“I found myself looking around at one point, at a real bleak winter in New York,” says Jim Carrey, “And it was just so depressing. And I think I needed colour.”
Jim Carrey, the comedian and actor in works like the Ace Venture films and more interesting, serious works like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is the subject of a mini-documentary on Vimeo, entitled Jim Carrey: I Needed Colour.
In the video, Carrey is shown creating various forms of fine art, from colourful, life-sized paintings to small sculptures, working until the early hours of dawn.
“You can tell what I love by the colour of the paintings,” he says. “You can tell my inner life by the darkness in some of them. You can tell what I…want by the brightness in some of them.”
Later, reflecting, he says, you can’t tell the meaning a painting has for an artist for a little while. “You think you do. Most of the time I start-out with a plan. But then a year later, I’ll realise that the painting was telling me what I needed to know about myself a year before.”
Carrey starting painting six years ago, “to heal a broken heart.” (The actor’s relationship with actress Jenny McCarthy had ended.) "When you're falling in love, you're floating, weightless," Carrey says, over footage of him painting a heart bursting into fire, like a meteor. "But when you lose that love, you have to reenter the atmosphere and it can get pretty rough, because you're just bouncing off one molecule and onto the next, rippin' through them at such a pace that they just ignite and explode, until you find another heart that's doing the same thing, has landed and cooled, and then you start to float again."
"I think what makes someone an artist is they make models of their inner life," Carrey adds. "They make something come into physical being that is inspired by their emotions or their needs or what they feel the audience needs."
It’s a beautiful documentary; give it a watch here.
Jim Carrey: I Needed Color from SGG on Vimeo.
