22 Celebrities Who Are Proven Artists (Including Oscar Winners!)

For some public figures, taking a break from the spotlight and serving as the head of state means turning to a canvas, a potter’s wheel or whatever helps them create with complete freedom.

From Academy Award-winning actors like Adrien Brody and legendary musicians like Paul McCartney to former President George W. Bush, many well-known names have explored painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics and more.

Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp, who has been painting privately as a hobby for years, started sharing his artwork publicly in 2022.

“Through the magic and madness of life, art has been my sanctuary,” Depp said in a statement to PEOPLE in 2024. “Creation is not always a comfortable process, but for me it’s a necessary one.”

Here’s a look at the famous faces who’ve found a way to express themselves through art and their creative works.

01 of 23

Adrien Brody

Before Brody was an actor, he was a painter.

“There were years that I was pretty much putting down acting and looking to paint primarily. Whether I was showing or selling works, I just wanted to paint,” Brody told Interview in May 2025.

He continued, “I find great creative autonomy and freedom in creating tangible, visual art as opposed to interpreting the words of others. … Drawing and painting has preceded acting. Since I was a child, I’ve been painting.”

Brody’s large-scale mixed-media pieces — often combining spray paint, collage and found materials — have sold for as much as six figures. Nearly a decade after his last public show, the New York-raised star held his latest exhibition, Made in America, at Eden Gallery in 2025, the same year he earned his second Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Brutalist.

“It’s been a processing of all of the influences that we have in our culture and of the many influences that I’ve had growing up as a New Yorker living in Queens and being the son of an artist,” he told the publication of his art. “It’s kind of an unpeeling of the layers and almost a nostalgia for another time.”

02 of 23

Paul McCartney

The love you take is equal to the love you paint.

For McCartney, a lifelong pull toward art took years to embrace as more than a pastime.

“I always liked drawing as a kid and I like the idea of painting, but I felt there was some sort of reason why I shouldn’t — because I hadn’t been trained, because I hadn’t been to art college, because I was just a working-class person,” he told the BBC in September 2000.

That hesitation disappeared in April 1999, when The Beatles‘ founding member opened his first art exhibition in Westphalia, Siegen. Since then, McCartney has created countless pieces, describing his painting as “both a respite from the world and another outlet for his drive to create,” per his official website.

03 of 23

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan‘s creativity has never been confined to just music.

For decades, the Grammy-winning musician has explored the visual arts, producing paintings, sketches, metalwork installations and more. However, Dylan started sharing his work publicly in 2007.

While his pieces have appeared in exhibitions over the years, including at London’s Halcyon Gallery in 2025, they’ve also been featured in several art books.

Point Blank — a collection of approximately 100 pieces created between 2021 and 2022 — arrives on Nov. 18, 2025, along with an unabridged audiobook version of Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, narrated by Sean Penn.

“This book showcases Bob Dylan’s mastery of telling stories, creating moods and provoking feelings,” said Simon & Schuster Vice President and Publisher Sean Manning. “The images are deeply evocative, at once innocent and world-weary, joyous and forlorn, humorous and sensual, enigmatic and familiar.”

Manning added, “Dylan’s ability to find beauty and mystery in the seemingly mundane is one of his great gifts — and the gift he’s continually given to the public over the years, including now with Point Blank.”

04 of 23

Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt turned to creating sculpture and ceramics after his September 2016 split from ex-wife Angelina Jolie. The Oscar-winning actor and producer has spoken publicly about his passion for the art form and even built a home sculpture studio, where The Sun reported he once made pottery with former Once Upon a Time in Hollywood costar Leonardo DiCaprio.

In September 2022, the F1 actor debuted his sculpture work at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, according to the Associated Press. His pieces were displayed alongside works by Australian musician Nick Cave as part of an exhibition originally dedicated to British artist Thomas Houseago, who reportedly encouraged the museum to include both Pitt’s and Cave’s creations.

At the exhibition’s opening, Pitt told Finnish publication Yle of his sculpture work: “For me, it’s about self-reflection. … It was born out of ownership over what I call a ‘radical inventory of the self.’ And getting really brutally honest with me and taking account of those I may have hurt and the moments I’ve just gotten wrong.”

The exhibition — which included pieces like a bullet-riddled house sculpture and a plaster panel depicting a gunfight — ran until Jan. 15, 2023.

05 of 23

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

While promoting her Apple TV+ series Surface in July 2022, Gugu Mbatha-Raw told Today co-hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb that she would have loved to pursue painting, but it made her quite “introspective.”

She added, “I loved acting because it brought me out of myself more.”

However, during the COVID-19 pandemic — when she wasn’t able to act as frequently — the actress got back into painting, creating and sharing portraits of public figures on Instagram, including George Floyd (pictured), Desmond Tutu and Kevin Hart, among many others.

“When you’re a creative person, if one outlet is sort of stopped, you spring a leak somewhere else,” Mbatha-Raw said.

06 of 23

Gene Simmons

Gene Simmons — who took up painting during the pandemic as a way to keep his mind occupied — debuted his artwork at the Animazing Gallery in Las Vegas’ Venetian Resort in October 2021.

“I never considered myself a painter,” the KISS bassist and singer told PEOPLE. “I never considered myself much of anything. You’re talking to the least qualified person you’d ever meet.”

07 of 23

Heidi Klum

No ifs, ands or butts about it: Heidi Klum is inspired by the beautiful scenery around her (and that includes husband Tom Kaulitz, whose portrait she posted on Instagram in June 2021, that we assume she painted.

While the German supermodel TV personality is busy with work in different creative fields, she “never really stopped” painting.

“I have an outside studio. It’s up on the bedroom patio. Everything I paint is with oil,” Klum told Artnet in August 2022. “Sometimes I do three or four paintings, and then I won’t paint anything for the longest time.”

08 of 23

Seth Rogen

Seth Rogen became so skilled at pottery during quarantine that he has since designed ashtray sets, stash jars and other accessories for his cannabis company, Houseplant. (The demand was so high that it crashed the site.)

“This is a thing I took up when I was like 38 or something, and I’ve gotten very good at it,” he said during a February 2024 interview on the Q with Tom Power podcast. “I’ve found a place for myself in the world of it. It’s not a thing I really even thought about until … my mid-life.”

Rogen has continued to combine his love for art and entertainment, serving as executive producer on the competition series The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down.

09 of 23

Britney Spears

Spears shared a video of herself on Instagram in May 2018, painting a bird and flower alongside her two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James.

The “Toxic” singer captioned the clip: “Painting feels so therapeutic to me! Getting to do this with my boys on a beautiful day like this is such a blessing!!!”

The side hobby has been successful, with late TV host Robin Leach buying one of the pop star’s paintings at auction for $10,000 in 2017.

10 of 23

Gigi Hadid

Another supermodel with an artistic eye, Gigi Hadid created a tribute to the late Karl Lagerfeld for an exhibition about the designer in 2019.

“The concept of my shirt is inspired by Polaroids I took of Karl,” she wrote in the caption on Instagram alongside a series of photos of the design and images with Lagerfeld and French fashion editor and exhibit curator Carine Roitfeld. “The back is a painted and stitched version of an image I shot of him in Paris, and on the front I attached a Polaroid of Karl’s suit and accessories that I shot in Milan, both in 2017.”

Hadid continued, “I always loved the details in Karl’s outfits and studied them whenever I could. He sometimes wore suits with staples on the collar and shoulders, so I added staples to the collar and to fasten the short sleeves of the shirt.”

11 of 23

Jemima Kirke

Jemima Kirke — who attended the Rhode Island School of Design before breaking out as an actress — still paints professionally, including this 2017 portrait of her former Girls costar Allison Williams in her wedding gown.

“My fear was that I’d be seen as the actress with a hobby — a hobbyist, which, for a painter, is a bad word,” Kirke said during an August 2025 episode of The UNTITLED Podcast. “You really can’t do more than one thing at a time to its fullest extent. Let alone two careers. I still struggle with it.”

Kirke is currently working on her first art book with Dream Baby Press, per The Untitled Magazine. You can find her artwork being sold at Anthropologie and Artsy.

12 of 23

Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus went through a phase where she created memorable 3D sculptures — and showed them at New York Fashion Week and Art Basel.

“I’d love to come to New York again and be able to show my art in an actual gallery,” she told W magazine in July 2017. “That’s something I’d never done before, so I’d love to do it again.”

13 of 23

Halsey

Halsey (who uses she/they pronouns) has been painting as long as she can remember.

“I have been making visual art since I could hold a pen and a brush; it has always been my first love and my favorite artistic medium,” they told Sotheby’s in July 2022. “I moved a lot growing up — I was really lonely, and I often found it easier to express myself through images rather than conversation.”

The award-winning singer has also incorporated painting into their stage performances. During their February 2019 performance of “Eastside” on Saturday Night Live, Halsey sang while painting a self-portrait.

On their Love and Power tour, they created a new work each night in the span of a single song, later auctioning off select pieces to benefit the National Network of Abortion Funds.

14 of 23

Pierce Brosnan

Pierce Brosnan got his start as a graphic designer before turning to acting, but he never gave up on his first love.

“I always set up a studio when I go on location,” he told PEOPLE ahead of selling some of his prints for charity in January 2021, adding, “art saved my life.”

In May 2023, he and his wife, Keely Shaye Brosnan, curated his first solo exhibition, So Many Dreams, which featured 50 of his original paintings.

“It’s a retrospective,” Brosnan told PEOPLE at the time. “It started in ’87, so it’s quite a long journey of painting and putting them in storage and giving them away. And the evolution has become more mature and more necessary in my life as I get older — and my birthday of 70 years on the planet is just in spitting distance, as it were, so we decided to have the show to put it all together.”

15 of 23

Lucy Liu

Lucy Liu has been creating art for years, debuting her first solo exhibition, Unraveling, in N.Y.C. in 1993. She told Artsy in October 2019 that painting gives her a deeper outlet for self-expression and a place where she feels at home. While her medium is primarily painting, she has also explored sculpture, silkscreen and textile art over the years.

In December 2024, during a roundtable discussion at the James Baldwin Centennial edition of MacDowell Presents, Liu reflected on how her reputation as an actress can sometimes overshadow her work as an artist.

“My work will probably not be received well, until probably postmortem,” Liu said. “Because they want to see me in this particular category and in that category only. And so it’s a little bit of a struggle.”

16 of 23

Christie Brinkley

Beauty and the beach: Christie Brinkley incorporates shells into her sketches and other crafting, as she has demonstrated on Instagram and on a tour of her home.

17 of 23

Sylvester Stallone

“I think I’m a much better painter than an actor,” Sylvester Stallone is quoted on his artist’s website as saying. “It’s much more personal, and I’m allowed to just do what I want to do. Quite often in acting, you have to play a certain part, you cannot speak as much as you want to speak.”

Much of his work takes on a boxing theme — fitting for the Rocky star.

18 of 23

Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey uses his bright, impactful art to make political statements or occasionally send a sweet message.

“When I really started painting a lot, I had become so obsessed that there was nowhere to move in my home,” he said in a 2017 documentary short. “Paintings were everywhere. I found myself looking around. It was a really bleak winter in New York, and it was just so depressing. And I think I needed color.”

Of the medium, Carrey added, “I like the independence of it. I love the freedom of it. No one else tells you what you can or can’t do, most of the time. And there’s an immediacy to it.”

19 of 23

Candice Bergen

You have to be in her close circle to score one of Candice Bergen‘s uncanny pet portraits on your designer handbag. However, the Murphy Brown star has an online store where you can get your hands on custom orders as well as her designs on tees and totes.

20 of 23

George W. Bush

Bush has painted everything from world leaders to the White House’s First Dogs. His 2017 book, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, featured his renderings of service members injured in the wars he oversaw as president.

In 2021, the former president released another book, Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, showcasing the portraits and stories of 43 immigrants he has come to know.

21 of 23

John Mellencamp

Rock musician John Mellencamp is also a serious artist, who initially intended to go to art school in N.Y.C. in the 1970s before landing a record deal.

In April 2019, he showcased his large and emotional works in his artist’s loft to Architectural Digest.

“I was very heavily influenced by German expressionism,” he told the publication, noting that his then-fiancée Meg Ryan (who announced their engagement with a drawing of Mellencamp’s) teased him for the moodiness. “Meg likes to tell me, ‘John, your heritage has to be from a small town in Germany called Anger, Germany.’ “

(Former girlfriend Brinkley also displayed his art in her home when they were dating!)

22 of 23

Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour used her time in quarantine to send her bright, bold pieces as cards to seniors in lockdown, as she displayed on Instagram.

Now, the actress and jewelry designer sells original fine art pieces, prints and sculptures on her website.

23 of 23

Johnny Depp

In July 2022, Depp staged his first formal art show, releasing 780 prints of his “Friends & Heroes” portraits (featuring Dylan, Elizabeth Taylor, Al Pacino and Keith Richards) to be sold individually for $3,973 or as a full set for $15,040.

It became the Castle Gallery’s “fastest-selling collection to date,” according to a statement, and earned more than $3.6 million. Most of Depp’s work is available through the Castle Fine Art website.

In October 2024, he debuted A Bunch of Stuff in New York, a collection showcasing personal artifacts and one-of-a-kind pieces pulled from his homes and art studios.

Read the original article on People