Paul Stanley – singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the theatrical rock group Kiss – has been known as a rock and roll artist for years. However with his latest endeavor, that title has taken on a whole new meaning.
Last year Stanley’s paintings, not his music, accounted for over $2 million in sales.
Stanley regularly appears at exhibitions of his paintings at various Wentworth Gallery locations across the country.
Stanley, 57, had been an art major at the prestigious High School of Music and Art in New York City. As a teenager, music became his passion, but he never abandoned his love of visual art. Over the years as a member of Kiss, he has expressed his visual creativity at photo shoots, and in stage or album cover designs.
In 2000, while going through a divorce from his first wife, he started painting as a form of personal therapy.
“I turned to painting as a means of self-expression,” Stanley said in a telephone interview. “But what I’ve always found is that when I do something that pleases me, it usually finds an audience and takes on a life of its own.”
His first formal showing was in 2005. To date, he has completed approximately 50 pieces. His work is priced at between $1,000 for a print, to $60,000 for an original acrylic painting.
Stanley admits that his rock star status helped jump start his career as an artist.
“The truth is, my success allowed me to get my foot in the door,” he says. “But ultimately you’re going to be judged on your work. No one is going to buy one of my paintings because they like the way I sing ‘Love Gun.’”
Stanley says he hopes that his name recognition will attract people to exhibitions and museums who would otherwise feel out of place in an art gallery.
“I believe that everybody on the street should enjoy art in a way that perhaps they’re not doing because they’re intimidated by this notion that your opinion has to be educated for it to be valid,” Stanley says. “That’s absurd, because the truth of the matter is that a work of art is valid because you like it. You don’t have to know the reasons why you like a painting, anymore than you have to know why you like a hamburger.”
Most of Stanley’s paintings are bold, stream of conscience abstracts combining basic shapes with a variety of colors and textures. Critics have compared his style to that of Peter Max and LeRoy Neiman.
“The exciting for me is that this success has come so quickly that people actually get to see me develop [as an artist] in front of them,” Stanley says. “I really am a work in progress.”
Kiss is also still going strong. The band recently celebrated its 35th anniversary with it’s most successful tour of Europe ever, playing 30 shows to over a half-million people. The band is preparing for a summer 2009 U.S. tour, and has also begun working on a new studio album, its first since 1998’s Psycho Circus.
Stanley says the two careers can easily co-exist. “I don't bring guitars into my painting studio, and I don't bring paintbrushes on stage,” he says.
The only obvious tie-in between the Queens, New York native’s music and art are four portraits Stanley painted of the Kiss band members in their famous make-up. Stanley says he did it a “a tip-of-the-hat to the fans.”
Ironically, and much to Stanley’s delight, the Kiss portraits are the least popular in the collection. To Stanley, it’s further confirmation that the people acquiring his art are not acquiring it simply because of its Kiss connection.
In many ways, painting now provides the creative outlet that music once did for Stanley as a teenager.
“I find the great thing about art is that it’s very solitary,” he says. “It’s something you do by yourself without an audience. In music, the journey has been much longer. I think I’ve established my musical identity. In art, I’m still finding my way. There’s a newness to it that’s very exciting.”
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