London’s Scream gallery will soon be home to the music industry’s greatest legends’ artwork, some of which has never been seen before. Frank Sinatra, for example, painted himself as a cheerless, unkempt clown while coping with a divorce from his third wife, actress Ava Gardner. The self-portrait, which will be available this month for £25,000, is just one of more than 30 pieces, ranging from paintings to drawings to sketches, featured in the Original Artwork by Pop Culture Artists exhibition. The show, set to open on September 24, also includes works from Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Kurt Cobain. Jamie Wood, who runs the Scream gallery, said that he hoped the exhibition would establish these prominent musicians as “great visual artists in their own rights” due to the art world’s usual scorn of non-artist celebrities entering that realm. Wood assures that the 30-plus works on display “actually show so much more emotion than we see in much contemporary art these days, because they are by multifaceted artists whose creativity extends beyond just one dimension.”
Read it at The Telegraph
