Pierce Brosnan is curating his first solo art exhibition, “So Many Dreams,” in a Los Angeles gallery this week.
Famed for his acting and his Ireland-meets-London accent, Pierce Brosnan has been in the performing arts for over forty years, playing everything from charming but inconvenient fathers to the dashing James Bond. But he’s also a painter, on his own time. A prolific one.
“I have been painting since ’87 and it’s very therapeutic,” Brosnan told Vanity Fair Saturday during his exhibition’s opening night reception. “Painting has helped me find my way in life. Whenever I feel angst, I’ll go to the canvas. It brings me comfort and it’s just so joyful.”
He says he began in 1987, but he actually left school early at 16, in the 1960s to pursue painting, and worked for Ravenna Studios in London for a time before he discovered acting. He says that his wife’s cancer, which would take her after only a few years, brought him back to painting.
“One dark night I got the paints out to try to physically deal with the pain and what was going on in my head and my heart. I put the canvasses up and I started painting with my fingers. It was pure gut and intuition. I thought I was going to put darkness and out came color. It ended up as ‘One Dark Night.’ It was therapeutic and remains so to this day. That was the start of it. From that night I began to formulate my thoughts and my practice at drawing and painting. It invigorated me.”
In all his years of painting, he’s produced around 300 pieces of art, most of it vividly colorful and with abstract elements. He credits Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and surrealism as his major influences, but denies that he’s put much study into it.
“I just paint. I’m a self-taught painter,” he said modestly.
Photo: Everrett Collection / Shutterstock