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The paint stripper
Stella Vine used to disrobe for money. Now she strips her subjects bare on canvas. Diana and her demons, Kate and cocaine, Jose Mourinho and his dog. Is any subject too raw for this notorious artist?
Stella Vine doesn’t look like any of the things she’s been. She doesn’t look like a stripper. She doesn’t look like an escort girl. And she certainly doesn’t look like one of Britain’s most notorious artists. Dammit, Stella Vine doesn’t even look like a Stella Vine. With her sensibly cropped hair and blushing country cheeks, she looks exactly like the name she was born with, Melissa Robson, a big-boned English lass from Northumberland, who would have made a fine wife for some sheep farmer up in Alnwick had the gods of art not tracked her down to the stage at the Windmill and forced her to swap her G-string for a paintbrush.
You surely remember the occasion. It was so noisy. Three years ago, Charles Saatchi, the most successful collector of modern art in Britain, put together a show of recent discoveries that he called, very Saatchily, New Blood. According to Saatchi, those chaps who had been turning light switches on and off in order to win the Turner prize were now passé. Here, he said, were the voices of the future, unveiling a motley crew of action sculptors and hasty painters, most of whom were from Germany. So unimpressive was this messy, artistic cast that nobody took any notice of the show. Until they discovered Stella Vine in it. And the gates of hell flew open.
Saatchi himself hadn’t heard of Vine either until a few weeks before the opening. Desperate for artists to pad out the huge new space he had lumbered himself with at County Hall – the ill-fated Saatchi Gallery, a giant wood-lined coffin, now kaput, thank God – he happened to wander into somewhere tiny in the East End that was showing paintings by Vine. I’ve been with Saatchi when he buys art. It’s an instinctive thing. Yeah, I’ll have two of those, he’ll wave, and that must have been how he came to own Vine’s portrait of a tearful Lady Diana confessing to Paul Burrell that she feared for her life, and a second picture of a crazily grinning Rachel Whitear, the heroin addict whose photo had been splashed across the papers, crouched on the floor with a syringe in her hand, betrayed by her boyfriend, and dead. These new buys were added to New Blood, and as soon as a few journalists saw them, the fuss exploded. “It’s self-evidently obvious Stella Vine can’t paint for toffee,” spat the cantankerous critic David Lee. Rachel Whitear’s parents were contacted and declared themselves appalled that their daughter’s plight was being trivialised by this ex-stripper who had painted a grinning Rachel with blood trickling from her lip. They wanted it removed. The Diana controversy was even fiercer. How dare this Windmill dancer paint the nation’s princess as a wild-eyed Essex girl who had been at her mother’s make-up box, and who appeared to have scrawled a message in bright-red lipstick across her picture: “Hi Paul, can you come over. I’m really frightened.” This wasn’t merely bad art. This was treason.
George Orwell got advertising exactly right when he described this trade as the “rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket”. Producing an ex-stripper who painted demented Lady Di’s was one of the most effective bits of stick-rattling Saatchi has come up with. Vine went from someone nobody had heard of to someone the whole of Britain disapproved of quicker than a leftover Chinese disappearing down a pig’s throat. The only critic who said anything nice about her work was me. I pointed out that it had something. Which is presumably why I am now sitting on a stool in her tiny new studio in Clerkenwell, while she is perched opposite me on an upturned plastic box, describing in detail the unusually awful life she’s had. In the corner, there’s a small bed. A few books. A few paintings. And that’s it. The fruits of Stella Vine’s success.
She admits the Diana picture was raw and naive. Her ambition was to “melt” into Diana’s character: not just to paint her, but to be her. She imagined the princess, too scared to use the phone at the palace because she knew it was bugged. So she decides to go out, still wearing her best princess dress, and with her make-up smudged because she’d put it on in a hurry. “And I thought she’d have gone to the shops and used a public phone. There’s a whole string of Asian newsagents at that particular place. It’s all very vivid… ‘Hi Paul, can you come over.’ ”
How did Vine learn to think like this? It’s what I’m here to find out. This summer, the thoroughly prestigious Museum of Modern Art in Oxford is putting on a retrospective of her paintings, which is perhaps the equivalent of Barbara Windsor starring as Rosalind in a new As You Like It at Stratford. One of the pictures she’s sending to Oxford was done yesterday. It shows a dark-haired man with huge eyes and a dog whom I recognise, but can’t think from where. It’s Jose, she explains. Jose? Ah, yes, Jose Mourinho, cup-final winning manager of Chelsea. Stella had never heard of him before but there was something in the paper about a man who loved his dog so much that he smuggled it out of the house. She admired him for that, and painted him the next morning with his brown eyes rhyming in sweetness with his terrier’s.
The biggest painting in the studio is not finished, but I recognise the royal family alright, skulking under a tree. That picture needed a dog too, so Stella put in the only one she could think of: Lassie. The royal family and Lassie are going into a special Diana room at Oxford, where Stella is showing a picture of Diana as a baby in her pram with the words of her favourite hymn – “I vow to thee my country” – echoing in the air around her as a look of raw terror disfigures her sweet little face. Stella Vine, it turns out, or Melissa Robson, as she was then, knows a thing or two about terror on the face of a little girl. The first seven years of her life in Alnwick were idyllic enough, but then her father began an affair and everything went off the rails. Her mother found a new boyfriend in Norwich, where they quickly moved and where the abuse began.
“He’d sit me on the toilet. Stand in front of me, staring, with absolute hatred. I had my knickers around my ankles. Terrified. Stiff. Then I’d go to bed. After half an hour he’d come upstairs, and touch me. He’d say, ‘Have you got your knickers on? Have you got your knickers off?’ Either one, it was wrong. If you’ve got them on, you should have them off. If you had them off, you should have them on. Because it’s the nice thing to do.”
Her mother, meanwhile, was ill, a lifelong sufferer from Crohn’s disease. She didn’t know what was going on. Nobody did. Even Melissa wasn’t sure. “I don’t feel anger towards him. I feel bad to say these things about him. And I feel sorry for him, but I do think what he did was wrong. I just wanted an apology, really.”
When she was 13, she was taken away by social workers and fostered. But the new foster parents couldn’t cope with her wilfulness.
First she left school, then she left the foster home, and moved into a row of derelict bedsits where the caretaker had his turn at her. “He just came knocking on my door one day and said, ‘Do you want a bear hug?’ ”
At 17, she gave birth to the caretaker’s boy and began facing up to the need to look after someone else. Pretending to be 19, and calling herself Jane Blackford, she tried the dole office and explained that she’d lost her birth certificate.
Her first proper ambition was to be an actress. She went to drama school. Played in Aladdin up and down the country. Got bloody good at it. And to me, it’s as clear as crystal that the paintings she now specialises in of betrayed and shaken women – the Lady Di’s, the Rachel Whitears, the portraits of her mother, a new one she’s working on of Isabella Blow – are examples of what we might call method painting: painted projections of herself in the Stanislavski manner.
One day, on a whim, she dropped the acting and became a Mayfair hostess. Seeing my greedy little face light up at the mention of “hostess”, Stella Vine or Melissa Robson or Jane Blackford makes sure I visualise the place she worked in. Like all of her clubs, it was a strangely respectable and old-fashioned establishment. “You sat there in a nice dress and talked to people. Often old men. About anything. And when they went to the toilet you poured the champagne into a bucket, and got them to order another one.”
Most of it was just talking. “Any negotiation for sexual favours, or your time, or conversation, was very old-fashioned. Very English. You know – ‘I’d very much like to buy you a dress.’ ” One man, whom she’s still in touch with, looked after her for six years. He’s the one who took her to New York and showed her the Frick Collection, where she discovered Gainsborough and realised how much prettiness was possible in art.
Then lap dancing arrived in London. Melissa Robson’s wages went up. And she began calling herself Stella Vine. “It was difficult. I used to drink a lot of vodka to be able to say hello to people. But once I was up on stage, I was fine. Sometimes I found myself on a roll, and I would make a fortune. Sometimes I behaved incredibly erotically. Doing things with ice cubes, sitting in a chair. Really enjoying my sexuality.”
The stripping continued for the best part of a decade as she moved from bedsit to bedsit with her son, and from Miranda’s to the Windmill to pay the rent. She tried to make life as much fun for him as she could, and enrolled him in some art classes at the Hampstead School of Art, but he didn’t like going, so Stella went instead. However, before Charles Saatchi walked into that East End Gallery and changed everything, there was still the exceedingly weird business of her involvement with the Stuckists to survive.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Stuckists? In the art world, they are the possessors of a shrill and tiny reputation as a bunch of schoolboy activists who make a point of complaining noisily about conceptual art. Taking their name from an insult apparently hurled at one of their founders, the aptly named Billy Childish, by his ex-girlfriend Tracey Emin – “Billy, you’re stuck, stuck, stuck” – the Stuckists turn up at Turner prize time to complain about Tracey and Damien and the others, and to insist that painting is the only real art. Nobody in the art world takes them too seriously, not even, I suspect, the Stuckists themselves. But they can be noisy. And hurtful. And it was very bad luck indeed for Vine to fall among them.
Like Tracey Emin before her, Vine had the misfortune to develop a crush on Billy Childish. She would turn up at his musical events. Follow him around. Until one day she was introduced to Stuckism’s other founder, Charles Thomson, which was where her problems really began. As Vine begins remembering the unfolding horror of her relationship with Thomson, to whom she was briefly and bizarrely married, I find myself tempted by a powerful urge to hide behind a sofa. Shame she doesn’t own one.
Thomson was fascinated by her exploits as a Windmill dancer. “He started talking about painting me naked and how it had to be very erotic. It was like talking to someone in a strip club, to be honest. There was something dark in him that I felt some kind of understanding of.”
The Stuckists offered her a showing immediately, and early in 2001 she found herself exhibiting alongside them at the Fridge in Brixton with a portrait of her stepfather and some stripping pictures. Thomson was 20 years older than her. He was interested in astrology and the cabbala. In his teens, she enlarges, he had been a member of a mysterious cult, and as Vine got closer to him, he began practising Past Life therapy on her in which he “killed” all her former selves. It was particularly frightening at night. She would wake up to find him talking to her in her sleep, she says.
Thomson believed it was his destiny to marry her. She insists she wasn’t keen, but during a trip to New York it just happened. There was no ring, no proper ceremony, and she was in too much of a daze to understand what was going on until the papers were signed. He liked documenting things, she says, and describes going into his office one day and finding a diary in which he had noted the ages of every prostitute he had been with, the dates of the assignations, what they did and where they did it. The wedding night was a disaster. As the Evening Standard noted in its Diary, she was married on Wednesday, divorced him on Thursday, “on Friday she trashed the hotel room and on Saturday she disappeared”. They had a stand-up fight in which she bit his arm and he burst one of her implants. She spent the night walking about New York and slept through the next day at Grand Central Station. Back in England, the marriage was consummated a few weeks later.
“I owed him that.” He paid off her debts, which amounted to £20,000, and that was married life done with. “I’ve never seen him again.”
Tracking down Thomson for his side of the story turns out to be easy. He’s a peripheral but noisy presence in the art world. Of course he remembers meeting Stella. How could he forget? “The first thing she said to me was, ‘I used to be a stripper and I’ve had a boob job.’ I felt like saying, ‘Can I feel them?’ But I didn’t.”
When I put it to Thomson that he’s been accused of hocus-pocus and tricking her into marriage, he bursts into theatrical, and slightly spooky, laughter.
Yes, he has a mystical bent, and yes, he did once go through some Past Lives stuff with Stella, but to accuse him of possessing mystical powers is ludicrous. And no, he’s never been a scientologist. Besides, getting married was Stella’s idea. She was the one who suggested he take his birth certificate to New York. And although they did have a bust-up on their wedding night, he denies bursting one of her implants. Stella, he shudders, was the one with the vicious temper.
“She’s a damaged person. She’s suffered abuse. But she’s also an abusive person. As a lot of damaged people are.” Whatever she’s saying about him now, his only real crime, he sighs, was falling hopelessly in love with her. “You meet someone and there’s a massive instant chemistry. It’s like a forest fire. And when it burns out, there’s nothing’s left except some burnt wood.”
I believe him about the love. Vine definitely knows how to press a bloke’s buzzer. When she was talking to me, the adjusting of her bra seemed to take place in a delightful slow motion. I knew it and she knew it. It’s clear also that Saatchi discovered her at a life-saving moment. She was 37 when New Blood opened, with too many burst implants behind her to go back to stripping, but being a painter was all she had. But she wouldn’t be Stella Vine if everything or, indeed, anything, ran smoothly for her. After the Saatchi opening she fell into a steep depression and became, briefly, a cocaine addict, living in a room in Bloomsbury, painting in her car. The cocaine was, she claims, a deliberate decision designed to free up more painting time by removing the need to sleep. The trouble was, she spent all her waking hours thinking about dying.
As for the sensibly short hair she now sports, where the flowing stripper’s locks used to be, it’s not, as I’d assumed, a practical coiffure for the summer. At Christmas, she did a Britney and attacked her head with a razor. It felt liberating, she remembers. And her dear old granny in Alnwick, where she was staying, said never mind dear, you can always wear a hat.
That’s her story. Now you’ve heard it, here’s a question: was there ever a painter better qualified to portray Lady Di or Rachel Whitear, or Kate Moss or Isabella Blow, than Stella Vine?
Stella Vine will be at Modern Art Oxford from July 17 to September 23. Tel: 01865 722733. Visit: www.modernartoxford.org.uk
Vine times
Vilified by critics but
pursued by art dealers including Charles Saatchi, this ex-stripper lives
anonymously but never escapes controversy. On the eve of her first major
show, Stella Vine tells how her sudden fame was followed by cocaine
addiction and therapy
by Lynn Barber
Sunday July 8, 2007
The London Observer
I had to meet her in the street because she said I wouldn't be able to find her studio and she was right: it is in a warren of warehouses and workshops in a derelict corner of London's Clerkenwell. The door is heavily barred and locked - a necessary precaution, she explains apologetically, because her paintings are 'quite valuable these days' (they sell for anything from £6,000 to £20,000) and she is not insured. The studio is painfully small with only one office chair to sit on - canvases take up all the wall space and the floor is densely cluttered with tins of paint. There is a bed in the corner but she says she no longer sleeps there 'because of the rats' so she has moved into a hostel. 'A hostel!' I squawk like Lady Bracknell, but she says it suits her down to the ground because 'it's wonderfully anonymous, safe, friendly, and there's the excitement that all the other people are travelling so they're optimistic. There are five bunk beds and you have your own little locker and you can read with a torch under the bedclothes.'
She is 38, but still very 'new' as a painter. She only started seven years ago when she took her son Jamie to art classes at Hampstead School of Art and got hooked. At the time she was a stripper and before that an actress. But in 2004 Charles Saatchi saw one of her paintings of Princess Diana ('Hi Paul can you come over, I'm really frightened') in a small East End gallery, bought it for £600, and made it the centrepiece of his New Blood show at County Hall. Critics rubbished it but it didn't matter - where Saatchi goes, collectors follow. She only met him for two minutes but he changed her life.
She rightly saw the Saatchi show as her launch pad, her chance to get out of stripping and into painting, and seized all the publicity she could get. But then she found it overwhelming: 'I felt really scared that I was just going to be a joke. The press were putting me in this box saying 'Stripper, Uneducated'. Worse still, her ex-husband, the Stuckist painter Charles Thomson, came out of the woodwork to tell the Mail on Sunday 'Stella is a violent, lying She-Devil'. She was married to him for about two months in 2001 and has not seen him since but he obviously still has the power to upset her. And after the Saatchi show she took on too much work, so she started using cocaine to stay awake and ended up with a £600-a-week habit. It didn't last long but she regrets that the one time she met Sarah Lucas, whom she reveres, she was too drugged to speak. Eventually she had a nasty fall in the street, was taken to hospital, seen by a psychiatrist and referred to therapy. She did four months of daily therapy last year, which she says changed her life.
Even so, she is still a wobbly mixture of toughness and vulnerability, egotism and self-doubt, and I find her hard-going at first. She has so much she wants to tell me, it's as if she's been sitting in solitary confinement for months waiting for her lawyer, but then the words come tumbling out so fast I can't follow. And there is no chance of getting her to explain anything because she simply ignores my questions and carries on. But then periodically she breaks off mid-flow to ask herself 'where was I?', as if a light switch has gone off in her brain. (Could this be a result of all the Prozac she has taken? She is not on it now, but was for many years.) At one point, talking about her stepfather, she breaks down helplessly in tears. Later, when she has calmed down a bit, she explains: 'I always get absolutely terrified of interviews - I get too emotionally involved in every sentence.'
To start with, she is full of grumbles about how the art world mistreated her. After Saatchi (who behaved entirely honourably) she fell among thieves, she thinks - patronising smoothie-chop art dealers who claimed they had sold things when they hadn't or kept the best paintings for themselves, who had no interest in nurturing her career but only in making a quick buck. But the galleries she admired all told her to go away and learn to paint and maybe come back in a year. So, faute de mieux, she became her own gallerist (she sells her work on stellavine.com) which meant 'learning to be Jay Jopling - and there's no manual. These last three years have been really hard but I think it's been worth it because I've learned so much and now I don't need to be so desperate.'
She shows me some of the work she is doing for Oxford - portraits of all the murdered Ipswich prostitutes, and some new Diana pictures. 'I wanted to do 100 paintings of Princess Diana but then I realised I couldn't physically do it in time. Everything takes me so much longer than it used to.' So then she decided to mix new with old, especially as she was keen to borrow back paintings that were sold to collectors in the States three or four years ago without being properly photographed. But shipping all these paintings back is costing a fortune so she has given Modern Art Oxford four paintings worth £46,000 to sell, to cover their costs.
There are about a dozen canvases in the studio either in progress or waiting to go to Oxford. At present she is working on a portrait of the young Beatrix Potter, taken from a photograph in which Potter is holding a dormouse, and Vine says she looks forward to painting the dormouse because 'I like putting bits of nature in. It started in 2003 when I did a painting of Sharon Tate and I wanted to put her in heaven so I added some birds, and I just really enjoyed having nature.' But she worries that if she paints birds people will say she is copying Tracey Emin.
While much of her work is 'sweet' and 'pretty' - words she uses herself approvingly - some of it is also incredibly witty. She showed me a great series of Lily Cole paintings she did for the American magazine Black Book, which are a brilliant spoof on the whole fashion shoot concept - 'Lily breaks up with her boyfriend in Bulgari, Marc Jacobs & Still by JLO'; 'Lily thinks about Good and Evil in Moschino'; 'Lily contemplates suicide in Van Cleef and Arpels' and 'Lily overdoses in Marc Jacobs'. They're so clever, I tell her, but she bridles at the compliment - 'I'm really not bothered by the clever thing,' she sniffs. 'I don't need to be intellectually approved - I think it's there anyway in my work.'
Much of the time, though, she goes out of her way to seem naive or childlike. But that is to do with empathising with her subjects. Basically, she says, all her portraits are self-portraits - she identifies with all these damaged, vulnerable women and commemorates them with all the sweetness she can muster. But sometimes the damage - dripping blood, running mascara - overrides the sweetness. It depends how she is feeling at the time. She has noticed that when she had long blond hair she tended to paint blondes, then when she dyed her hair black she painted brunettes - she shows me one of Princess Beatrice, Fergie's daughter, taken from a Tatler photograph. 'I'm drawn to Beatrice because you can see that there's something very sweet and delicate about her,' she explains. 'I liked her throwing that Scarlett O'Hara birthday party.' When Vine talks about celebrities, there's always this sort of possessive familiarity - 'when Kate [Moss] was in the Priory' - that reminds me of the way children talk about their imaginary friends. And perhaps celebrities are her imaginary friends - she has had quite a lonely life.
She is drawn to 'damaged' people because she feels that she is damaged herself and, 'I think when you're damaged you have a childlike vulnerability that never grows up until you fix it. Which I think I have done by four months of daily therapy last year. But there is an openness to me, an empathy and understanding, that causes people to treat me very badly. It's bizarre how many nutters homed in on me in the strips - there were some very dark conversations. And I don't necessarily walk away from those, even when they're very graphic, violent, because I think there's a sort of attempt to self-heal by being kind, by being understanding. But you have to learn that you have the right to walk away - you can't be compassionate to everybody.'
'As a child,' she says, 'I was quiet, very sweet - and afraid the whole time.' Actually it wasn't till she was seven that she was afraid - up till then she was happy, living with her mother, brother, grandmother and auntie Joan (her father ran off with the lodger when she was only two) in her grandmother's house in Alnwick, Northumberland. She was Melissa Robson in those days (she changed her name to Stella Vine about 10 years ago) and she remembers 'There was a roaring fire and there were always gypsies bartering fabric. There was this real sense of belonging there. So all that early stuff was beautiful and wonderful...' But she was closer to her aunt Joan than to her mother, Ellenor, a seamstress, who was strangely elusive. 'She was fragile, she wasn't an affectionate woman, there was never a cuddle, there wasn't really a bond. I adored her but there wasn't anything there - she was ethereal, just this glittering thing. She was hardly there - I think she went off hitchhiking round Europe for a year or something.' She was also ill, with Crohn's disease, which later turned into bowel cancer.
The idyll ended when Melissa was seven and her mother told her they were moving to Norwich and she was marrying a Norwich Union executive called Richard Jordan. The first time Melissa met him was the day before the wedding and she distrusted him on sight. She claims he always hated her and her brother because they were not his children and that she spent the years from seven to 13 - when she ran away from home - in a state of constant fear. She never quite says that her stepfather abused her, but that seems to be the idea - she told Waldemar Januszczak that he was always asking 'Have you got your knickers on?' But when I try to press her she suddenly bursts into tears and sobs: 'This stuff that happened and happened, there's just no point in remembering - it just means that for the next three days I feel suicidal. It's not worth it!'
At 13 she ran away from home and lived for a while in London (she mentions hanging out in Brixton with Meg Mathews) but then went back to Norwich and signed on as Jane Blackwood, saying she was 19 and had just run away from a hippie convoy - 'I'm sure the social services must still have all those files.' She lived in a bedsit in a derelict house, and at 17 had a baby by the caretaker. This was her son Jamie, light of her life - she always wanted a baby as someone to love. But then Jamie's father started hassling them so she ran away to London where she suffered the awful loneliness of the tower-block single mum. 'People just don't realise the craziness of the isolation - you almost go mad. The only time I ever had to myself was one night a month for a few hours when a charity paid for a babysitter. And I would go to Blow Up and dance to soul music for a few hours and then go home.'
Nevertheless, she somehow managed to get herself to drama school, the Academy of Theatre Arts, because she'd always loved drama. She did a Joe Orton play at the National Theatre of Wales in Clwyd, and then went on tour round the country. 'When I went to drama school they told me I would never work because I had a child, so I had this incredible drive, but it was quite tough touring the country, just me and Jamie, finding different babysitters in different towns.' And because she was so driven, she accepted every job she was offered, always afraid to leave a gap, so her career slid gently downhill from Joe Orton to Agatha Christie to panto. (She says she made the same mistake at the start of her painting career but has now learned to pick and choose.) She gave up acting in the end, simply because she was exhausted and Jamie had to go to school, so she rented a flat in Hampstead and worked as a waitress at Fatboy's Diner.
From waitressing she moved on to hostessing and stripping, which paid better. She was never an escort girl because that was too dangerous: instead she'd sit in these rather old-fashioned hostess clubs - there was one called The Directors' Lodge where the White Cube gallery is now - chatting to elderly gentlemen and pouring her champagne into flower vases for £50 a night. Then it was stripping at the Windmill Theatre, which she loved because it was a real theatre and felt like acting. She also mentions some mysterious 'sugar daddies', one of whom invited her to stay in New York where she discovered the Frick Collection and her love of Gainsborough. One year when Jamie was a teenager and keen on skateboarding they bought a camper van and spent the year going round skate parks - she says it was the best year of her life. In 2000 she started attending classes at Hampstead School of Art and in 2001 she had her short, unhappy marriage to the Stuckist painter Charles Thomson. In 2003 her mother died and she expressed her grief in paintings of Princess Diana - five of which Saatchi would buy, and is lending back for her Oxford show.
Her life now is just painting, painting, painting. Jamie is grown up and has his own flat so there is nothing to distract her. She paints all day and then goes back to the hostel to sleep, or perhaps to read Heat under the bedclothes. 'The drive is phenomenal,' she says. 'At the beginning you think you could be up there with people you admire, and that's a fantastic thing, but then maybe if you get there, you want to go a bit further.' She must be thrilled to be doing the Oxford show, I tell her, but she gives me a black look - I am being patronising and there is no worse sin in her book. 'Obviously I am grateful, and hopefully I'll be proud of the Oxford show, but I'm not really into this acceptance of gratitude because I know that I'm capable of putting a show on anywhere in the world. I don't want to compromise, I don't want to have to prove and explain the way I work and what I do. It will be when I'm dead that the critics can do all that.'
I can't wait to see her Oxford show - I think she's the real deal.
Details:
Born Melissa Robson in Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1969. Changed her name to Stella Vine in 1995.
Childhood Aged 13 asked to be fostered due to a breakdown in her relationship with her stepfather. Shortly after moved into a bedsit on her own. Gave birth at 17 to her son, Jamie, then moved to London to attend drama school. Worked as a stripper, waitress, cleaner and in a hostess bar to earn money to provide for her son.
Art training Studied at Hampstead School of Art in late 1990s. Opened a gallery in 2003 in former butcher's shop.
Big break Charles Saatchi kickstarted her career when he bought her portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales in February 2004 and one of Rachel Whitear, a dead heroin addict, for £600 each to showcase in his New Blood exhibition. Vine spiralled into depression soon after, painting in her car and becoming briefly addicted to cocaine.
Personal life Married the co-founder of the Stuckists, Charles Thomson, in 2001 in New York. The couple separated almost immediately.
Stella Vine: Completing my new show was the only thing that saved me from suicide
She compares Chantelle from 'Big Brother' with Shakespeare and paints adoring portraits of celebrities from the pages of 'Hello!' magazine. Yet Stella Vine couldn't be more serious about her art.
By Hermoine Eyre for the Independent
15 July 2007
There Stella sits, surrounded by huge unfinished canvasses of Princess Diana and Beatrix Potter, flicking through assorted leafs from National Portrait Gallery brochures (Holbein's Jane Seymour) and Hello! magazine ("Brave Kate moves on without William"). The Artist As Media Magpie, Sitting In Her Nest.
All these scraps she collected because they touched her plucked, she says, at her solar plexus. "I will look through 200 photographs of Kate Moss and there will be just one that I connect with for some reason, maybe because of the composition or something in the eye... Something touches me and I know I have to paint it, in the way a child knows it wants something."
Stella Vine came on to the art scene in a blaze of notoriety in 2004 when Charles Saatchi purchased her paintings of a bleeding, frightened Princess Diana ("Hi Paul can you come over"), and the 21-year-old heroin casualty Rachel Whitear, displaying them in his New Blood exhibition (omega) despite censure from the public and Whitear's parents.
Stella's past added fuel to the flames. Before she started painting she was a single mother, an actress, a cleaner, a stripper, director of her own theatre company and singer in her own band. But as Germaine Greer wearily notes in her forward to the catalogue for Vine's new show: "She was and always will be the 'single mum, ex-stripper' of the art world."
It is hard to know whether it is her outsider status or her subject matter that exercises people most. She consistently flaunts demarcations between high and low culture: her latest subjects are Chelsea manager José Mourinho and his Yorkshire terrier. (She had never heard of him before; she simply liked the juxtaposition of the football manager's machismo with his race to save his little pet from quarantine.) This work, along with faux-naïve portraits of Kate Moss, Lily Cole, Liz Taylor and a suite of new Diana paintings, will form part of her forthcoming solo show at Modern Art Oxford. One critic described her appearance there as "perhaps the equivalent of Barbara Windsor starring as Rosalind in a new As You Like It at Stratford" .
Yet it shouldn't be surprising to see an artist truffling through tabloids. The dialogue between celebrity and art has been going on long enough, after all. Think of Joshua Reynolds and Nathaniel Hone's paintings of Kitty Fisher (actress, courtesan and Jodie Marsh of her day), of George Romney's Emma Hamilton, of Sickert's music hall stars. And then there's Andy Warhol. Stella Vine feels a strong connection there. She studied Warhol in depth on a course at Tate Modern, but she also feels she is "the same type of person as him". A part of her longs to be among the glamourous people she paints; she always felt as if "one day, I might be". Now she could be, but she is too shy to go to the parties she is invited to.
Perhaps because of Warhol's ubiquity, celebrities receded from contemporary painters' imaginations: too done, too obvious. The art world still seems conflicted about whether it's OK to be thought of as an artist who paints celebrities. Many of the gallerists and artists approached for this piece refused to allow their work to be included. Yet celebrities clearly inspire a Pleiades of female artists, among whom Stella Vine shines. Sam Taylor-Wood draped Robert Downey Jnr across her lap to make a modern-day Pietà; Elizabeth Peyton's portraits of Jarvis Cocker and Liam Gallagher made her " the first artist of Britpop". Dawn Mellor, Spartacus Chetwynd and Karen Kilimnik all conjure with famous names. What unites these very disparate artists, who work in many media from performance art to oils, is their apparent sincerity: their attention to their famous subjects is so close it is often described as "loving".
"I want to worship them," Dawn Mellor says, simply, of the icons she depicts. Her work, which includes a smiling Gwyneth Paltrow cuddling a lion cub, its claws poised on her perfect skin, tells a different story. But sarcasm is held at arm's length by all these artists. Irony is in the eye of the beholder. And so we return to the sincerity of Stella Vine. This reveals itself, accidentally, when I ask, looking through her cuttings box, if she would paint Kerry Katona.
"Kerry just doesn't strike a big enough chord with me. If I was an ironic painter I could probably be doing Kerry going to Iceland, because that's quite interesting, isn't it? Someone advertising a family household product and having quite a wild party time in their own life.
"There's nothing at the moment that speaks to me about her. I'd rather paint Sylvia Plath. If I was a more cynical painter I probably would paint that but, I'm not." Instead, she is a Romantic, inspired by nature (" when I'm walking through the mountains or by the sea, I'm flooded with creativity") and communing emotionally with tragic heroines.
"Stella Vine paints her big-eyed subjects with as much intensity as any dazzled fan could muster and as much tenderness as if they were kittens on a chocolate box," writes Germaine Greer. "But the painted gesture is driven by something darker, something bitter."
To understand her work, some facts about Stella's life are useful. She is isolated, a loner. She is wondering whether she will make it to the opening of her Oxford show she failed to turn up to three of her previous opening parties. She loves going to the Comedy Store to watch Paul Merton and Josie Lawrence, but she always goes alone.
"Perhaps the people I choose to paint are often objects of derision celebrity is a bit of a put-down term, isn't it? But to me they are my world. " Vine was abused by her stepfather as a child, and taken into care at 13. She gave birth to a boyfriend's baby he was the caretaker of the building she lived in at 17. She was married, very briefly, to the Stuckist artist Charles Thomson, though it ended in disaster: Stella suffered a burst breast implant after they fought, and insults have been traded between them in the press.
"For the last few years I thought I was dirty and a hateful character, very unlovable, so I clung on to these people that I painted over and over again. Sometimes it was the places I painted, as well, often favourite romantic places, like The Priory." She refers to the celebrity addiction centre as a "favourite romantic place" without self-consciousness.
Stella chooses to paint in the naïve style, and sometimes she speaks in a naïve style as well, without perspective or knowingness. She is clearly extremely intelligent, and educated too, though late in life and unconventionally. (The claim that she is a self-taught painter simply means she did not go through art school as an adult, she took classes at Hampstead School of Art and at Tate Modern, and studied Philosophical Aesthetics at Birkbeck University.)
But her view of the world is that of an outsider, unworldly; touching, as much Naïve art can be, but also profoundly detached. Take this: " Shakespeare and Chantelle: I don't have more respect for one than the other. They're both human, both good people, doing what they do. I think it's easy to patronise someone like Chantelle. I watched that Big Brother quite thoroughly and I thought she was principled in the way she stood up to George Galloway, and that (omega) takes intelligence. She and Preston were more adult than the adults. So why is she not as good as Shakespeare? I mean, I know he left an incredible body of work behind... But I think celebrities are entertaining and absorbing and I think one can learn a lot from observing other people's lives."
She knows, I think, how odd she sounds. "I feel quite ethereal, childlike, quite innocent," she says (auditioning as a teen for the National Youth Theatre she did Caliban's speech, but she could as easily have been Ariel). Later she asks: "Allow me my little intelligence," sounding for all the world like John Clare. In the past she has been through periods where people buyers, gallerists, boyfriends have not allowed her that "little intelligence" and it stunted her. She talks of working on a portrait of Kitty Fisher ("She was leaning over her goldfish bowl") and receiving a visit from a dealer who didn't seem to think much of it. After he'd gone, she ripped the canvas to shreds with a Stanley knife. She mimes the violence with passion. Those days, however, are behind her. She is full of strength now. She used to be elfin and, though she would never believe it, very pretty, but she has cut her hair and put on a few stone in weight, exchanging femininity for the androgynous power of an artist. Even through the course of the interview she seems to grow stronger.
"All those people who derided me did me a favour, because now I don't care what anyone says about me. I feel I am now able to be a really powerful painter, to take on the mantle of the US male expressionist." She even compares herself to Pollock (and why not? They both drip), but the way she does it is so plucky, and her defiance so hard-won, that it's hard not to feel admiring.
Stella's talent is praised by Germaine Greer, who identifies a " mysteriousness" in her way of projecting a likeness: "All the measurable details will be wrong: eye colour, hair and complexion will all be changed and yet the figure remains identifiable, as if seen through water or through a distorting glass." We recognise the celebrities she is representing, yet at the same time the figures, says Greer, become " fictitious, merely virtual". The fantasy of celebrity identity breaks down.
There is defamiliarisation at work in Vine's art, but there is also the much more traditional method of allegory. She thinks of Holbein, of George Romney, but not explicitly. She puts in whatever feels right. A robin hovers next to her likeness of Sylvia Plath, and doves around her Sharon Tate. Vine was at work on a portrait of Isabella Blow in which, in a reference to Blow's self-inflicted poison, Paraquat, weeds were going to be trailing round the frame "a sort of Victorian poetic touch" but she had to stop the painting half way through. "It was just too sad."
Vine thinks herself into the minds and bodies of her subjects a legacy of drama school, where one of her teachers was a devotee of Stanislavsky. While working on Holy Water Will Not Save You Now, her portrait of Kate Moss, Stella became addicted to cocaine there's Method painting for you. Explaining how painting feels to her, she becomes transported, closes her eyes: "There are zillions of pictures in your head. It's almost like you feel cold because it's nighttime. You can smell the night. You're there. You're THERE."
As I leave, Stella prepares to return to finishing up her suite of paintings of women who have suffered the most macabre form of celebrity: the prostitutes murdered in Ipswich last year. Their faces grin, mask-like and pretty, against a vivid forest backdrop.
"These women have been completely used, so they're almost shells. The only life force in the painting is the forest, because it carries on. They are very important to me, these paintings. Last year I was having a bad time and feeling really suicidal, and my overriding thought was, I have to finish the Ipswich girls. I can die, but I need them to be here. It always used to be my son Jamie that I thought of, but he's 21 now and he's very independent. I feel the art is my job now, my calling."
Stella shows me the pink she uses for their cartoon courtesan cheeks, raw as slapped skin. "There have been a lot of whores in art," she says, slowly, significantly. "But there haven't been many whores who have made it to the top."
Will these tragic celebs bring art a new audience?
Gallery hopes Stella
Vine's naive portraits and colourful biography will bring in the crowds at
first major show
Maev Kennedy
Saturday July 14, 2007
The Guardian
Standing in the middle of a huge space hung to the ceiling with vast canvases, many with her trademark childishly-painted women with smeared mouths and eyes, some with the paint barely dry - the paintings of the murdered Ipswich prostitutes are not yet complete, but two walls are hung with giant new paintings of Diana as a child - she explained how simple it was.
But if she is not nervous, the gallery director, Andrew Nairne, is petrified. His wife keeps patting him reassuringly on the shoulder, and promising people will remember that he has a track record of admired exhibitions. He is surely right that the images - of supermodel Lily Cole bejewelled in a bath seeping blood, of Kate Moss hung beside a giant portrait of Pete Doherty, and of Courtney Love peeling her knickers off in a London cab - will lure in people who might never normally set foot in his gallery.
There will be genuine admirers of her work, including Germaine Greer, who has written in the catalogue introduction: "Stella Vine paints her big-eyed subjects with as much intensity as any dazzled fan could muster and as much tenderness as if they were kittens on a chocolate box, but the painted gesture is driven by something darker, something bitter, something that makes the surface bulge and slither." Others will be drawn by the controversy which has surrounded the stripper turned artist since instant fame exploded around her.
Charles Saatchi bought two paintings for £800, the teary Diana on the phone to her rock, butler Paul Burrell, captioned: "Hi Paul, can you come over, I'm really frightened"; and a portrait from a school photograph of Rachel Whitear, the young heroin addict whose body was permitted by her parents to be used to shock others out of following the disastrous example of her short life.
In 2004 Saatchi included the pictures in a major exhibition at his now defunct gallery on London's South Bank: the media uproar eclipsed the famous and established artists in the show. Others will undoubtedly come slack-jawed with astonishment that such an important gallery, the biggest public art space in the region devoted entirely to modern and contemporary work, has given Stella Vine her first major solo show.
"I didn't believe it when I saw the show was coming up," David Lee, famously iconoclastic critic and editor of the Jackdaw magazine, said yesterday. "I would be surprised that she has enough works to fill anything except a very small room. She is quite obviously a really horribly bad painter - but she's very good at publicity."
"There just is something about her," Nairne said. "The more I thought about her work, the more I felt that the conventional art world in which I am involved had maybe missed something here. I think people are going to be astonished."
This spring he had the invitation to a small exhibition in her native Alnwick lying on his desk, and found he couldn't throw it away. The picture - included in the show - is a sentimental image of a glamorous young woman, surrounded by cuddly animals: a portrait of Vine's mother, Ellenor, whom she adored but who seemed incapable of demonstrating love in return. The happy childhood home was shattered when her mother remarried. Vine was pregnant herself at 17, and worked as a cleaner, actor, dancer and a stripper to bring up Jamie alone. Eventually Nairne took the long train journey to Northumberland to see the picture, and after an hour in the gallery drew a deep breath and offered Vine her first major solo exhibition.
"I wanted my work to be seen for free in a public space," Vine said. "I want to be up there with Pollock and de Kooning, one of the big boys."
"Jolly good luck to her," David Lee said. "She is a hopeless, hopeless painter - but she's done very well."
Magnificently shallow
Some critics have dismissed Stella Vine’s celebrity portraits. We should take her seriously
Is she the real thing or is it all just a racket? People have been wondering this ever since Charles Saatchi swooped on the art work of some ex-stripper and put it up in his 2004 New Blood show. Stella Vine’s garishly disturbing portraits were bound to stir up a media storm. She had painted Diana, Princess of Wales, with blue eyes boggling and lips dribbling blood, calling for help from her dodgy butler. “Hi Paul can you come over I’m really frightened,” Vine scrawled across the canvas, like some teenager lip-sticking a message on her mirror. She had painted a picture of the heroin addict Rachel Whitear, whose death with a syringe in her hand had made newspaper headlines. The girl’s parents were contacted so that they could protest their outrage.
Overnight, Vine found herself flung from obscurity into the public spotlight. And now, three years later, she is being given her first exhibition in a leading British gallery. A huge show of her work, its hundred or so images including her controversial Diana paintings, a host of celebrity portraits as well as the faces of characters in her own family story, is opening at Modern Art Oxford this week. But does she really merit it as an artist? Can her paintings stand up to scrutiny? Or is her work just another example of that easy sensationalism that stages a raid on the popular imagination? In one sense it’s easy to see the fascination of Vine. Taking up our positions of voyeuristic privilege, we can revel in the vaguely salacious life story of a young woman which has been peddled to a prurient media and which, for your delectation, I am about to repeat.
Stella Vine’s real name is Melissa Robson. She was born in 1969 in the picturesque Northumbrian town of Alnwick, where she lived with her emotionally elusive mother, a seamstress called Ellenor, and an affectionate and much-loved Auntie Joan. But when she was 7 she moved to Norwich. Her mother had fallen in love with a man whom, Vine intimates, subjected her to mental and perhaps sexual abuse. At 13 she ran away, first going to London then returning to Norwich where, living in a clapped-out bedsit and signing on under a false name, she got pregnant at the age of 16 by the caretaker of her derelict block.
Returning to London with the baby, she lived the desolate tower-block life of a single mother on benefits, struggling her way through drama school and then dragging her son round regional theatres as she took on a succession of ever less remunerative roles. She ended up as a waitress, then a hostess girl, then a stripper as she struggled to foot the bills and better herself so that she could pursue her creative ambitions. In 2000 she started classes at an art school in Hampstead. “Forget about drawing, get the paint and colours down,” the teacher said. And she did, splashing down pictures in gaudy acrylic. She fell in with the Stuckists, a clamorous cult of resentful artistic also-rans who, convinced that their talents have been by-passed by a Tate-led fad for conceptualism, protest publicly each year at the Turner Prize award dinner. And she had a very brief but vitriolic marriage in 2001 to their slightly sinister leader, Charles Thomson.
Picked up at various times in her life by cocaine, Prozac and the occasional sugar daddy, she found success through intensive therapy and the marketing mogul Charles Saatchi, who, desperate to pad out a show of upcoming painters, stumbled across her Diana pictures. She had transferred all the emotions from her mother’s death on to the princess, she suggests, and she let them slop straight on to the canvas.
These are the sort of canvases that she sells for as much as £20,000 – and perhaps more now that she has received an official stamp of approval from Modern Art Oxford. Are they worth it?
The images on the gallery walls make an immediate impact. Celebrities from the Beatles to the Brontë sisters to Big Brother’s Chantelle goggle down at the viewer with vast Barbie-doll eyes. The spectator is fixated by a sense of sudden recognition and by the colours, which are as lurid as a tube of fizzy sweets. He is amused by the flashes of inappropriate humour and, occasionally, by the accuracy of the observation. Here is Courtney Love, crouched like a rabbit in the dazzle of the camera flash-bulbs; the London gallery owner Sadie Coles manically flicking her hair; Pete Doherty singing in his typical slope-hipped pose.
But there is something more complex going on. These images speak about more than the simple desires of a starstruck teenager. They are the painted projections of Vine’s own self. They arise from the slightly spooky ambition of a former method actress who has tried to put herself into her character’s persona, to actually become the person she painted. And Vine can’t be unaware that she in a sense has succeeded. Through the controversy she has created, she has attained the sort of fame that belongs to her subjects.
Vine’s paintings look like “something that might hang on the park railings”, one critic railed. But if Vine was a park railing painter she would try to make the pictures neater, more perfect. Instead they are deliberately left raw. They have a naive power. When she wants a dancer’s dress to look swirly she just swirls the paint across it. She applies make-up colours to the surface of her faces as subtly as a clown’s mask. Vine wants to appeal to some direct response. It’s all there on the surface.
And yet this is the surface that is cracking. Look at her Kate Moss, for instance. The spaces between her cutely imperfect teeth are crammed with darkness. Her smile is as taut as a sneer. The babydoll palette of Vine’s pictures turns acid. The colours are souring. The mascara runs with tears. The dreams are curdling into the ghastly self-confessional parodies of the reality. The highly polished Vogue aesthetic is turning into the trashy Heat snap. We can’t dismiss these paintings as a mere racket – not in a world in which the racket has become the real thing.
Everyone's talking about Stella Vine
Love or loathe her, Vine's lurid and gutsy paintings are causing a storm in the art world. And rightly so.
the guardian
Among those who actually know Vine, it's been worse. Former husband Charles Thomson is so furious at the news, he's launching a rival show on the same date entitled: I Won't Have Sex With You As Long As We're Married. These, apparently, were the words Vine said to Thomson on their wedding night before - according to Thomson - trashing their New York hotel room and absconding for the rest of the honeymoon.
So far, so personal. Yet the real source of Thomson's rage is artistic. As leader of the Stuckists - a movement who first exhibited Vine's work in 2001- Thomson is infuriated she refuses to acknowledge her debt to the group, who have consistently promoted painting over conceptual art.
For those removed from the suffocating, claustrophobic art world, however, news of Vine's first major exhibition comes as a breath of fresh air. It's impossible not to see some of punk's DIY spirit in an artist who scans the tabloids for subject matter and whose dazzling pop art canvasses are delivered at a rate of knots - she is exhibiting 25 new works at Oxford. Particularly in the light of Damien Hirst's For the Love Of God, the artistic equivalent of Yes' Tales From Topographic Oceans.
Plus, the fact that the range of T-shirts she has recently designed for Top Shop - emblazoned with slogans like Breaking Up With Her Boyfriend - are flying out, speaks volumes for her public support.
Vine's art is lurid, funny, vulnerable and diamond-sharp. She's causing a fuss. What's wrong with that?