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When I hopped on a scheduled Zoom call with iconic actress Sharon Stone earlier this month, I had every intention of picking her brain about some of her favorite restaurants, go-to bookstores and preferred parks in New York, also discussing her first East Coast art exhibition, "Welcome to My Garden," now on display at C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut, about an hour out of New York City.
I should have known better, though: the 65-year-old Emmy and Golden Globe winning actress wanted to talk about what she wanted to talk about and I was just along for the ride.
“I painted in college and sold all of my work but for basically no money,” the Academy Award nominee says to me matter-of-factly, sitting at a desk at home surrounded by a slew of statuettes. “I never really thought I could make it as a painter in the 1970s but I thought I could make it as an actress because I was a model and was making a ton of money.”
Fast-forward a few decades, iconic movie roles, endless accolades and a global pandemic that virtually shut down the world at large for over a year, and Stone, who never really stopped painting, decided to turn her guest house into an art studio to accommodate the scope of her hobby, which intensified during the pandemic.
"I took a painting to my good friend's birthday party as a present," she remembers when discussing her life post-pandemic lockdown. "She had a big party in her house with a lot of famous people and I unwrapped the painting and all these people wanted to commission work. I got so overwhelmed, I had to leave. About ten days later, I got offered a show."
The exhibit, which was mounted at Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles this past March, was the actress' official debut into the world of art.
When asked about what she gets out of painting when compared to performing on stage or in front of a camera, Stone defines her art as "another form of expression" and then dives into her experiences when visiting museums around the world.
“It disturbs people when I go to a museum during open hours,” reveals Stone. “So they let me go alone when it’s closed and it’s an unbelievable education because I can really stand in front of a painting or a sculpture or even lay on the floor and look at works from a different perspective. My bodyguard for 30 years said to me that he and I have the greatest art education in the whole world.”
It's here that things start to go a bit sideways.
As I try to get Stone to talk about one of the 19 paintings on view in Connecticut through December 3, the artist veers into politics.
"We're in this divided period when it comes to politics so I wanted to work on surrealistic landscapes because I want to remind people of what is possible in America," she says. "People forget how rich of possibility our country is while all these assholes are fighting about who is going to be a leader of Congress."
After touching upon the need to set up term limits for the Speaker of the House and the "unthinkable behavior" that the leaders we "used to call fathers of our nation" are now guilty of, Stone presses on about the American dream in connection with her being a woman.
"I am an American dream," she says proudly. "I am an actress who made it and a painter who will be just fine no matter how many areas you shut me out of because you don't like women succeeding. My parents had nothing and they did just fine."
And here, the legendary actress starts to cry.
After a few minutes, a newly poised Stone decides to restore a bit of hope to the current state of affairs, reminding me that, after all, "the planet always survives."
"The world survived the Ice Age and it will survive this," she says while smiling.