Image via Complex Original
Every year, American actors, actresses, directors, writers, and more gather for the Academy Awards, the oldest and one of the most prestigious awards ceremonies in the entertainment industry. To be nominated for or to receive an Oscar is an honor that most people can only dream of, yet some of these already accomplished stars somehow find the time to pursue other hobbies, such as painting and visual art. And here we can't even muster the energy to pack a lunch before work!
Many of the celebrities on this list, such as Jared Leto and Javier Bardem, cite painting as their first love. It's hard to imagine Johnny Depp or Sylvester Stallone being famous for their paintings rather than their acting, but it turns out that they all have real talents to fall back on in case something in film doesn't work out.
Here are 20 Oscar Nominees and Winners Who Paint, many who will surprise you.
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Dennis Hopper
Nomination: Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Material Not Previously Published or Produced and Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Easy Rider (1970), Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Hoosiers (1987)
Hopper's performance in Hoosiers earned him a nomination for the Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar in 1987. More than a decade before that, he wrote the screenplay for Easy Rider and earned an Oscar nomination for the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Material Not Previously Published or Produced category. Many know Hopper as a man of many talents, and painting was just one thing he happened to do very, very well.
Audrey Hepburn
Nomination: Best Actress in a Leading Role, Roman Holiday (1954)
Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1954 for her role in Roman Holiday. Art-making was always one of Hepburn's hobbies. As a child, she suffered from chronic hunger pains during WWII, and in order to distract herself, she would draw pictures of stories she'd make up. She took up painting as an adult as a way to pass time during her pregnancy. Samples of Hepburn's work have been published in the book Audrey Hepburn: An Elegant Spirit.
Viggo Mortensen
Nomination: Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, Eastern Promises (2007)
Nominated for the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for the film Eastern Promises in the year 2008, Viggo Mortensen is also an art connoisseur. A series of his paintings are abstract and filled with vibrant colors, leaving his audience anticipating more, whether it be a painting, poem, or form of photography.
Anthony Hopkins
Nomination: Best Actor, The Silence of the Lambs (1992), The Remains of the Day (1994), Nixon (1996), Amistad (1998)
In 1992, Hopkins won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in The Silence of the Lambs. Thereafter, his roles in The Remains of the Day, Nixon, and Amistad earned him three nominations for the Best Actor award, as well. Hopkins is also an accomplished painter and some of his paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows.
Javier Bardem
Nomination: Best Supporting Actor, No Country for Old Men (2008)
Bardem won Best Supporting Actor in 2008 for his impressive performance as Anton Chigurh, a marked man and monomaniacal killer in No Country for Old Men. Like Kathryn Bigelow, Bardem describes painting as his “first love,” though he admits to being a “very bad painter.” He took acting jobs in order to support his painting. He sees painting as a way to express his feelings and would have continued with it, had it felt more like the right place to be.
Darren Aronofsky
Nomination: Best Director, Black Swan (2011)
Aronofsky's direction in Black Swan earned him a well-deserved nomination at the 2011 Oscars. Born in Brooklyn in 1969, his upbringing was largely characterized by his Jewish heritage and going to films in Times Square...as well as painting graffiti art on subway cars. Surprise, suprise.
Jeff Bridges
Nomination: Best Actor, Crazy Heart (2010)
Bridges was the 2010 winner of the Best Actor award for his performance in Crazy Heart. Beyond being an impressive actor, Bridges is also a musician, a photographer, a ceramicist, and a painter. Compared with acting, music, and ceramics, he says, "painting isn't something [I have] done as much of," though he admits that getting into it is "like hanging out with an old friend." The actor has been painting since he was a kid, and still the art form "always surprises [him] a little."
Daniel Sousa
Nomination: Best Animated Short Film, Feral (2014)
Daniel Sousa's animated short, Feral, is a nominee in this year's Best Animated Short Film category. Sousa's skills go beyond filmmaking and animation. He graduated from RISD, where he also studied painting and illustration.
James Dean
Nomination: Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Giant/East of Eden (1957,1956)
Two time Oscar nominee James Dean was known for his good looks as an actor, and surprisingly, he was also a painter. He primarily used watercolors, pen, and ink, gouaches in his work, and he also made sculptures. His last painting before he died was a portrait of his best friend Billy Gunn. Unfortunately this piece is not for sale.
Daniel Day-Lewis
Nomination: Best Actor, There Will Be Blood (2009), Best Actor, Lincoln (2013)
Day-Lewis has won Best Actor twice—last year for his performance in Lincoln and in 2009 for his role in There Will Be Blood. He is known for his method acting. He learned to paint with his toes in order to play disabled Christy Brown in the film My Left Foot.
James Franco
Nomination: Best Actor, 127 Hours (2011)
James Franco's 127 Hours performance earned him a Best Actor nomination in the 2011 Oscars. In an interview with Jared Leto, Franco offered to paint his Leto's portrait. Franco followed through with the offer and painted Leto's portrait the morning after the interview.
Born to aspiring artists, Franco has been painting even before he became an actor. His grandfather was a cartoonist and his grandmother ran a Japanese art gallery in Cleveland. On a trip to Japan with his grandmother, Franco was invited to live with one of the artists he met. Franco spends his free time painting with oils and acrylics, and his paintings have been exhibited at the now-defunct Glu Gallery in Los Angeles.
Some of Franco's other work has been featured overseas. The "Dangerous Book Four Boys" exhibition was his first solo exhibition. After it was presented at the Clocktower Gallery in downtown Manhattan, the exhibition was presented in two locations in Berlin, marking Franco's first European solo exhibitions.
Sally Hawkins
Nomination: Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Blue Jasmine (2014)
The Blue Jasmine actress and 2014 Oscar nominee for Best Actress in a Supporting Role enjoys painting in her spare time. Sadly, the world hasn't gotten to see the fruits of her labor.
Sylvester Stallone
Nomination: Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Writing for a Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Rocky (1977)
Oscar nominee Sylvester Stallone is not only praised for his awesome performance in the 1976 film Rocky, but he is unexpectedly an artist greatly influenced by abstract expressionism. Evidently, he had been producing art since the 1960s, even before he began acting. Basically, he went from boxing in the ring to revealing striking, intense paintings in an exhibition at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Rocky is a man of many talents!
Kathryn Bigelow
Nomination: Best Director, The Hurt Locker (2010)
Bigelow’s direction in The Hurt Locker won her an Oscar in 2010, making her the first woman to win the Best Director Award. The respectable director’s “first love” was painting. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for high school before moving to New York, where she enrolled in the independent study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The museum sponsored the director's painting scholarship.
Bigelow spent the '70s as a painter and conceptual artist in Manhattan. Before gravitating towards film, she was part of the conceptual art collective Art & Language, where she worked with literary icon Susan Sontag, who was one of her early mentors. In fact, Bigelow got her start directing a short movie that was set about four blocks from where she was renting and renovating lofts with Phillip Glass in order to make money. While Bigelow's 20-minute short was inspired by semiotics and Lacanian deconstruction, her early experiences with painting and her artistic social circle in 1970s Manhattan certainly had an influence on the painterly compositions of her films, in which she creates and escalates spectacular visual images.
Jared Leto
Nomination: Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Dallas Buyers Club (2014)
Jared Leto is nominated at the Oscars this year for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club in the Best Actor in a Supporting Role category. He was first trained in the visual arts before getting into the performing arts. He attended three art schools, beginning with the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., where he studied painting. He went to two other art schools after that, ended up in New York City, and then dropped out during his third year of school.
In an interview with James Franco, Leto elaborated on his painting work, art movements he's interested in, and other artistic mediums he has explored:
I was doing conceptual work. I was really into abstract and contemporary art. I always loved pop art as well. Then I fell in love with photography and filmmaking. I was also studying sculpture and exploring a lot of different things, as you do when you're a student. But I ended up focusing on film during my third year. Not so much traditional, narrative film—more art film and video art. But then I dropped out because I thought I would have a better chance at directing a film if I got a job as an actor first. So that's one of the reasons why I headed west with a backpack and a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. I went to California and ended up sleeping on the beach in Venice, and that was really the beginning for me. But I come from a visual background, and I grew up around a lot of hippies and artists. My mom and my brother and I moved around a lot. We basically moved every couple of years, and I went to a lot of different schools. But creativity, for us, was always a way of life. It was never a job. Being an artist was a passion and a way of life.
Judi Dench
Nomination: Best Actress in a Leading Role, Philomena (2014)
Dame Judi Dench's performance in Philomena has earned her a nomination in the Best Actress in a Leading Role category of this year's Oscars. The Bond star has been painting for years but has never let anyone see her work, nor does she intend to exhibit any of it. Painting for her is a private hobby, analogous to writing a diary.
Johnny Depp
Nomination: Best Actor, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2004), Best Actor, Finding Neverland (2005), Best Actor, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008)
Johnny Depp may not have won an Oscar yet, but his roles in Sweeney Todd, Finding Neverland, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Swan have earned him three Best Actor nominations. Less known among his talents is his flair for painting. When he's not recreating imaginative personalities in front of the camera, the canvas becomes his stage.
In a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair, he declares his love for painting portraits, emphasizing his subjects' eyes as windows to their interior selves: "Because you want to find that emotion, see what's going on behind the eyes." There seems to be a literary streak in the characters Depp has painted. Among the fictional characters he has played are Ichabod Crane, the Mad Hatter, and Sweeney Todd—otherworldly personalities who have sprung from the minds of 19th-century literary greats. In Finding Neverland, the film that earned him an Oscar nomination in 2005, Depp dives into the psyche of Peter Pan author, J. M. Barrie. When it comes to painting, Depp specializes in oil portraits and has painted Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Jack Kerouac—all personalities who have been celebrated for their poetic work.
Jennifer Lawrence
Nomination: Best Actress in Supporting Role, American Hustle (2014)
Jennifer Lawrence has been nominated for another Oscar, thanks to her brilliant performance in American Hustle, where she plays the neurotic housewife of the confidence man. This year, she's a nominee in the Best Actress in Supporting Role category. Lawrence was the winner of last year's Best Actress award for her role in Silver Linings Playbook. The Hunger Games and Winter's Bone star paints for fun and mostly with acrylics. In a 2010 interview with T Magazine, she mentions a "woman phase" she was going through at the time and that she just "paint[s] a lot of naked women." Her mom "thinks [she's] a lesbian," she elaborates.
We're ok with not having any images of Lawrence's paintings, because the idea of her painting naked women as part of any "phase" will have us fantasizing for days.
Banksy
Nomination: Best Documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop (2011)
The elusive stencil graffiti artist's documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. The Carpetbagger reported that during an Oscar nominees luncheon that year, the Academy president and director got together with the producer of Banksy's Oscar-nominated documentary to work through the plausible scenarios, should Banksy win the Best Documentary award. One of the Academy's concerns seems to have been the likelihood of the artist having to appear on stage, in which case he would be in costume. The Academy's president, Tom Sherak, said, "If Banksy isn't comfortable showing his face on the Kodak stage ...then the Academy isn't comfortable having him on that stage."
Christian Bale
Nomination: Best Actor in a Leading Role, American Hustle (2014)
Christian Bale slipped into the art of the charming, self-made trickster in American Hustle and has earned himself a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role at this year’s Oscars. When he’s not playing Batman or being the confidence man, Bale draws, paints, and sculpts with his daughter, who is “crazy about art.” The actor also told The Guardian that one of his favorite hobbies is painting castles. Unfortunately, there are no images online if these castles, so sadly we'll have to use our imaginations.