by One day a close friend of Sharon Stone went for dinner with her family. The friend’s father-in-law advised that she should not choose pizza, since she just had a baby and should lose weight. This incident inspired one of Stone’s paintings, It’s My Garden, Asshole: a gorgeous acrylic on canvas depicting a shimmering impressionist garden held together by an undulating land of De Kooning-esque salmon and pinks.
So the father-in-law was the asshole, ask him? No, explains the star during a video call from her home in California. When Stone came to do the painting, a drone was hovering over her house. You can see a black smudge on the top left of the canvas. “I thought, these people need to get the fuck out of our garden. They’re so busy trying to spy on us that they have no idea what’s really going on.”
Related: Sharon Stone names producer who ‘told her to sleep with co-star’
So, this painting is angry, expressing outrage about patriarchal power and the erosion of privacy? “It’s not! It’s a love story!” Stone explains that her friend had struggled to have a baby for a long time. “When she finally got her baby after going through so much, naturally she was upset when some old white man told her to lose weight. I told her ‘Go tell him it’s his last chance to be a grandfather and you want him to love that kid after everything he’s 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 up to 17 hours a day. She currently has a solo exhibition at a gallery in Berlin, and another opening in San Francisco next month. If you feel like a slacker, consider that Stone probably wouldn’t have a gallery space if she wasn’t already famous. “Not likely,” says Stone, “but I’d be more valuable if I were dead. If there is the possibility of a shorter life expectancy, that’s a winner for female artists.”
Wait, what? She remembers taking her portfolio to a meeting with a gallery in New York. “After two hours I finally said, ‘Are you even going to 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 she gave galleries what they wanted. “Johnny Depp is printing people’s pictures, painting them and signing them, and making a fortune,” she says. (Two years ago, Depp’s first art collection Friends and Heroes, which includes 780 screen prints of the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards, sold for an estimated $3.65m.) “Galleries were coming to me and I said, Will you make prints of your face, please?’ I think it is my duty no to do that. My job is to open a window for other women and keep it open longer.” That’s what she did as an actress, she says, and is doing now as an artist.
Remember what Marilyn Monroe said: ‘Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition’
She tells me she wants $40,000 a piece for some of her paintings. More than anything else, buyers will get a lot of surface area for their money. Stone often works on a large scale. Take her 2023 abstract diptych Amelia. A vertiginous neo-geometric composition, it was inspired by what pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart looked like “being in the plane all 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 pictures she took as a teenager to put her through school. Little Sharon got the art bug from her Aunt Vonne in small town Pennyslvania. Her parents, Dorothy and Joseph, were, as their daughter says in her memoir The Beauty of Living Twice, not so much “lace-curtain Irish” as “kitchen-sink Irish”. “My parents did not 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 taken away when she was nine years old to be a housekeeper, a laundress and a cook.”
Their tough childhood shaped Stone’s childhood and character. “You did your work before you could play, before you had to eat. And if you didn’t, your bomb was taken off the bed and you were knocked down the stairs.”
Aunt Vonne offered an escape from that harsh life and inspired Stone’s lifelong love of art. “Painting was just another language I knew, 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 that I would be able to make a living as a painter. I was offered a modeling job for $5,000 a day. So I was thinking: 25 bucks or 5,000?”
Modeling brought her to New York and she became part of the Studio 54 crowd. Then one day in 1980 she stood up to be an extra in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and got the non-speaking role of “pretty girl on the train” . Her first appeared 10 years later, in Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi Total Recall. Two years later, she worked with the Dutch director again on the silly erotic thriller Basic Instinct – although he called her Karen incessantly.
“Remember what Marilyn Monroe said,” says Stone: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.” The quote is probably apocryphal but it’s clear why she likes it. The most interesting characters on Sharon Stone’s CV are ambitious women who don’t so much want to be equal to men as kick their asses. “I was playing big characters,” she agrees. “Exactly. I was standing next to the men rather behind them.”
The role she is most proud of is Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino, which she played opposite Robert De Niro. “Bob encouraged me in every possible way. He was so amazing to me that he told me that his performance depended on my performance. I did everything I could to accommodate him because I wanted to work with him, and it came true.”
Her acting career hasn’t reached that high since. “I was surprised that I didn’t manage to continue working well, because I did everything to do my best.” She has certainly had well-documented problems with Hollywood misogyny: she recently revealed that during the filming of the 1993 film Sliver, Hollywood producer Robert Evans advised her to have sex with co-star William Baldwin to improve his performance. improvement (whether Evans thought it would involve the same methods. improved hers is moot). One main reason she hasn’t been as prominent in Hollywood in recent years, however, is that Stone suffered a stroke in 2001, two weeks after 9/11, from a brain hemorrhage, an event that inspired the title of her autobiography.
“When one door closes, I have to open another,” she says. “My book has been sold in 22 countries so far.” Now she is writing a novel. She is a devotee of the wisdom of the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose philosophy, embodied in the motto “follow your happiness”, inspired Stone to move from film sets to donkeys. “It made me get decent brushes and remember things I thought I’d forgotten.”
You haven’t really painted in almost half a century? “I was not able. I worked 307 days a year. When I wasn’t settled, I was flying to the press junkets. I was home six days one year, nine days another. So no. I didn’t paint.”
My daily art helps me fight my way out of the weight of these scary times we live in.
But now she does. Very quickly she has put together a body of work that can be influenced by Joan Miró, Monet (there is even one called Giverny, inspired by a trip to the French garden) and Kandinsky. Stone says that, like Kandinsky, she feels a spiritual charge when she paints – although she admires Rodchenko most among Russian artists.
Related: Basic Instinct at 30: a lurid throwback to when Hollywood still took risks
The press release for Stone’s latest show quotes art historian Martin Oskar Kramer’s assessment of her oeuvre: “A representation of the feminine that is very much in touch with natural and fundamentally unimaginable forces.” Perhaps that helps to explain why, in his most figurative works, the snakes are so prominent. As we talk I notice a table lamp behind Stone is supported by a snake. “Snakes completely change their skin and move on,” she explains. “The ability to change is a symbol of how smart you are.”
The show in Berlin is called Totem. “Totems often serve as monuments to resilience and strength,” says Stone. “These pictures feel totemic to me. My daily art helps me fight my way out of the weight of this scary time we all live in.”
Among the paintings she is currently exhibiting is one entitled Please Don’t Step on the Grass. Inspired by trips to Israel in 2006, it takes on new resonance from the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent destruction of Gaza. His subjects are borders, invasions and the follies of conquest. “Before we start killing and maiming and injuring thousands of women and children, we need big brains, more emotional intelligence, not more energy of a small boda. My painting is all about that.”
Is she happier as a painter than as an actress? “I’m not saying that. Working as an actor, I really liked it. If someone offers me a significant role, I’m going to take it. But that’s not happening.”
Why not? “What happens in the business is that when you’re a huge seller, they want to put you in small projects, so you start funding people who want to start their careers. Great, but that’s not really where I’m at. I want to work with the masters because I deserve 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 remains current and modern.” As if to prove the point, she tells me that she plans to spend the rest of the day painting for her new show in San Francisco. She is in no rush to get back to acting on other people’s terms.
• Sharon Stone: Totem is at Galerie Deschler, Berlin, until 18 May
• Sharon Stone: My Eternal Failure opens at Gallery 181 at 181 Fremont Residences, San Francisco, on April 11
