agrees. “Absolutely. I was standing beside the men instead of behind them.”

The role of which she is most proud is Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino, which she played opposite Robert De Niro. “Bob encouraged me in every possible way. It was so amazing to me that he told me his performance depended on my performance. I just did everything I could possibly do to serve him because it was my wish to get to work with him, and it came true.”

Her acting career has not reached those heights since. “I was shocked that I didn’t get to continue to work well, because I did everything to be my very best.” Certainly she’s had well documented problems with Hollywood misogyny: she recently revealed that during filming of the 1993 film Sliver, Hollywood producer Robert Evans advised her to have sex with co-lead William Baldwin to improve his performance (whether Evans thought the same means would have improved hers is moot). One key reason she has been less prominent in Hollywood in recent years, though, is because in 2001, two weeks after 9/11, Stone suffered a stroke caused by a brain haemorrhage, an event that inspired the title of her autobiography.

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“When a door closes, I have to open another one,” she says. “My book’s been sold in 22 countries so far.” Now she’s writing a novel. She’s a devotee of the wisdom of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose philosophy, encapsulated in the slogan “follow your bliss”, prompted Stone to move from movie set to easel. “It made me get some decent brushes and remember what I thought I’d forgotten.”

You really didn’t paint for nearly half a century? “I couldn’t. I worked 307 days a year. When I wasn’t on set, I was flying to the press junkets. I was home six days one year, nine days another. So no. I didn’t paint.”

But now she does. Very quickly she has amassed a body of work in which one can see the influences of Joan Miró, Monet (there’s even one called Giverny, inspired by a trip to the Frenchman’s garden) and Kandinsky. Stone says that, like Kandinsky, she feels a spiritual charge when she paints – though of Russian artists, she most admires Rodchenko.

The press release for Stone’s latest show quotes art historian Martin Oskar Kramer’s assessment of her oeuvre: “An expression of the feminine that is deeply in touch with natural forces and fundamentally untameable.” That perhaps helps explain why, in her most figurative works, snakes figure so prominently. As we talk I notice a table lamp behind Stone has a snake support. “Snakes completely change their skins and move on,” she explains. “The ability to change is a symbol of how smart you are.”

The Berlin show is called Totem. “Totems often serve as monuments to resilience and strength,” says Stone. “These paintings feel totemic to me. My daily art-making helps me fight my way out from under the weight of this alarming time we are all living through.”

Among the paintings she’s exhibiting currently is one called Please Don’t Step on the Grass. It was inspired by trips to Israel in 2006, and takes on new resonance since the 7 October attacks in Israel and subsequent devastation of Gaza. Its subjects are borders, invasions and the folly of conquest. “Before we start killing and maiming and wounding thousands of women and children, we need big brains, more emotional intelligence, not more small-penis energy. My painting is about all that.”

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Is she happier as a painter than an actor? “I’m not saying that. Working as an actress, I absolutely loved it. If someone offers me a substantial role, I’m going to take it. But that’s not happening.”

Why not? “What happens in the business is that once you become a huge seller, they want to put you in small projects, so that you start financing people who want to start their careers. Terrific, but that’s not really where I’m at. I want to work with the masters because I have earned my place there.”

She insists on being creative while her acting career is on hold. “It’s really important to continue to be artistically creative, to let that faucet flow, so that your art stays ever present and modern.” As if to prove the point, she tells me she’s planning to spend the rest of the day on a painting for her new San Francisco show. She’s in no hurry to go back to acting on other people’s terms.

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