Brad Pitt’s face has been sculpted by the gods, his body by gym instructors, while his hands have been behind the 46cm-tall ‘House A Go Go’, fashioned out of tree bark and held together with tape. The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star has a sculpture studio in his home, where he and his co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, have reportedly made pottery together.

Cute, of course. But it is more than that. There is enough detail in his work to make it shine. For him, it is about “self-reflection”, as the 62-year-old pointed out to the Finnish publication Yle. “It was born out of ownership over what I call a ‘radical inventory of the self’,” he said.

The Fight Club actor’s 2022 show with musician Nick Cave and artist Thomas Houseago was packed with memorable moments, including the showcasing of ‘Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late This Time’ (2020), which presents a gunfight between eight figures.

His hands found something to do following his divorce from the actress Angelina Jolie in 2017. He spent considerable time experimenting at Houseago’s art studio, working with clay, plaster, rebar and wood. Lugging clay around, chopping and cleaning up did not dampen his enthusiasm.

Becoming an artiste is not easy for a famous person like Brad Pitt. The hammer and chisel may not become his bread and butter in the long run, but they surely allow him to explore life beyond cinema.

It is not a crossover, just as it has not been for Bob Dylan. The man who has given us classics such as Like a Rolling Stone and Mr. Tambourine Man, and who has effortlessly reached a number of milestones — including a Nobel Prize in Literature — has also undertaken perplexing projects, such as creating a 26-by-15-foot iron archway for a resort casino in Maryland.

He is, in a sense, an “Iron Man”. The 84-year-old has been around iron since he was a child. “I was born and raised in iron ore country.” There, he could “breathe it and smell it every day”.

For the project, he used objects and scrap metal from junkyards, from “farm equipment, children’s toys, kitchen utensils and antique firearms to chains, cogs, axes and wheels”.

Dylan is truly freewheeling. Besides sculptures, he has showcased striking drawings and paintings, including at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. All this does not place him on the same pedestal as Donatello or Vincent van Gogh. Some years ago, he showcased paintings based on photographs he supposedly took in Asia. The word ‘competent’ best describes the effort.

For a long time, the singer kept his artwork private, until around 2007. Since then, he has held exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, and has released art books, including The Drawn Blank Series.

Painting as Statement

He is a bit like Winston Churchill. The statesman’s time at the easel was not a stunt. The hobby began when he was in his forties, and his creative fire only grew more potent.

The paintbrush has also applied colour to the imagination of Robbie Williams. Stepping out of his comfort zone was not easy, but that is what he did a few years ago with his creative partner Ed Godrich. The black-and-white paintings the pair worked on together at Sotheby’s New Bond Street space captured a certain degree of whimsy. The duo were swayed by an element of nostalgia that resides in monochrome.

The former Take That singer pushed his creativity further during a more recent showcasing, titled ‘Radical Honesty’. He took bold steps, such as creating a giant hoodie covered in pockets embroidered with the names of mental health medications. It is earnest, but not quite as big a hit as his song Angels.

Filmmaker David Lynch had a more serious relationship with the brush. The director of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, who died last year, was formally trained as a painter. He was an advanced student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1966 and 1967.

“I loved my time at the academy,” the director once told The New York Times. “The building was almost black. All of Philadelphia had a kind of coal-dust patina and a mood that was just spectacular. There was violence and fear and corruption, insanity, despair, sadness — just in the atmosphere of that city. I loved the people there. All these things, whatever way it was, were my biggest influence.”

In fact, for him, films became a “moving painting”. “As a painter, you do everything yourself, and I thought cinema was that way,” Lynch said, “like a painting, but you have people helping you.”

Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, too, has had his share of the canvas. A few years ago, the Rocky and Rambo actor unveiled a series of paintings he had created nearly 60 years earlier, which he used to sell for $5 to pay his bus fare to and from school.

His time with the brush began in the 1960s, centred mostly on shirtless men, bold colours and scrawled messages such as “Our little lives are big deals.” At a 2021 exhibition, there were self-portraits, including ‘Finding Rocky’ (1975), which predated both the screenplay and the film.

Fame, freedom and the democratisation of art

Not every musician or actor has managed to find success in the art world. In an August 2025 Instagram post, singer Ed Sheeran said that sales of his artwork had raised more than $1.25 million for charity. He does not claim to be a Jackson Pollock; he simply loves the work of Jackson Pollock. You can call his art a tribute to the abstract expressionist painter. It is slick work, but not something that is likely to endure in the long run. It is simply a fun way to let off steam. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why celebrity singers and actors have taken up art.

Interest in painting can also be attributed to his upbringing. His father was a curator at Cartwright Hall, Bradford, and his mother worked at Manchester City Art Gallery, so he has his art history straight.

Johnny Depp has been more successful when it comes to painting. In 2023, he sold more than $3.6 million worth of prints struck from portraits he had painted of celebrity friends and role models.

After playing a gangster and a man with scissors for hands, he has enjoyed being an artist. His exhibition, ‘A Bunch of Stuff’, brought together works that Depp had created over the years. “Some may call it art, some may not; I call it mine,” he wrote in the introductory wall text.

Musicians and actors taking to the brush is not a new phenomenon. Frank Sinatra painted for several decades. His interest lay in oil painting. But what might have turned him to the canvas? In a Daily Telegraph article from 2009, there is mention that one of his paintings is believed to date from 1957, the time when he was getting a divorce from the actress Ava Gardner. The painting is a self-portrait of the artist as a melancholic clown. Now think of Sinatra singing Send in the Clowns. The song probably had a special connection with his life.

His paintings were influenced by painters of the mid-20th century, especially the Abstract Expressionists. If that has piqued your curiosity, try to lay your hands on the book A Man and His Art: Frank Sinatra, with a foreword written by his daughter Tina Sinatra.

Further, his paintings have value. The Financial Times reported that paintings by Sinatra have found buyers at auction 23 times since 2018 and have soared as high as $137,500 (with fees), according to Arthur Analytics. It is far higher than what Stallone and Depp managed to achieve.

Sinatra’s friend and admirer, the late Tony Bennett, took a similar path.

Eric Rhoads, publisher of PleinAir, said a few years ago: “My phone rang, and on the other end I heard, ‘Eric, it’s Tony Bennett. I’m landing soon — meet me at the Four Seasons in an hour. Bring your painting gear.’”

He signed his paintings Benedetto, his birth surname, which means “the blessed one”. Most of his work was in oil and watercolour. He even had “no fewer than three works in the Smithsonian collection”, and created a commissioned artwork commemorating the United Nations’ 50th anniversary.

Playing an important role in the evolution of Benedetto was James McWhinney, a junior high art teacher who discovered the singer at 14, drawing Thanksgiving images with coloured chalk in an Astoria gutter.

Later, in 1962, a friend, Johnny Brascia, challenged him to quit painting. Benedetto became even more committed to the discipline. He continued his art studies in private studios with instructors throughout the years. In October 2004, at Union Square in San Francisco, a five-foot heart-shaped sculpture was unveiled, bearing the image of the Golden Gate Bridge painted by Benedetto.

It would be remiss not to mention the Beatles. Paul McCartney, for example, was interested in art since his school days, but he began painting only when he turned 40. Over the decades, he has filled hundreds of canvases, using oil and acrylic paints. The self-taught artist has been inspired by Willem de Kooning. At his exhibition in 1999, there were 16 of his paintings, including one titled ‘Bowie Spewing’, an abstract portrait of David Bowie throwing up, painted in 1990.

John Lennon, too, had published his drawings, and these had peace and love at their centre. His drawings were also a whimsical, intimate diary of his life with Yoko Ono. Ringo Starr and George Harrison also toyed with painting.

Since Bowie’s name has cropped up, the late singer’s 1995 show was dismissed by one critic as “vanity exhibiting at its worst”.

A more successful musician in the art business has been Miles Davis, who died in 1991. He started to draw and paint only when he was in his mid-fifties, during the early 1980s. During the last few years of his life, he worked obsessively each day and studied with New York painter Jo Gelbard.

The strokes were bold, and you can find hints of Picasso and African tribal art. Since his death, his estate has put up several travelling gallery and museum shows. In 2013, Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork was published.

Of course, there have also been artists who have tried their hand at music. Marcel Duchamp, for example, came up with Musical Erratum. The first performance of it was on New Year’s Eve, 1912. Yves Klein, who is best known for his signature blue print, came up with Monotone Silence Symphony, a piece of minimalist music. He had the idea for the piece in 1947, but the first performance occurred in 1960. It consists of 20 minutes of an orchestra performing the chord of D major, followed by a 20-minute silence.

It all comes down to expanding art’s appeal and, of course, reminding one of an old saying — beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Democratising art is always welcome.

Mathures Paul