Stella Vine: Difference between revisions
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After a difficult relationship with her stepfather, she left home and in her teens, had a son, with whom she moved from Northumberland to London. She worked in various jobs, including as a stripper. She joined the NYT ([[National Youth Theatre]] of Britain) in 1983, and the [[Academy of Live and Recorded Arts]]. |
After a difficult relationship with her stepfather, she left home and in her teens, had a son, with whom she moved from Northumberland to London. She worked in various jobs, including as a stripper. She joined the NYT ([[National Youth Theatre]] of Britain) in 1983, and the [[Academy of Live and Recorded Arts]]. |
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In 2003 she opened her own gallery Rosy Wilde in East London, and rose to prominence in 2004 when [[Charles Saatchi]] bought a painting by her of [[Princess Diana]], which provoked media controversy, as did a subsequent painting of drug victim, [[Rachel Whitear]]. A major show of her work was held in 2007 in [[Modern Art Oxford]], which won over some previously hostile critics. |
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Her work is figurative painting with subject matter drawn from either her personal life of family, friends and school, or rock stars, royalty and celebrities. Paintings by her of the model [[Kate Moss]] have become well known through press reproduction. She has also provided clothing designs for |
Her work is figurative painting with subject matter drawn from either her personal life of family, friends and school, or rock stars, royalty and celebrities. Paintings by her of the model [[Kate Moss]] have become well known through press reproduction. She has also provided clothing designs for [[Top Shop]]. |
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==Early life== |
==Early life== |
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Revision as of 19:43, 8 December 2008
Stella Vine (born Melissa Jane Robson, 1969) is an English artist, who lives and works in London.
After a difficult relationship with her stepfather, she left home and in her teens, had a son, with whom she moved from Northumberland to London. She worked in various jobs, including as a stripper. She joined the NYT (National Youth Theatre of Britain) in 1983, and the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts.
In 2003 she opened her own gallery Rosy Wilde in East London, and rose to prominence in 2004 when Charles Saatchi bought a painting by her of Princess Diana, which provoked media controversy, as did a subsequent painting of drug victim, Rachel Whitear. A major show of her work was held in 2007 in Modern Art Oxford, which won over some previously hostile critics.
Her work is figurative painting with subject matter drawn from either her personal life of family, friends and school, or rock stars, royalty and celebrities. Paintings by her of the model Kate Moss have become well known through press reproduction. She has also provided clothing designs for Top Shop.
Early life
Stella Vine was born Melissa Jane Robson in Alnwick, Northumberland, England. Her name was changed to Melissa Jordan after her stepfather's name; she subsequently changed it to Stella Vine in 1995, inspired by Andy Warhol names, as "I didn't feel like I belonged to either of my fathers' families."[1] She lived with her mother who was a seamstress and her grandmother who was a secretary. Her mother remarried when she was seven, and they relocated to Norwich. In 1981, she won a silver cup for "most original act" for a mime in a "Junior Startime" talent competition at the Norwich Theatre Royal.[2] After a difficult relationship with her stepfather, she was briefly fostered aged 13, and then moved into a bedsit, where she started a relationship with a 24-year-old caretaker. Two years later she became pregnant.
She moved with her baby into a home for single parents and then to London, where she joined the NYT (National Youth Theatre of Britain) in 1983, and the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, London, 1987-1990 where she formed a close relationship with the musician and film maker Ross Newell, they collaborated on several creative projects. She worked as a cleaner, waitress, stripper and in hostess clubs such as The Windmill and Miranda Club in London's Soho area. For five years she also performed as an actress in provincial theatres around the UK, as well as running her own improvised theatre company Minx Productions and playing with her band Victoria Falls.
In the late 1980s, Vine met and auditioned for film director Mike Leigh:[3]
- I saw Meantime by Mike Leigh in the late 80's, and it became my dream, to act or direct in improvised films. I met him in my early twenties, had a couple of auditions with him, he said "I can understand why you want to be other people."[3]
In text for a group show Chockerfuckingblocked in 2003, she said, "Perhaps these works are my other people."[3]
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She attended part-time art classes at the private Hampstead School of Art in 1999 - 2001 and began to paint members of her family, as well as celebrities who fascinated her, such as Mike Leigh, PJ Harvey and Sylvia Plath. In June 2001 she was exhibited for the first time in a public show, in the Vote Stuckist show by the Stuckists art group, with paintings of Sylvia Plath, her step father, a stripper and a life painting from Hampstead School of Art.[4] She participated in the group's activities and took part in a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. She founded the Westminster Stuckists group, which she soon renamed The Unstuckists. In August 2001 she married Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckists, in New York. They did not live together, and separated after eight weeks. She had severed links with the Stuckists by the end of the year.
She studied Philosophical Aesthetics with Johnathan Lahey Dronsfield at Birbeck College in 2002 - 2003, attending the course Performance After Warhol with Professor Gavin Butt in 2002, and Women's Work with Kathy Battista at Tate Modern.
Recognition
In 2003 Vine opened the Rosy Wilde gallery in East London in a former butchers shop to show emerging artists.[5] This not-for-profit art space was on the verge of bankruptcy, when Charles Saatchi purchased her painting of Princess Diana Hi Paul Can You Come Over..., showing the Princess with heavy eyes and blood on from her lips. Thick red text painted on the canvas said, "Hi Paul can you come over I'm really frightened", a reference to Diana's butler Paul Burrell.
The purchase resulted in considerable media coverage, which focused on the controversial nature of the painting, as well as the fact that the painting had been bought for only £600 from an unknown artist, who was a single mother and an ex-stripper. Saatchi had discovered the painting in a show called Girl on Girl in Cathy Lomax's Transition Gallery, which is housed in a converted garage in Hackney. Vine had originally wanted to price the painting at £100. Lomax described this painting:
- Stella Vine's work deals with her fascination with the trashy and the dark. Underlying this is a sometimes contradictory love for her subjects. Hi Paul Can You Come Over... examines that pivotal moment in the standing of the British Monarchy, the death of Princess Diana and the horror of her crash. All the conspiracy theories are summed up in this painting as a wild eyed and tiara clad Diana cries for help whilst painterly blood drips from her luscious lips.[6]
A subsequent purchase by Saatchi of Vine's painting of Rachel Whitear (also with blood running from the mouth) created further media reaction, as Whitear was a former drug user, whose body was due for exhumation. Vine refused to acquiesce to the parents' request, backed by the police, not to exhibit the painting, then on view in the Saatchi Gallery in the New Blood show. Saatchi had delegated to her the decision to keep the work on display or withdraw it.
Vine's promotion by Saatchi brought a reaction from the Stuckists who claimed that her work had been influenced by theirs, and that both she and Saatchi were benefiting from their ideas without due acknowledgement. Vine disputed that there had been any influence. She and former husband Thomson engaged in artistic and personal recriminations in the media. Thomson then reported Saatchi to the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) but the complaint was dismissed.
The media attention left Vine depressed and even suicidal.[7] She subsequently sold her gallery, and travelled abroad, teaching art to children in Spain. She moved back to her home town of Alnwick, where she presented work to the local Bailiffgate museum, and then returned to London, living in a hotel for a short while in Montague Street; she said, "... as I couldn't make a mess in the hotel, I was painting in the van because I had to get work ready for a show in New York".[8]
Vine moved to a flat in London's Bloomsbury district, opposite the British Museum, feeling at home with the historic character of the area. She continued with an erratic, bohemian life, using a local Camera Café as her office.[8] There followed a series of solo shows in Israel, Los Angeles, London and New York, whilst group shows included the second Prague Biennale. Also in 2005, her solo show of new paintings Stellawood was staged at Tim Jefferies' gallery in Mayfair, London. At this time Vine collaborated with the artist James Jessop for the exhibition Fame at the This Way Up Gallery above the Dragon Bar in East London. The installation of paintings was based on the New York graffiti scene of the 1980's, including depictions of Fab Five Freddy, Keith Haring and Blondie.
In 2005, her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over... was nominated as one of the ten worst paintings in Britain in The Guardian.[9] Shortly after, a new painting of Princess Diana, Murdered, Pregnant and Embalmed, by Vine was bought by George Michael for £25,000, reported in The Sun newspaper which condemned it as "sick".[10]
Vine's large painting of Kate Moss, Holy Water Cannot Help You Now, was widely reproduced in the media. Moss has also appeared in other Vine paintings, painted during the media scandal regarding the model's alleged cocaine use. Vine herself admitted to a four-month cocaine addiction.[11] She said, "I had been painting Kate Moss for a long time, both before the time of her crisis and during it. I felt very strongly for her—she's a hard-working mum and it seemed as if suddenly the world turned against her."[8]
Vine was a curator for the Noise Festival, a festival of art for under 25 year olds, launched at Tate Liverpool in April 2006.[12] In June 2006, she gave a talk at Tate Modern on "the contrived eroticism" of Sleeping Girl, a 1943 a painting by Balthus.[13] In August 2006, she was featured in the tabloids, when her painting of Celebrity Big Brother stars, Samuel "Ordinary Boy" Preston and Chantelle Houghton, was used as the invitation to their wedding.
In 2006, she re-opened her Rosy Wilde gallery, this time on the first floor above the first Ann Summers sex shop in Soho, London. She commented on her experiences in the commercial gallery world: "The art world is really exactly the same as the sex industry: you have to be completely on guard, you will get shafted, fucked over left, right and centre."[14] Vine said:
I have always been ambitious, no doubt about that. I always felt like I had to reach the dizzy heights of fame and success or whatever the heights are of a number of given professions I have dabbled in, to prove myself, "Stripper of the year", a Bafta or whatever, for me it was by creating something interesting and entertaining or moving, but not by compromising the thing I was creating, that thing had to reach those heights, I guess it's about being accepted and loved a bit or a lot.[2]
In March 2007, Vine was the judge for a UK nationwide art competition held by Visto Brahma.
July – September 2007, the first major solo show of Vine's work was held at Modern Art Oxford.[15] The show included paintings which had not previously had much exposure, and also work made specially for the show, including a Princess Diana series of paintings.[15] A book to accompany it had an essay by Germaine Greer.[15] Richard Dorment of The Daily Telegraph, who had previously described her work as "crappy", said "she isn't a great painter," but "Stella Vine is bang on the money: the paintings in her first solo show skewer celebrity culture with a vitality and truth that can't be faked".[16] At the same time the Stuckists, angry at their omission from her biograpy, held a rival show I Won't Have Sex with You as Long as We're Married, words apparently said by Vine to Thomson on their wedding night.[17] Tate gallery Chairman Paul Myners visited both shows in succession.[18]
In July 2007, Vine collaborated with Topshop clothing chain, creating a limited edition fashion range inspired by her artworks. These included T-shirts, vest tops, and T-shirt dresses, the labels designed in pink glitter.[19] In November, she perfomed the poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath, in the Purcell Room, at the Southbank Centre in London, as part of Art of The Visual, a symposium organized by Sally Bayley. In March 2008, a portrait of Vine, taken by photographer Venetia Dearden, was part of the North Face exhibition at Alnwick Castle, comprising ten photographs from the National Portrait Gallery's collection.[20] In December 2008, Robert Diament became her agent and manager.
Vine lives and works in London.
Collections
Vine's work is in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery; and David Roberts.[21]
Critical response
Initially Vine's work was not well received by many critics. In 2004, David Lee, the editor of The Jackdaw, called her a "rotten, talentless painter"[22] and Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph critic, wrote her off: "It's trash. It is another stab at creating the visual equivalent of tabloid journalism."[23] However, Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times critic, who singled her out for praise in his otherwise hostile review of the Saatchi Gallery's New Blood show, has continued to champion her: "although I didn’t much want to like Vine’s contribution, I found I did. It had something." He saw "a combination of empathy and cynicism that can be startling."[24]
In 2007, Richard Dorment also changed his opinion of Vine's paintings thanks to her show, Stella Vine: Paintings at Modern Art Oxford in 2007, saying "Well blow me down, she's good after all. Stella Vine is bang on the money: the paintings in her first solo show skewer celebrity culture with a vitality and truth that can't be faked"[25]. Another art critic Lynne Barber commented, "I think she's the real deal" in The Observer newspaper.[26]
Andrew Nairne, director of Modern Art Oxford, said in the Summer brochure of the gallery, "she will be discovered to be one of the most remarkable painters of our time".[27] Germaine Greer wrote in the show catalogue, "Stella Vine remains viscerally connected to the facts of her life, she is not her own hero. Her art is not performance", and that Vine "seizes on her celebrity subject and throttles her into paint, smearing her lipstick and melting her eye-makeup, she is as implacable as any rapist."[28]
Ana Finel-Honigman wrote in her introduction to an interview with Vine on the Saatchi Gallery web site: "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."[29]
Notes and references
- ^ "Girlcrush", Stella Vine blog, 8 March, 2006 Retrieved April 2, 2006
- ^ a b "Harry Pye", Stella Vine blog, 11 March 2006. Retrieved 2 April 2006.
- ^ a b c "Stella Vine biog", stellavine.com. Retrieved 7 December 2008.
- ^ "The transformation of Stella Vine's art" stuckism.com. Accessed 24 April 2006
- ^ "Rosy Wilde", Rosy Wilde. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ [http://cathylomax.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_cathylomax_archive.html Cathy Lomax blog, 19 February 2004. Retrieved 1 April 2006.
- ^ Eyre, Hermione. "Completing my new show was the only thing that saved me from suicide", 15 July 2007. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ a b c Williams-Akoto. "My Home: Stella Vine, artist", The Independent, 30 November 2005. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ "Ten of the worst" The Guardian 2005
- ^ Iggulden, Caroline. "George's sick Di portrait", The Sun, 30 August 2008. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Keating, Matt. "My mentor", The Guardian, 10 December 2005. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Noise Festival (dead link).
- ^ "The Long Weekend", Tate. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Smith, David (2006)"Art? It's like the sex trade" The Observer, 23 April 2006. Retrieved 23 April 2006.
- ^ a b c "Stella Vine: Paintings", Modern Art Oxford. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Dorment, Richard. "Stella Vine: Well blow me down, she's good after all", The Daily Telegraph, 28 August 2007. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Moody, Paul. "Everyone's talking about Stella Vine", The Guardian, 12 July 2007. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Duff, Oliver. "Legal sharks circle round Davis and his chief of staff", (3rd story), The Independent, 27 July 2007. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ "Stella Vine for Top Shop", Top Shop, 27 July 2007. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ "North Face", ilikemuseums.com. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Gleadell, Colin. "Art sales: galleries chase a new face in the collector crowd", 7 February 2006. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
- ^ Owen, Paul. "From the art publications", The Guardian, 14 July 2004. Retrieved 8 August 2008.
- ^ Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph
- ^ "The Picture of Health?", The Sunday Times, November 27, 2005 Retrieved March 29, 2006
- ^ Dorment, Richard. "Stella Vine: Well blow me down, she's good after all", The Daily Telegraph, 28 August 2007. Retrieved 8 August 2008.
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/jul/08/art
- ^ http://www.artshub.co.uk/uk/news.asp?sc=1&sId=175372&catId=0
- ^ Stella Vine: Paintings, Modern Art Oxford, 2007.
- ^ Honigman, Ana Finel. "Stella Vine in conversation with Ana Finel Honigman", Saatchi Gallery 2007. Retrieved 8 August 2008.
Further reading
- Nairne, Andrew and Greer, Germaine. Stella Vine: Paintings (Modern Art Oxford, 2007) ISBN 978-1901352344 [1]
- Alleyne, R (2004-02-24). "First blood to Saatchi as a star is born". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Deveney, C (2004-03-14). "Stripped bare". Scotland on Sunday. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Morris, S (2004-03-16). "Gallery urged not to show portrait of dead addict". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Johnston, I (2004-03-21). "Former husband of artist Vine denies paying her to marry him". Scotland on Sunday. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Ito, T (August, 2005). "Stella Vine". Interviews. fogless. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - "Alnwick Sensation". Inside Out. BBC. 2004-09-27. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Januszczak, W (2007-06-10). "The paint stripper". The Times. Retrieved 2007-09-28.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - The Stuckists Punk Victorian. National Museums Liverpool (2004). ISBN 1-902700-27-9.
External links
