Billy Morrison: From Rock Star to Art Star

For many years, Billy Idol guitarist Billy Morrison has collected valuable at works by Sex Pistols artist Jamie Reed as well as pieces by Shepard Fairey and Banksy, and he has long admired the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. But Morrison didn’t actually dip a brush in a pallet of paint and start to create until 2013.

“The actor Eric Roberts said to me, ‘Don’t ever tell anyone you’ve only been painting for two years,’” the fun-loving, effervescent Morrison reveals. “This was at the VIP opening of my show ‘Dis-Ease’ [an Evening of Fine Art With Billy Morrison at Mouche Gallery on Sept. 2, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California].’ But the honest truth is that I never went to art school; I never went to school, period! I wasn’t in any art classes, and for some reason I have an innate talent of some kind that a lot of people find appealing.”

Morrison painted his first piece, an image of a skull on a tiny canvas, in 2013 to prove to a friend that he couldn’t paint at all. He describes the experience as transcendent, almost otherworldly. “I wasn’t copying anything,” he explains. “But the creative experience was insane. It was just like learning the chords to ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ by the Sex Pistols for the first time. It felt like I’d unleashed demons and angels at the same time, and it came out looking really cool. It’s the same as music. I can’t help but play a guitar and have a certain amount of Mick Ronson or Steve Jones or Billy Duffy in my fingers, because they were integral to me when I was learning to play. So when I pick up a paintbrush, what comes out is very solid, powerful imagery rooted in my many influences.”

When he realized he had a gift for painting, Morrison took advantage of the opportunity. Within weeks, he was creating iconic images of canvases and finding his voice as an artist. He knew he wanted to create pieces that were striking, thought-provoking. and expressed some sort of duality, but it took him a while to find the motifs that would color his work. Well, it was a while by Morrison’s standards. For the rest of the art community, being invited to present a show less than two years into your career is nothing short of extraordinary. Morrison is fully aware that his celebrity as a musician may have helped him get his foot in the door of the art world; however, he alone is responsible for being able to keep it there.

“My head is a wonderful place to live,” Morrison says. “It’s full of creative visions. But beyond that, I love to paint and I really don’t want to paint as a hobby or as a side job to playing guitar. When I do something, I want to do it full-on and well. I have gone to great lengths to try and embrace what I’m doing as fine art and not a bunch of doodles I made at a hotel room and stuck in a frame.”

Morrison was first introduced to art and music when he was 10 years old growing up in working-class Bromley, England. He had already heard the Pistols and the Clash, and one day when he went to buy their latest singles, a clerk told him he should check out David Bowie.

“I said to him, ‘F— that guy, he wears a dress,’” Morrison says. “And the salesman sat me down and educated me about all this stuff. He said, “To understand where punk came from, you need to listen to the New York Dolls, Bowie, and Iggy Pop, and then go even further back to the Velvet Underground and see what Andy Warhol was doing with pop art in the ‘60s. I was lucky to be educated like that.”

Inspired by his new creative outlet, Morrison continued painting throughout 2013, and it wasn’t long before he was attaching symbolism and metaphors to his work. Without even meaning it, he was able to create striking dualities with just a few bold images. He first learned that others saw power in his work when he painted a series of hand grenades.

“It just seemed like a powerful image to me,” he says. “But after I painted 35 hand grenades and sold them all, I realized that a hand grenade is an image of destruction and death, but if you paint it in pastel pink colors it becomes a huge dichotomy and that’s the terminology that the art world wants to hear. That’s all true, but it’s not necessarily present when I start a piece. I don’t sit down and say, ‘I want to paint an incredible dichotomy that embodies the destruction of man.’ That’s just what sort of happens.”

Morrison hopes to follow his “Dis-Ease” exhibition with other shows. At the same time, he’ll release his second solo album God Shaped Hole on Oct. 23. The album features half covers and half originals, including “Gods,” a ballad written with Ozzy Osbourne.

“I have never asked Ozzy for anything, which is possibly why I’m one of his closest friends,” Morrison says. “I see him all the time and we text each other every day. I hadn’t texted him in a few days and he sent me a message saying, “Where the f— are you?” And I said, ‘I’m in the studio working on a solo album. The next text from him was, “Well, I want to sing a song on your solo album.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, that would be great, mate.’ I didn’t think too much about it. But when I saw Sharon [Osbourne] I said, ‘Look, Ozzy’s talking about doing this song with me,’ and she was 100 percent behind it. She said, ‘I fully support the idea.’ When she heard the song she went, ‘This is amazing!’ And she got me the clearances from Epic.“

Check out Billy Morrison’s art and accompanying commentary in the gallery here.