A STRIPPER with no training as a painter has found herself in the art market’s spotlight after Charles Saatchi bought her first painting.
Stella Vine, 35, was astonished to learn that Britain’s foremost collector of contemporary art had bought her portrait of a bleeding Diana, Princess of Wales, for £600 — the pay for four nights’ work in a strip club.
When Mr Saatchi buys and sells, the art world takes note. His activities are regarded as a barometer of the market. Damien Hirst, the animal pickler, and Tracey Emin, best-known for her unmade bed, are among the artists whose reputations have been made by Mr Saatchi’s interest in them.
“I really love your painting,” he had told Ms Vine, after noticing it at the Transition Gallery in North London. Ms Vine, a friend of the gallery’s owner who had been included in a show of emerging artists, said that Mr Saatchi had said: “ ‘How much is that? I’ll have it’. I couldn’t believe it.”
The artist, who is a single mother, had until recently performed at the Windmill Club in Soho. Now she has moved to a smaller venue in London.
Her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over, which shows the Princess begging for help from her butler Paul Burrell, will be featured in an exhibition from Mr Saatchi that is to open next month, New Blood. Ms Vine painted the work after reading that the Princess had believed that there were plans to kill her.
Ms Vine said her dream is to become a full-time artist. It was the “dark side” of stripping that she wanted to get away from, she said. “You meet some wonderful women — people in the law, nursing and single parents trying to get by,” she said. “But you also meet a lot of dark men and it is easy to get sucked into dodgy stuff. You’ve got to be really tough inside to maintain who you are.”
Ms Vine left home at 13 and became pregnant at 16 by the caretaker at the bedsits where she was living. She eventually left him and went to a drama school in Wandsworth.
She worked as a waitress but was not making enough to live on, and found work in hostess bars and strip clubs, dancing nude. She said: “At one point, I was totally broke. I began table-dancing in Wembley, earning £20 a night. I was struggling.”
A year after opening its doors at County Hall, the Saatchi Gallery will feature previously unseen work by a new generation of artists in its new show. The exhibition features a vibrating mummy by a New Zealand artist, Francis Upritchard; a travelling theatre caravan constructed from old tables and cupboards by an English artist, Brian Griffiths; and taxidermal horses’ bodies posed like Henry Moore sculptures by a Belgian artist, Berlinde de Bruyckere.
Since its opening, the Saatchi Gallery has attracted more than half a million visitors. The forthcoming exhibition will fill most of the 40,000 sq ft gallery, although works by the Chapman Brothers, Emin and Hirst will also be on view.
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