Looking at a Sharon Stone painting is like feeling the pulse of time: the colour vibrates, the gesture breathes, the form tells a story. For audiences who knew her as an absolute cinema icon – from the magnetic seduction of “Basic Instinct” to the dramatic depth of “Casino”, to the most intense and complex roles that defined her career – Stone today reveals another side of her creative power: that of a painter, author, activist, and cultural figure who traverses the arts with a presence capable of uniting instinct, memory, and vision.
Her history with painting, as she recounts in the interview, began as a child, alongside Vonne, her beloved aunt, a muralist, with whom she spent her days off from school.
That original connection with the pictorial gesture powerfully resurfaced during the pandemic, when Stone painted up to seventeen hours a day, transforming a period of global crisis into a return to the roots of her being.
International critics have recognized this evolution: Helen Stoilas and Whitney Mallet have praised her expressive power, while Jerry Saltz – a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the world’s most influential critics – dedicated an extensive essay to her work, even inviting her to his artist talks in Los Angeles and New York. Her exhibitions have been enthusiastically received by collectors, curators, and leading figures in the art scene.
Her creative journey, however, extends beyond painting and film. Sharon Stone is also an established author, with the New York Times bestseller, “The Beauty of Living Twice”, and is recognized as a cultural and humanitarian leader: her numerous awards include a Golden Globe, an Emmy, an Oscar nomination, a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, the Nobel Peace Summit Award, the Women Making History Award, and the United Nations Global Citizen of the Year.
Works like “River,” dedicated to her late nephew, transform grief into acceptance; the new portraits, born from a spiritual dialogue that the artist defines as a form of “creative channelling”, give voice to presences, memories, and intuitions that demand representation.
The new series of portraits, The Rogues Gallery Collection, conceived as an immersive, phone-free experience, invites the public to a direct encounter with art and with themselves, in a time suspended from the noise of the world.
In her current artistic phase, Stone maintains a unique balance between abstraction and figuration. Some of her figurative works originate from referential sketches by Gabriel Aubry, which become the starting point for a painting in which the visible and the intuitive intertwine.
At this moment in her life, Sharon Stone unites film, painting, and spirituality in a single creative thread, allowing each work to become a gesture of freedom, consciousness, and transformation.
And now, let’s let Sharon Stone speak: through her words, we enter her inner world, the heart of her art, and the profound vision that guides her new creative season.
How did your painting journey begin? Was it a sudden urge or a natural evolution of your expressiveness after the film?
When I was a kid, I spent all of my time off from school with my aunt and my grandmother, who lived next door to one another. My Aunt had a master’s degree in painting, and she painted murals on the walls of the houses. I learned to paint by being with her and ultimately painting with her when I was very small.
Your works blend abstraction and figuration: how does this “borderline” between the recognizable and the undefined arise, and what do you seek in the pictorial gesture?
Oh… come on; how like life this is. When does a thing become real? When does the real thing suddenly become abstract? I joked in school that the first impressionist was just a guy with bad eyesight.
In “River”, dedicated to your deceased nephew, the river almost resembles a human figure with open arms; how much did this painting help you process your grief and transform it into art?
Transformation is a process; this painting was the prettier part. That is the beautiful thing about painting for me: I can take those difficult feelings and push them through to a more enlightened, less dense place in myself and hopefully into the piece. River is a meaningful piece in my private collection, because it does afford the understanding of acceptance.
In your new portraits, you tell stories of souls who asked to be painted: how does this dialogue with the spiritual world arise, and how does it translate into your painting?
Since this happened for me with these paintings, I have had dialogue with other artists who have had similar experiences: talking to their sculpturers, drawing, artwork of all types. It seems to be less uncommon than I thought.
Yes, my paintings ‘talked’ to me, and I wouldn’t have believed it either, but they told me things I had to look up online to read about and understand. Things from other times and other places of which I had no knowledge.
Of course, when I played Ginger in Casino, there was no doubt for me that I could hear the woman whom this character was based on speaking to me in my mind and in my heart. I do believe that there is a type of artistic channeling that sometimes, when I get very lucky happens for me.
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