Sylvester Stallone Painted Rocky Before He Wrote Him

Long before "Rocky" was a script, it was a painting. Sylvester Stallone sold small paintings for five dollars apiece to cover his bus fare to school, and one canvas he made years later turned out to be the blueprint for the most famous underdog in movie history.

A Character Painted Before He Was Written

In 1975, Stallone was a broke actor mostly getting cast as a movie thug. Instead of writing first, he picked up a brush. He made a self-portrait of a battered, hopeful boxer and titled it "Finding Rocky." The Rocky script did not exist yet. Stallone has said he needed to see the character's face before he could put him into words.

The Screwdriver Detail

To get the sadness in the eyes right, Stallone put down the paintbrush and picked up a screwdriver, carving the eyes directly into the canvas. That mixed-media self-portrait became the centerpiece of his later exhibitions, hung as the piece that started it all.

Decades of Painting in Private

Stallone kept painting through his entire acting career, with work dating back to the late 1960s. For decades almost none of it was shown publicly. He had a two-week museum solo show in Nice, France in 2015 called "Real Love," alongside earlier stops at a gallery in Saint-Moritz and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. But his full body of work stayed largely out of view.

Germany Gives Him the Full Retrospective

That changed in December 2021, when the Osthaus Museum Hagen in Germany opened "Sylvester Stallone: The Magic of Being," his full museum retrospective. The show ran through February 2022 and gathered nearly 50 canvases spanning his entire painting career, timed to coincide with his 75th birthday. Several of the works on display were Rocky and Rambo themed, tracing the characters back to the paintings that shaped them.

The actor who once sold his own paintings for five dollars just to get to school ended up with an entire museum wing built around his art, all because he had to paint Rocky before he could write him.