Long before becoming a 1980s pop icon, Boy George dreamed of being an artist—the paintbrush and canvas kind. This was back in his troublesome schoolboy days, a time when George Alan O’Dowd received the frequent encouragements of his art teacher. Art was, Boy George has said, “the only place where I was able to be self-indulgent and free.”
As a teenager, Boy George channeled these feelings of liberated self-indulgence into drawing pictures of his favorite musical figures, most of all, David Bowie. As an adult who has met quite a few famous people, he continued the habit and has now released a series of works that portray the likes of Bowie, Madonna, Prince, and himself.
The collection is called “Fame,” for obvious reasons. Boy George said each of his icons perceive fame differently and that “there is no ‘right way’ to do it,” which is good to know. Artistically, what this amounts to is Boy George presenting his chosen celebrities in iconic outfits—their adopted alter egos. The works are bright, flat, and boldly outlined with black, a tendency compared (not unfairly) to his signature eye penciling. They look as though they were composed on a digital tablet.
Boy George, Colour By Numbers (2024). Photo: Castle Fine Art.
In “Fame,” Madonna appears donning an eyepatch, the accessory of choice for Madame X, her secret agent, globe-trotting, pop star persona back in 2019. This portrait comes in spite of the pair’s allegedly acrimonious relationship, though Boy George noted that “you don’t have to like someone to paint them.”
In Purple Reign, Prince sports his famous purple trench coat, albeit one made symmetrical and without texture. Yamamoto takes its name from the Japanese fashion designer who crafted some of Bowie’s most iconic stage outfits, including the bodysuit wore on the Ziggy Stardust tour. In his hand, Bowie seems vague and confused.
Boy George with his paintings from his “Fame” series. Photo: courtesy Castle Fine Art.
As for his self-portrait, Boy George depicts himself in the early days of fame, a time when he was “regularly feeling grumpy.” This is not the most obvious emotion emanating from Colour by Numbers, which also the name of Culture Club’s 1983 album. It shows him close-up and cartoonish, his eye a star, his nose some Picasso abstraction, his head encircled with strands of hair—are they braids or dreadlocks? It’s a reclamation, he said: “I was an invention, so it’s easy to draw that person because it’s so set in stone.”
Elsewhere, there is a series of acrylic works that call up Boy George’s days in the New York club scene of the mid-’80s. One celebrates how his “punk DIY” aesthetic is comparable to drag, another recalls the bold outfits he sported to gain entry to hot clubs, and a third is a portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who, according to the press release “often borrowed $300 from Boy George but tragically passed away in 1988 before repaying him.”
Boy George, Basquiat 03 (2024). Photo: Castle Fine Art.
The collection arrives courtesy of Castle Fine Art, a gallery with a strong track record of platforming the painterly leanings of celebrities including Johnny Depp, Bob Dylan, and Billy Connolly. Boy George’s Fame prints have been released in editions of 195 with each sold at £1,950 ($2,275).