Sharon Stone on her first gallery exhibition in Los Angeles

On a cold, stormy night earlier this month in Los Angeles, heavy rain battered the streets outside as a small crowd thronged the Allouche Gallery. Heads craned to see the creator of the large paintings hanging on the walls – many of which were landscapes bordering on abstraction and rather moody themselves. The entertainer, actress Sharon Stone, held court in the gallery’s first room, a striking figure in a black suit accented with magenta ruffled ruching.

The show, Loss (until April 7), is the first solo gallery exhibition for Stone, who took up painting – almost feverishly – during the Covid-19 shutdowns. The title refers to all kinds of loss, she says, including loss. She had become a household name for Primary instinct (1992), in which she played an attractive psycho-killer, but then found herself trapped in Hollywood stereotypes. She feels that Hollywood, which once embraced her, has now abandoned her. “I lost my family – my movie family – I lost my personal family, many of my family died,” she says. “My brother had a heart attack and his 11 month old son died of crib death; my godmother is dead and my grandmother is dead.

Artistic creation has long been part of his life. As a child, she received painting lessons from her aunt Vonne, who had studied painting and literature in college. Later, Stone also studied these two subjects at the University of Edinboro in Pennsylvania, his home state. But when her acting career took off, she didn’t have time to make art, although she says some of her favorite memories during those turbulent years were visiting “museums around the world whole when they are closed, which was an amazing experience”.

When the pandemic started, Stone found herself stuck at home like everyone else. A friend overheard her saying she wanted to paint again and sent her a paint-by-numbers kit for adults. “I bought real brushes and started to take back control, my brush movements,” she says. “I painted and painted and painted and found myself. I found my heart. I found my center. At first she painted in her bedroom, but then she set up a studio on her property and now paints every day she can.

In Allouche, Stone’s canvases are hung in three rooms, with the large painting which gives its name to the exhibition, Loss (2023), an eight-foot-tall acrylic-on-canvas composition, in a passageway. Against a black background are winding coils of translucent tubing, much like the skins that snakes shed; pink, yellow and blue circles dot the surface. River (2022) is another work dear to the artist, as it was made after the death of his 11-month-old nephew. In the foreground, tall reeds and a river winding in the distance towards a sky in which several red moons float. “I did this painting about our trip,” she says, “and her trip.”

For decades, Stone says, people told him to “stay in your lane.” It doesn’t suit him well. “How do you know it’s not my path?” How do you know that painting is not my true path? »

• Sharon Stone: moultinguntil April 7, Allouche Gallery, Culver City, Los Angeles