Comedy king Jim Carrey has been away from the big screen for a long time. According to a new documentary, he has been spending his time painting. In Jim Carrey: I Needed Colour, directed by David Bushell, Carrey is seen as a sincere but reclusive painter. He is filmed at his house, which is filled with canvases.

“When I really started painting a lot, I had become so obsessed that there was nowhere to move in my home,” Carrey says in a voiceover. It began on a bleak winter day in New York, when he looked around and it got depressing for him. It was then “I think I needed colour”, Carrey said.

Carrey’s last major release was Dumb and Dumber To (2014), the sequel to one of his career’s biggest hits. The movie was critically panned and performed badly at the box office, as have most of his releases in the last seven years.

Carrey was cast against type as a silent hermit in his last big-screen appearance in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch (2017). While the film generated interest in film festivals, Carrey stayed away from promotional activities related to the film.

Jim Carrey: I Needed Colour. Courtesy: Some Kind Of Garden Media.

The push to begin painting came six years ago when he was trying to mend a broken heart. Among his favoured subjects: Jesus Christ. “The energy that surrounds Jesus is electric,” he says in the film. “The paintings of Jesus are really my desire to convey Christ consciousness.” Painting frees the actor – “Free from the future, free from past, free from regret, free from worry.”

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Jim Carrey: I Needed Colour.