Rob Zombie Joins a Long Tradition
of Musicians Who Paint
Morrison Gallery called him the only artist to find success in both music and film. The bigger story is less about being first and more about the good company he's keeping.
This past October, Morrison Gallery in Kent, Connecticut opened What Lurks on Channel X?, the first gallery exhibition of paintings by Rob Zombie, the musician and filmmaker known for The Devil's Rejects, Halloween, and a discography built on horror movie samples and shock rock theater. The gallery's own promotional language called him the only artist to experience unprecedented success in both music and film. That is the kind of line a press release reaches for when it wants a headline. It is also not the interesting claim available here. The interesting claim is that Zombie's exhibition puts him in the company of a lineage stretching back over half a century, musicians who took their visual art seriously enough to be taken seriously by the people who decide what counts as serious.
Inside "What Lurks on Channel X?"
at Morrison Gallery
The show ran eighteen large scale paintings built from a decade of work, a wall of pop culture faces colliding with each other. Bela Lugosi shares space with Charles Manson. Archie Comics characters sit near classic film comedians. The Hartford Courant's review took the work seriously enough to place it inside real art history rather than treating it as a curiosity, drawing lines to Pop Art, to the underground comix tradition of Gary Panter and Mark Newgarden, and to the political photomontage John Heartfield built in Weimar Germany. That last comparison is worth a small correction. Heartfield's most famous anti fascist photomontages date to the 1930s, not the 1910s as the review states, work he made for the magazine AIZ after the Nazi party's rise rather than during the First World War. The correction does not weaken the comparison. If anything, it sharpens it. Heartfield was making political collage under real threat, and the throughline from wartime propaganda imagery to pop culture collage is exactly the kind of connection serious criticism is supposed to draw.
I was in Kent for the show, and the connection between Zombie's films and his paintings was hard to miss in person. The gallery's opening reception on October 25th drew a crowd, rock and roll fans came in from across southern New England and New York, and the room was packed. Six days later, on Halloween evening, Morrison Gallery had a second surprise waiting, only announced on Instagram that same week: an outdoor screening of The Munsters, with Rob Zombie and his wife, actress Sheri Moon Zombie, in attendance. The choice of film made practical sense on its face. The Munsters carries a PG rating, which made it the only one of Zombie's features that could reasonably run in a public setting. I suspect the quiet announcement was deliberate too, a way to keep a family-friendly movie night small and local after a packed, high-profile opening, though that's my own read on it rather than anything the gallery said outright. Watching the film that night, the connection to the paintings inside the gallery wasn't just practical. The Munsters' bright, candy-colored palette and its irreverent, cartoonish tone matched the work on the walls closely, and both read as the same kind of homage, a grown man's tribute to the television and movies he grew up watching obsessively as a kid.
What the Courant review did not do, and what the gallery's own language actively worked against, is put Zombie in conversation with the other musicians who have walked this same path. That comparison falls into three distinct shapes, and Zombie's show sits differently against each one.
The Gallery's Sleight of Hand:
Music, Film, and Painting
Morrison Gallery's line deserves a second look, and honestly, a little credit. The exhibition on the walls is a painting show, but the promotional language reached past it, calling Zombie the only artist to find success in both music and film. That's a smart piece of copywriting. Painting isn't mentioned in the claim at all. The sentence borrows the credibility of one career, film, to boost curiosity about a different one, painting, and folds both into a single confident line. It's worth pulling apart, and worth taking on its own terms, because there is a defensible version of it once the two claims are separated.
Musicians who act in movies is not a small tradition to begin with. Will Smith built an entire film career out of a music career. Cher and Frank Sinatra both won Academy Awards for acting. Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah, Lady Gaga, and David Bowie himself all crossed from music into acting credits. That list runs long, which makes "unprecedented" a hard claim to defend if acting is the standard.
But Zombie's film career is a narrower and more specific claim than acting, and a genuinely rarer one. He is a writer and director, credited on the screenplay and behind the camera for House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, and both of his Halloween films, among others. That's a different bar than showing up in front of a camera, and it has real company of its own. RZA wrote, directed, scored, and starred in The Man with the Iron Fists, a 2012 martial arts feature he built after Quentin Tarantino gave him an informal education in filmmaking during the scoring sessions for Kill Bill. David Byrne wrote and directed True Stories, a 1986 feature that struggled commercially on release and has since been reclaimed by the Criterion Collection as a genuine, singular piece of American filmmaking. Held next to those two, Zombie's writing and directing career looks less like an anomaly and more like the same pattern the painting lineage already shows: rare, but not unprecedented, and worth naming accurately rather than loosely.
Full Defection:
The Painter Who Left Music Behind
Don Van Vliet spent the 1960s and 70s recording as Captain Beefheart, building thirteen albums of some of the most uncompromising music American rock ever produced. In the early 1980s he stopped. Not slowed down, stopped, walking away from performance entirely to paint full time. The transition was not a hobby finding an audience. By the mid 1980s he was represented by Michael Werner Gallery, the same gallery that represents Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck, and his paintings have since been compared by critics to de Kooning, Kline, and Rothko. Mary Boone gave him his first solo show. Anton Kern represented him in New York. This is not a musician's side project getting indulged by an admiring art world. This is four decades of an actual painting career, built by someone who quit music to have it.
Parallel Credibility:
Staying in Both Worlds
Not every musician who takes painting seriously leaves music to do it. David Bowie never stopped recording, but he built real standing inside the art world running alongside his music career. For nine years he sat on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine, conducting interviews with artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and reviewing exhibitions as a critic in his own right, work chronicled in detail by Sotheby's when his personal collection went to auction. He held solo painting exhibitions of his own work starting in 1995. None of that replaced his music. It ran beside it.
Joni Mitchell's relationship to painting runs even deeper. She trained formally in art school before her music career took over, and she has said plainly, in her own words on her website, "I'm a painter first, and a musician second." Her paintings appear on most of her album covers, including a 1995 self portrait as a bandaged Van Gogh. Unlike Zombie's public unveiling, most of Mitchell's visual art has stayed almost entirely private, viewable mainly through her own website rather than gallery walls. She is proof that a musician can hold painting as a primary identity without ever needing a public exhibition to validate it.
Contested Reception:
When Critics Push Back
Not every comparison in this lineage is flattering, and that matters as much as the successes. Ronnie Wood trained at Ealing Art College before he ever joined a band, studying alongside future musicians Pete Townshend and Freddie Mercury, and he has painted continuously through six decades in the Rolling Stones, the Faces, and the Jeff Beck Group. His work has been the subject of a retrospective at Sao Paulo's Museum of Modern Art. It has also drawn real skepticism from serious critics. Guardian critic Jonathan Jones has argued that a rock star's art can never be fully separated from the fame that gets it hung on a wall in the first place. Wood's case shows this tradition is not a rubber stamp. Real training and museum history do not guarantee critical respect, and that skepticism is part of what makes the tradition worth taking seriously rather than treating as automatic validation.
The Newest Name in the Room:
Kid Cudi's Paris Debut
The tradition is not a closed historical chapter. This past January, Kid Cudi, one of the defining voices in hip hop and alt rap for two decades, opened his first solo painting exhibition, Echoes of the Past, at Ruttkowski;68 gallery in Paris. He shows under the name Scotty Ramon, his own first and middle names, a deliberate separation from his stage persona that echoes the same instinct Van Vliet had decades earlier, treating painting as its own identity rather than a celebrity side project. He picked up a paintbrush a little over a year before the show opened and has already produced dozens more paintings beyond the ten on display. The verdict on his work is still being written. That is exactly the point. This tradition did not end with the artists who already have museum retrospectives. It is still adding names.
What This Means for
"What Lurks on Channel X?"
None of this settles whether Zombie's paintings are good. That question deserves its own honest answer, not a borrowed one, and it is a different question from the one the gallery's language raised. What this history does settle is the frame. Zombie is not a novelty walking into uncharted territory. He is the newest name in a real lineage that runs from a trailer in the Mojave Desert to a Paris gallery earlier this year, a lineage that includes total career reinventions, careers run in parallel, and plenty of skepticism along the way. The honest version of Morrison Gallery's claim was sitting right there the whole time, and it turns out to be more interesting than the marketing language it was traded for. Being part of a fifty year conversation is a better story than being unprecedented. It just requires knowing the conversation exists.
Full disclosure: I saw White Zombie with Pantera at Roseland Ballroom. My memory is that it was 1995, but it could have been a year earlier or later. I was Rob Zombie a few years at the same venue. I am a fan of Rob Zombie's music. I saw the show at Morrison Gallery and think the paintings are good; a combination of fun train-of-thought assemblage and technical ability. Each of the large paintings is an emersion into a world that continues the long tradition of painting's history.
Where This Comes From
For more on the movements and artists referenced here, my course modules go deeper:
History of Photography — 13 modules covering photography from 1839 through the smartphone era, including the photomontage tradition Heartfield worked in
Modern Art — 6 modules covering art from 1850 to the present, including Pop Art and the postwar movements referenced above
Further Reading
Hartford Courant, "Rock star's first art exhibit a bright, brash pop culture provocation at CT gallery" — courant.com
Morrison Gallery, "Rob Zombie: What Lurks on Channel X?" exhibition overview — morrisongallery.com. Note: this is the gallery's own promotional page and the original source of the "unprecedented success" language discussed above, not independent reporting.
Litchfield Magazine, "Halloween with Rob & Sheri Zombie" — litchfieldmagazine.com
Filmmaker Magazine, "RZA on The Man with the Iron Fists" — filmmakermagazine.com
Criterion Collection, "True Stories (1986)" — criterion.com
Artnet, "Don Van Vliet" artist page — artnet.com
Sotheby's, "Bowie/Collector" — sothebys.com
Joni Mitchell, "Paintings" — jonimitchell.com
Artnet News, "Rolling Stones Guitarist Ronnie Wood Is Also an Artist, But His Amateur Paintings Can't Get No Satisfaction From Critics" — news.artnet.com
Artnet News, "Kid Cudi on Painting His Way Out of Darkness" — news.artnet.com
Online Art Lessons, "15 Famous Musicians Who Also Paint" — a light, casual roundup rather than critical writing, a fun rabbit hole for readers who want more names without a deep dive — onlineartlessons.com