After all these years, waiting in the wings of the stage as 100,000 people scream their lungs out eagerly awaiting his performance brings no butterflies for Paul Stanley. As a member of Kiss, the rocker has been dealing with thousands of screaming fans for more than 40 years, a stark contrast to the art galleries where he can now be found showcasing his work as a painter.
Stanley, aka “Starchild” when he’s on stage with Kiss, has been painting for almost 20 years and has been displaying his work in galleries across the country, including, for the last 10 years, Wentworth Gallery. Stanley is set to make special appearances in the Metro-D.C. area at Wentworth Gallery locations in Bethesda, Maryland’s Westfield Montgomery Mall on Sept. 21 and Tysons Galleria on Sept. 22 from 6-9 p.m. However, it wasn’t always Stanley’s desire to share his work with others.
“I did it purely for myself and purely as an outlet, and never did it with the intention of anybody seeing the pieces, but I love being creative,” Stanley says. “Lo and behold, when I put a few pieces up in my house people would ask me ‘Who did them?’ They weren’t telling me because they wanted me to take them down.”
Stanley did try at times to paint while on tour, but he found the experience disjointed and prefers to paint Monday through Friday when he’s at home. While both are acts of creation, he finds performing music and painting give him different experiences.
“[Painting] is very different than writing songs because there’s really no structure to it,” he says. “It’s a matter of balance, but it’s much more free, it’s much more free-formed in the sense that you’re free to use whatever colors you want and you’re free to make any kind of composition you want, and it’s just a matter of whether it works or not.”
Like with his experience on stage, the more Stanley hung his work in galleries and saw the positive response from patrons, the more confident in his work he became. Any potential nerves have been replaced with excitement.
“It’s tremendously gratifying to see that once again if I do something that pleases me, it pleases someone else,” he says.
