IRISH star Pierce Brosnan has announced plans to showcase his personal artwork in his first-ever art exhibition later this year.

The 68-year-old actor took to Instagram to make the announcement and said that he had been painting since 1987. “I do ponder at times whether to show the work slowly practiced since one dark night in 1987 when I first began to paint,” Brosnan said in a post on Instagram.

He said that his wife Keely Shay-Smith convinced him to showcase his artwork by asking him “if not now, when?”

Consequently, the superstar said he would be putting his work on display in Los Angeles before the end of the year.  In a previous interview with Origin Magazine, he said he paints figurative and landscape paintings. “It’s all in my own kind of style. I’m self-taught,” Brosnan said in the interview.

In 2018, Brosnan donated his portrait of Bob Dylan to a charity event in Cannes aiming to raise money and awareness for AIDS treatment. The portrait ultimately fetched US$1.4 million at the 25th Annual Gala amFAR’s Cinema Against AIDS auction.

Brosnan also said he plans to sell some of his personal works in the near future. “Time to let them go,” he said in the Instagram post.

An Instagram user reacted to the exciting announcement, “There’ll always be critics. As an actor, you are steeled. As an artist, you’re authentic. So let them say what they will; exhibit and enjoy the sharing of your work!”

In an interview with People early this year, Brosnan shared how he left school “with nothing but a cardboard folder of drawings and paintings.” He decided to be a painter and began training in commercial illustration at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. “Art saved my life. I managed to get a job, and I wanted to be a graphic artist. But I discovered acting three years into working at this studio, and that was it, the tide turned.”

Brosnan returned to painting after the tables turned. He abandoned art for acting; he found comfort in artistic expression during his first wife, Cassandra Harris’ battle with cancer in 1987. “It really came to light out of a very hard time in my life,” he says. “I turned to the world of painting and that gave me a great sense of comfort.”

Brosnan joins the long list of celebrities who paint on the side to channel their creativity, including Anthony Hopkins, Sylvester Stallone, Britney Spears, Johnny Depp and Miley Cyrus.

During his time on the set of his first film, “GoldenEye,” he told People that “the prop master would hand out these packets of earplugs because of the rifles and the explosions. I found the infographic on the back to be steadily pleasing and compositionally intriguing.”(SD-Agencies)