15 Famous Musicians Who Moonlight As Visual Artists

Image via Complex Original

Sample Work: Teaser And The Fire Cat, 1971

Cat Stevens set sights on being a famous artist at a young age, a goal that even led him to Hammersmith College in the 1960s, where he planned to study art. His love for creating drawings and sketches eventually took a supporting role to writing songs, and as they say, "the rest is history." Stevens used his artistic skills to create album art, cartoons and even an illustrated children's book, The Teaser and the Firecat, which was released in 1971.

Sample Work: Josephine Baker

A few years before his death, Miles Davis professed art is "like therapy for me, and it keeps my mind occupied with something when I'm not playing music." As an artist, Davis worked predominantly in pencil and paint, and his style ranged from figurative to abstract.  Canvases featured recurring themes, such as intertwined androgynous figures and African tribal art. 

Sample Work: Beggar's Banquet, 1990

Ronnie Wood was born into a artistic family, with his father and brothers all studying either music or art. Wood himself received formal art training at Ealing College of Art, and despite finding music as his primary career, he has continued to paint throughout his life. His works on canvas regularly feature members of the Rolling Stones, other musicians, and celebrities. Occasionally, there are also more intimate portraits of family and home life. 50 of Wood's paintings will be on display in his exhibit Faces, Time and Places through the end of June at Broome Street Gallery in New York City.

Sample Work: Birth Of A Nation, 2006-2009

John Cougar Mellencamp started painting in the late 1980s in the garage of his Indiana home. In interviews, he has expressed that in his life off the road as a musician, painting has provided a cushion for the fall back to normality. Politics and religion are recurring themes in his pieces, and critics have likened his use of dark colors and shadows to the style of  French and German Expressionists.  In 1998 he published a book, Mellencamp: Paintings and Reflections and his newest exhibit, Nothing Like I Planned: The Art of John Mellencamp, features 49 paintings and runs through June at the Tennessee State Museum.

Sample Work: DHead XXVIII..XXV, 1995-1996

It is widely known that David Bowie has also cultivated a very artistic career. From his work in performance arts as a musician, mime, and as an avant-garde actor, to his creations on canvas and in sculpture, Bowie has created a very strong presence across the world of culture and arts. He has played both reviewer and artist, writing for Modern Painter Magazine in the 1990s, and interviewing such artists as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. He participated in one of the greatest art history hoax's of all time, inventing a forgotten 20th-century American artist, Nat Tate, with a colleague at Modern Painter, and fooling the global art world in 1998. In addition, Bowie's own artwork has been featured in galleries in the US, England, and Switzerland as auctioned off for charitable causes.

Sample Work: The Enabler, 2002

In 1999, Marilyn Manson identified himself a watercolor painter, and noted that his first sales were to drug dealers. The public finally got a taste of his art at a 2002 show in Los Angeles, The Golden Age of Grotesque. While the paintings were less well received by critics than by drug dealers, Manson continued to paint, and even named himself part of a self-created art movement: Celebritarian Corporation. Since then, his art has been exhibited in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna.

Sample Work: Untitled, 2010

Despite a successful musical career, Joseph Arthur describes art as his primary passion. Arthur, who often combines both by painting while performing onstage, explains that he makes "art which reveals secret selves or secrets of the self."  He has received numerous accolades for his artwork, including a Grammy nomination for "Best Recording Package" for his 1999 album Vacancy. Arthur's paintings, exhibit information, and videos of live onstage painting are available on Museum of Modern Arthur.

Sample Work: Self-Portrait, 1971

Patti Smith began exploring the visual arts in the 1960s. She was the subject of many of her dear friend Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs and for many years later, Smith favored the Polaroid Land 250 camera that Mapplethorpe shot with in his early days. In 2008,  the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris hosted an exhibit of Smith's artwork created between 1967 and 2007. For Smith, already a well-known performer and poet, the exhibition sought to highlight connections in her artistic and spiritual life through drawings, photographs and film. 

Sample Work: Monk, 2009

Like much of his time as a musician, Bob Dylan has had a successful yet controversial career as a painter. In 1994, he published a set of works entitled Drawn Blank, created while on tour in the US, Europe, and Asia. These pieces were re-worked and exhibited in several European galleries. His latest work, however, came under public scrutiny in 2011 when many of his paintings were exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. The paintings, which aimed to provide a "visual journal" of his travels through Asia, portrayed extreme likeness to famous photographs by other artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Léon Busy. In response to inquiries about his inspiration, Dylan replied that he paints "mostly from real life."

Sample Work: Pinto's in the Sky with Desert Poppy, 1991

Describing the experience of painting, McCartney explains, “I basically like to apply paint onto canvas. I just like the act of it — I make it up as I go along. I really don’t analyze them that much.” McCartney's admiration for artists began in his early teens, and he even won awards for his drawings of a local church. His career stopped there, forever, as he felt that only those who had acquired a proper art degree could actually paint.  It wasn't until thirty years later that he picked the brush back up and rekindled his love affair with the canvas. Today he has created hundreds of paintings, evocative of Abstract Expressionism and the work of William de Kooning. He has also published a book, Paul McCartney: Paintings.

Sample Work: 9 Portraits

John Lennon once said, "if art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life, and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness." Before he was a Beatle, Lennon had set his sights on art.  He completed three years at the Liverpool Art Institute prior to leaving a professional career in art behind to focus on music. Despite this, he continued to draw throughout his life, and even compiled lithographs to be shown and sold in galleries. 

Sample Work: Dude War, 2009

Kim Gordon, most famous for her role as a singer and bassist with Sonic Youth, also moonlights as an artist and curator. She graduated from the Otis College of Art & Design in 1977, and took her degree to New York City where she spent much of the early 80s writing for Artforum Magazine and creating her own installations. When describing the range of her artistic life Gordon explains that she is more disciplined in the visual arts and more "primitive" as a musician. Her paintings and watercolors have been exhibited in various galleries around the world and created visual effects for movies such as V for Vendetta and Alexander.  In the recent past, she has also published two books chronicling both her life onstage and as a visual artist.

Sample Work: No Woman No Ticket No Cry, 2007

n late 2009, Ryan Adams became Morrison Hotel Gallery's "Artist in Residence" in New York City. Painting is a side hobby Adams has nurtured for years, and the exhibit featured works from prior series and pieces created at the gallery in the two weeks leading up to the show. Many paintings in the show, with titles such as Statue Of Fucking Liberty and Bums in the Park, were also auctioned off, with proceeds going to non-profits that support ending homelessness and AIDS.

Sample Work: Brotherhood, 1995

Anthony Bennedetto, better known as Tony Bennett, studied at the School of Industrial Arts. Famed for his landscapes and portraits, Bennett has been painting for over half a century. Two books of his artwork are published, and four works have places in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Portrait Gallery. In his 2007 book, Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art & Music, Bennett described the creative process as a means to keep it real — "When you're at the canvas, you're alone. This is your own story. And when you're painting, you're thinking about your own story. Just you."

Sample Work: Table Laurel Canyon I., 1969

Joni Mitchell once said, "I'm a painter first, and a musician second." With a range that spans from figurative to abstract styles, she notes both Cezanne and Van Gogh as past influences. Many will recognize the paintings from her album covers such as Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon to Both Sides Now. Having dabbled in art since childhood, Mitchell became more serious about art in the late 70s and began exhibiting her work over ten years ago.