I mentioned recently Anthony Hopkins making the news when he missed the announcement that he had won a BAFTA because he was preoccupied with painting. Naturally I was curious enough to look at his work and was intrigued to see that his work shared certain characteristics with the artwork created by other celebrities such as Jim Carrey, Sylvester Stallone, Rose O’Donnell, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennet, Macauley Culkin, Johnny Cash, and Pierce Brosnan, (to name a few, the list is endless!) all are avid creators of images that are colourful, vibrant and created with evident passion.

They appear as confident artists, some display an almost rebellious avoidance of rules or constraint, some communicate obvious political responses, others display an emotional or maybe simply intuitive application, but there is a bold approach to their work that I wonder whether it originates from their confidence that their fame will encourage, if not guarantee, interest or is it the determination to communicate their personal artistic interpretation with such passion and drive that it is this that is evident in their work?

I am not a confident artist, far from it, but then I am anonymous and unknown and therefore I have the philosophy that my artwork will be liked by some, and not liked by others. I do however, have slight envy that these celebrity artists can create knowing that they probably don’t have to worry about storage space for their paintings!
(Ok, and I confess to having more than slight envy when I saw photographs of Sir Hopkin’s art studio, it looked huge and every kind of art material was readily available, whereas I am quickly using up my tube of Davy’s Grey and having to ration my application for the meantime!)