Stella Vine
Ironically, Stella Vine is almost as (in)famous by now as the celebrities she paints. Her life-story, the on-going questioning of her talent, and critical controversy over her admission into the 'High Art' arena may be unknown to most HEAT readers. But anyone who has recently picked up a daily newspaper or mainstream magazine will know Vine as the ex-stripper, abused child and single mother who became fodder for controversy when Charles Saatchi included her portrait of a zombie-like Princess Diana in his 2004 'New Blood' exhibition. The Diana painting showed her wearing a little-princess-like tiara and formal gown, with blotchy skin and eyes bulging in fear and blood dribbling from her mouth, pleading in words scrawled in red by her ghoulish face, "Hi Paul can you come over I'm really frightened." The punctum of the painting was the mystery of Vine's motives in creating it. Was she mocking the Princess and reveling in some sick form of schadenfreude, or was she empathizing with Diana's tragic vulnerability?
The line between empathy and exploitation always stretches painfully thin in Vine's art. In the 100 images that Vine herself hung for her first major solo show at Modern Art Oxford, the 38-year old artist lined up a pantheon of famous faces, alongside a few personal portraits. Her roughly painted portraits of rough patches in media stars' magnificently mangled lives dramatically illustrate Mick Jagger's challenge: "If I could stick a knife in my heart/ Suicide right on the stage/ Would it be enough for/ your teenage lust/ Would it help ease your pain?"
Pain is the omnipresent ingredient in Vine's paintings. Not only the pain that Diana, Kate Moss and her other protagonists visibly experienced under the media's severe scrutiny, but also the pulsating, powerless frustration and anguish an adolescent feels when confronted by adult hypocrisy. In a sensitive and supportive review of Vine's MAO exhibition, Financial Times art critic Jackie Wullschlager wrote on July 21st, "Vine is a fabulist who is both a grown-up artist and, emotionally, a child so damaged that she cannot grow up."
Paradoxically, the quality that critics use to undermine the credibility of Vine's art - that it is adolescent- is actually the source of its indisputable emotional impact. Without question, her art is adolescent - in the same way that Holden Caulfield's observations about a world filled with phonies, and Kurt Cobain's acid outrage over adult lies and injustice, and Sylvia Plath's over-heated anger and bitterness at the world's betrayals were adolescent. At first Vine's art appears clumsy, but look longer and it is less careless than bitterly honest. Plath would surely appreciate Vine's portrait of Ted Hughes, with the epithet, "Daddy, I have had to kill you" emblazoned on the canvas.
While the discovery of hypocrisy is a universal theme in art, Vine's work is significant because it is obsessively current. Yet even as they radiate voyeuristic intimacy, most of Vine's images are remarkably detached from her own life. In a recent profile for the Independent, Vine told journalist Hermione Eyre, "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."
Included in the MAO show are a few portraits of her mother, Ellenor Robson (Vine's real name is Melissa Jane Robson). A beautiful brunette seamstress, after Vine's biological father deserted the family when Stella was seven, she married a man who later abused her daughter. Vine left home when she was thirteen and was briefly in foster care before she relocated to a bedsit and started a relationship with her 24-year old caretaker. She became pregnant two years later, and as a single mother supported her child by working as a cleaner, waitress, stripper and hostess in clubs. For five years Vine ran her own improvised theatre company, Minx Productions, and played with the band Victoria Falls.
Vine began painting portraits of her family through part-time classes she attended at the private Hampstead School of Art in 1999-2001. She became involved in the Stuckists group around that time, and married Charles Thomson, the universally perceived dodgy founder of the Stuckists movement. She opened the Rosy Wilde gallery in a former East London butcher's shop 2003 as a showcase for emerging artists. Shortly afterward in 2004, Charles Saatchi bought her Diana painting from a group show entitled 'Girl on Girl' in Cathy Lomax's Transition Gallery, for £600.
Saatchi included the painting in 'New Blood', along with a second painting by Vine of the deceased Rachel Whitear. Whitear's body was due for exhumation and her parents, accompanied by the police, arrived at the gallery to request that the painting not be exhibited. Saatchi had delegated to Vine the decision to keep the work on display or to withdraw it, and honored her decision not to remove the painting from the show.
I talked with Vine about her Modern Art Oxford show a week before it was hung, and we discussed her artistic process and purpose.
Sylvia, 2005
80 x 90cm, acrylic on canvas
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: You paint a wide range of public figures, both famous and infamous, from all areas of culture. Do you distinguish between, say, painting a literary celebrity like Sylvia Plath and painting a model like Kate Moss?
STELLA VINE: No, I think there is a total equality for me between painting a literary figure or Kate Moss or my Mum or a dog or a bird. To me, they are all absolutely equal.
AFH: I can almost see equating a beautiful and mysterious animal with a celebrity who is equally alluring and unknowable. After all, celebrity gossip is like our contemporary version of Aesop's Fables. But I am surprised you put your mother on the same plane since she's someone you know intimately.
SV: Stella Vine: My Mum was ethereal, a serene, gentle woman, and remote, very remote. In my mind, they are absolutely equal. I don't think I am drawn to one part of pop culture or culture more than any other part. I think it is all to do with a sort of desire - a desire for romance, or beauty or glamour, with its flip side, dark, lonely, scared. And it sort of comes from, at its heart, from me being an observer and being a naturally quiet isolated person. Even though I am aware that it is mainly fiction, I can still get quiet swept up in it - in the stories I am given, that make up the pictures in my head. It's the same with everyone else.
'Ellenor Seaton Point', 2006
3' x 4', acrylic on canvas
AFH: Are you saying that you consider that your way of reading these images, and these magazines, is the same as any average reader?
SV: You know how complex you are, in your many facets. It is sort of like that.
AFH: What do you intuit about the famous people, like Alexander McQueen, who have bought works of yours depicting people they know personally?
SV: I think it is fantastic. When Alexander McQueen bought the Kate Moss painting, she was really being persecuted. I can't remember the exact timing, but I think it was before the cocaine, when she was just having a hard time with Peter. I think that was when he bought that. I was really pleased because he was such a huge supporter of her. It was so terrible what was happening to her. She could have sunk. She could have died. I don't mean literally, but she could have disappeared.
'I only sleep with Jesus'
AFH: She could have quit, you mean?
SV: Yes. When you are persecuted, you have the choice to either sink or swim. You can mentally start to disintegrate. To be publicly humiliated like that gives you few options. She fought back and went to rehab. That can't be easy. It was a pretty love story, gave all us fucked-up loners a sparkle in our day. We thank them, now they both need to get back to work, and do themselves proud. Kate's an artist too, it's all there in her eyes. They need to knuckle down and blow our brains out.
AFH: Nor can it be easy to have strangers feel invested in judging your personal choices, whatever they might be. How do you decide from within the massive pantheon of celebrities - who to paint and who to ignore?
SV: It depends whom I am passionately involved with on the day when I want to make a painting. Or something will hover about in the back of my head for a long time and I'll think that I really want to paint them, but there is so much stuff missing that it takes years for me to hear enough about a person that things will drop into place. Suddenly, I'll think 'My God, I really want to paint that person. Funny I didn't last week.'
AFH: What changes?
SV: It might be something really extreme, like they died, and then suddenly - it all makes sense.
AFH: Why haven't you painted Britney Spears yet? She is the current embodiment of the qualities so many of your heroines possess.
SV: I have an incredible image of Britney Spears that has been developing over the whole thing. It was very gentle when she was seen driving with the baby in her lap and then, she really started to get persecuted (and it might not be the right word but the same thing happened to Kate), where you're thought of as a bad mother. The same thing doesn't happen to men. When you're in the limelight and being a bit reckless, then suddenly people start judging you and deciding you're a bad mother.
AFH: Well, it makes a certain moral sense that this is when the public's judgment seems justified. Many people with children shouldn't be parents, but seeing bad parenting, and realizing another non-consenting person's well-being is at risk, is perhaps more responsible than invasive when the
public passes judgment.
SV: I suppose so, but so many things are so easily done. Having been a young mum, in many ways, I was extremely reckless and you just don't know enough. I just don't judge people, unless they've done some serious child abuse or murder, then we're all capable of fuck-ups.
AFH: We all look to celebrities to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
SV: Yes, if you're watching Big Brother and talking to your mates about what's happened, what you're really talking about is right and wrong. I think I learn so much about myself by watching Big Brother. You look at it and think 'Oh My God! What if that was me in that situation? She just doesn't realize its all coming over.'
AFH: I'm sure you're familiar with Phil Collins who has a show coming up at Victoria Miro, about people whose lives have been damaged by their experiences on reality TV. Do you feel the press you've received and the exposure have adversely affected your life?
SV: It's totally spun around to a really rather great place. I feel like, and I realize this sounds totally corny, but I feel like a better person for it. I feel like I'm always grateful for a platform for my work. First there wasn't one, and then there was one. I wasn't expecting there to ever be one. In any creative process I've ever done, I've always felt it would be a really long slog. I thought it would be fifty years to create a film - fifty years to create a novel, fifty years to create paintings.
AFH: It did not take that long for you, but neither were you a kid just out for school. You were older when success first hit, and had lived a much more varied life.
SV: When Saatchi first bought my paintings, I was really very much focusing on showing other young people at Rosy Wilde.
AFH: You must get inundated with material from artists eager to show with you in the hope of replicating your success.
SV: I'm had to cut down on that in the last six months. I get really excited when I heard about someone new and their work and maybe in the future, I can do more of that again by sponsoring and encouraging things to happen without all the tremendous responsibility of a space. Right now I am just focusing
on, hopefully, getting closer and closer to making incredible paintings in my lifetime. Hopefully all these things will happen eventually. I've been really desperate for some recognition or respect for what I was doing, and I just felt ridiculed for so long.
AFH: But isn't this show at Modern Art Oxford just that sign of recognition?
SV: It is, and I feel like that's all part of me feeling so much more relaxed and comfortable in what I'm doing. I'm not creating a million platforms all the time. I feel, finally, a lot more still. I feel like it's all going to be all right, and what I've achieved so far is really good. It's been great and Andrew Nairne giving me this opportunity is wonderful.
AFH: Are you concerned about the press you or Modern Art Oxford might receive, considering the past press you've gotten?
SV: I want the way press evolves to be something other than 'the stripper has a show.' I can have a show because my work is really good, and I want that to be the press I get.
AFH: Sure, but you're aware that the stripper tag line probably won't go away.
SV: No, it won't and I'm not embarrassed by it. It was a part of me for ten years, off and on. It's been the right choice.
AFH: Why do you feel that's been such a point of contact for the press since, really, there are a lot of women in the art world who did stints in some kind of sex work at some point? Maybe it's not as public, but it's in a lot of women's backgrounds and often was an experience they find rewarding or inspiring.
SV: Well, I think the provocative images of Diana and Rachel W. combined with the slogan "Paint Stripper." But on a more profound level - it's just the boxes people get put in. There are millions of single parents, and millions of not formally educated people doing creative pursuits.
AFH: Do you think there is any real connection between your art and your experiences as an ex-stripper?
SV: I was making very aggressive provocative paintings. Whether the Rachel paintings, or the Diana paintings, I've sensed over the three or four years that I've been in getting press attention, I've sensed that it has not been that long since the woman painter was not allowed in the Royal Academy, and not allowed to paint nude men, and thee is such a huge body of work that men have made, versus the small body of work made by women, that I am not surprised to get this response.
'Elizabeth and Lassie', 6' x 7', Acrylic on canvas, 2005
AFH: How are you connecting the response to your work, to the historical neglect of women in art?
SV: After hundreds of years of women being depicted as whores in paintings, I'm not surprised that as an artist coming from that industry, I'm getting a lot of attention. I was a stripper, and now I am maker of the art. There is a certain comedy to that. Comedy to me might not be comedy to everyone.
AFH: Are you talking about revenge?
SV: No, success.
AFH: Often that's the same thing.
SV: It's all complicated.
AFH: The sex industry is a topic that's increasingly popular in contemporary art.
SV: I guess I am not that interested in expressing my personal history so literally. The image that comes pretty close is called "The Lodge." It's connected with the theory that Jack the Ripper was being protected by the Freemasons, who were members of "Lodges". It was originally one of the Diana series, and also I worked in a hostess club called The Directors Lodge in Mason's Yard. It's an improvisation, but it ends up coming quite close to the bone.
AFH: Are there differences for you between painting a memorial portrait of someone like Rachel Whitear, who was unknown when she was alive, and painting a figure like Diana, who was so significant on such a mass level?
SV: They are all different parts of me. They are all projections of things I like, or want, or am afraid of. They are literally parts of me mirrored out. With Rachel, there are connections for me of being 13 or 14 in a bed-sit, being pretty vulnerable. In that, there is that image of a girl in a bed-sit and I connect to it. Anyone who survives anything is a soldier. They are heroes.
AFH: Sure, but neither Rachel nor Diana survived. They both died.
SV: I don't think of victims. I think of soldiers. Diana taking her kids on the chute in a funfair, even if she lived to be 100, that would have been historical and heroic. Royalty did not do that, but she did. I think a lot of these people I paint are quite brave.
AFH: Have you met any of the living people you paint?
SV: No, but I've had emails off of Chantelle and Preston.
AFH: What's her spelling like? Does she use emotioncons?
SV: Actually, I've only had emails off of Preston. He is a bright, bright boy.
'Pete and Elton', 2005
6' x 7', acrylic on canvas
AFH: What do you think of Pete D.?
SV: I think it depends on what his new album is like. He might need to fuck up a little more.
AFH: He seems over his quota already.
SV: No, sometimes real talent only comes when you're a little older. You need to really fuck up and survive it and then maybe the talent, maybe Pete's talent, will kick in. I think, as you get older, that you realize you
just can't fuck up any more.
AFH: You get tired early.
SV: You can't physically or mentally pick yourself up. Like when you were a kid. You then need to stop yourself up and focus on what matters. Pete has got all the icon stuff but when you are slightly self-destructive and everyone says you're crap, then you don't think 'I'll prove them wrong.' Sometimes you think "it's not fucking worth it." And you don't bother. It's a very private world where the buzz in your life is actually creating but when you're exposed, the private creative thing is very vulnerable.
AFH: You have a small cameo painting here of Tracey Emin, looking almost like Jackie Kennedy. Do you feel a particularly strong affinity for her as an artist, or a media figure?
AFH: Kate and Tracey, they are incredibly strong. When I was a child, coming to London, I always thought that if you kept your vulnerability and never were afraid to say that you were afraid - then you would be stronger than the person who wanted to hide all that. That was always my theory, but you can get very, very hurt like that. Diana saying, "There were three of us in this marriage" or talking about getting a colonic, she was so brave but so vulnerable. With Tracey, the essence of her revelations, her abortions and all, and relationships or upsets - or with me with all my bits and bobs. It can be painful and humiliating having your private life exposed. Kate doesn't speak, but I imagine she must feel great pain at having her private life discussed for decades. And Tracey is just amazing. I think she is an Amazon.
AFH: She is a cool lady.
SV: She is. But I don't think I could do what she does and have a public image like that, and keep being as creative as she.
AFH: But don't you?
SV: No. I am not a very social person really.
Stella Vine
Until 23 September
Modern Art Oxford
30 Pembroke Street
Oxford OX1 1BP
T: + 44 (0)1865 722733
All images copyright Stella Vine
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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