By JOHN ROGERS

Associated Press Writer

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — When it comes to glam rock stars, Paul Stanley always could wield that makeup brush with the best of them.

So maybe it shouldn't have come as a surprise that the Kiss guitarist, first introduced to the world with his face covered in white makeup, his lips painted bright red, a dark star over his right eye, would someday set aside that guitar long enough to pour his soul into oil on canvas.

Still, Stanley says he was the most surprised guy on the planet when he, an art-class washout from New York City's High School of Music and Art, suddenly began to make the transition from guitar god to serious painter eight years ago.

"I managed to fail art. Which is, you know, astonishing," he says with a sly smile as he sits in an oversized easy chair in his home studio. "Nobody fails art at that school."

How he managed to do so seems surprising when one casts a glance around Stanley's studio, which sits just behind his house atop a brush-covered, mansion-dotted hillside overlooking Los Angeles. There, basking in the bright light that streams in from the windows are a dozen or more high-resolution scans of some of his original works.

Large in scale and filled with bright color, they range from the abstract to the surreal to the figurative. Some of them, such as "God of Thunder" and "Love Gun" are named for Kiss songs.

Then there are others, like "Liberty," a huge, abstract representation of the Statue of Liberty. His Kiss band-mate and longtime friend Gene Simmons, who owns the original, says he was captivated when he first saw it and asked to put it in his home.

"It captures the grandeur and beauty that is America," Simmons said.

There are also representational portraits, including one of the artist's 87-year-old father that, Stanley says with a laugh, is said by friends to be so realistic "that if they issued it in a police bulletin my dad would be apprehended in five minutes."

The originals fetch as much as $70,000, a figure the artist confirms with both a touch of pride and a bit of embarrassment. On the one hand, he considers it proof that serious collectors have accepted his work. On the other, he acknowledges he doesn't need the money and, in any case, never set out to sell the art he created.

He was approaching 50 and going through a divorce when he found himself searching for another emotional outlet outside of music.

"A friend of mine who knew me well said, 'You should paint,'" he recalls. "Having no idea what I was going to do, having no training, I went to a store, bought canvases, paints, pallet knives, brushes and went home and just started. The first piece I hung in the house, invariably people would go to that one and say, 'Who did this?'"