ne 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.
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. “I had galleries approach me and say, ‘Could you please make prints of your face?’ I think it’s my dutyto 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.
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.”
But now she does. Very quickly she has amassed a body of work in which one can see the influences of Joan Miró, Monet 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.