For people who live in the public eye, painting can be a way to peacefully remove oneself from the melee of life in the spotlight. From politicians like Winston Churchill to actors like Jim Carrey, the famous have often enjoyed putting paint to canvass (despite often hard-to-stomach results). This month Christie’s auction house shined a spotlight on the artwork one of the most recognizable singers of the disco era, Donna Summer in an online sale that saw not only photos, sequined dresses and ephemera, but also Summers’ paintings take their turn on the auction block. Below, ARTnews would like to introduce you to Donna Summer the visual artist, and eleven other celebrities you may now have known were visual artists.
There’s no question that the Queen of Disco’s music inspired innumerable booties to shake it on the dance floor. But most people don’t know that she was a visual artist as well.
According Love to Love You, Donna Summer, a recently released documentar
y that traces the signer songwriter’s life and career directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano, Donna Summer’s daughter, she first aspired to be an actress. “It’s always strange to me that we put people into these boxes, especially people who become famous,” Sudano told ARTnews. “But really, they are all artists, they’re storytellers who are able to be extremely creative in all these different mediums. It’s just a matter of whether the audience can accept the fact that an artist can be more than one thing. For my mother, she really was an artist in every sense. Her paintings and sketches were just another manifestation of her artistry.”
Sudano recalls her mother’s studio in the garage of their ranch home in Thousand Oaks, California. “There would be multiple canvases up at the same time in the garage. She would start one and while that was drying, she’d move on to another.” At first the paintings were purely for herself, Sudano says, “music was for other people, the painting was really for her own sense of artistry.”
A selection of Summer’s paintings, along with handwritten lyrics, performance outfits and other personal items, were recently on sale at Christie’s. Many of the works hung in the living room and kitchen of her California home when Sudano was growing up. “It’s a little bittersweet, selling these paintings my sister and I grew up with,” Sudano said. “My mother’s fans have been so generous to use over the years it didn’t feel right to keep these things in storage. They are meant to be shared, to be experienced.”