Pierce Brosnan Is Selling Prints of His Pop Art-Inspired 'Earplugs' Painting

If you have ever dreamed of having a painting by a former James Bond in your home, today has brought great news for you. If you have ever wanted that painting to be a detailed diagram of an ear plug being shoved deep into an ear canal, even better: Pierce Brosnan is selling silkscreen prints of exactly that. The actor and artist has partnered with Los Angeles art gallery Seasons to sell 100 signed, limited edition silkscreens of his piece Earplugs, which open for pre-order tomorrow, as Variety reported. 

In mid-December, Brosnan posted to Instagram a black-and-white picture of himself next to the original work in 1995 at Leavesden Studios in southeast England, where The Phantom Menace and the Harry Potter films were eventually filmed. He painted Earplugs during breaks while filming Golden Eye, inspired by both pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and the instructional illustration on the back of the ear plug packet he received while shooting loud action sequences, Brosnan explained in the caption. Brosnan's art has a history that goes back even further.

An alumni of London's Central St Martins College of Art and Design, Brosnan has been painting since 1987. That year, his late wife and actress Cassandra Harris was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and Brosnan painted his first work, Dark Night amid that "painful time," explains his website. 

The descriptions on his other paintings give more insight into his family situation; a portrait of Cassie from 1991 recalls a difficult prognosis. Harris died from ovarian cancer in 1991; their daughter, Charlotte, died of the same disease in 2013. Amid loss, Brosnan has continued to use painting to cope, telling The Guardian in 2018, "I had been painting out of pain, and now the pain sometimes comes through in color." His work is marked by bright colors and portraits, usually made using acrylic paint on canvas. 

Brosnan had 153 paintings as of 2018—the most notable of those being a Bob Dylan portrait that sold for $1.4 million to Ukrainian billionaire Marina Acton at that year's amfAR Cinema Against AIDS event. (The year before, Acton bought Kim and Kanye's former Bel Air mansion for $17.8 million, setting a record for the most expensive home sale in Bel-Air Crest.)

As it turns out, Earplugs is much more than just a painting of earplugs. The prints can be pre-ordered at Seasons LA beginning tomorrow.