Portrait of an ex-husband's revenge

The vicious feud between artists Charles Thomson and his former wife, Stella Vine, has spilled over on to canvas. Anthony Barnes reports

Sunday, 3 September 2006

As an act of naked revenge, it is a work of art. The artist Stella Vine, who found fame when Charles Saatchi took her under his wing, is laid bare by her former husband in a series of explicit, humiliating nude portraits at a major exhibition.

The artworks will reignite a simmering feud between Vine and Charles Thomson, which has seen them trading verbal salvos in media interviews without actually exchanging a word with each other. Thomson - co-founder of anti-conceptual art movement the Stuckists - himself concedes the works will leave her "pissed off" and "angry".

His paintings, to be exhibited at the Stuckists' first major central London exhibition, are titled simply Stripper and Strip Club, though it is clear who inspired them. The publicity material for the show, which opens next month, even spells out that they are "explicit images of his ex-wife".

They will be seen by many as an act of revenge for the brevity of their marriage. Thomson, 53, said the works were not intended as a public attack, more a way of privately dealing with his own emotions through his art after their relationship crumbled.

Vine, 37, who formerly worked as a stripper, found notoriety when her painting of Diana, Princess of Wales, daubed with the words "Hi Paul, can you come over I'm really frightened", was exhibited by Saatchi.

As a former member of the Stuckists, her association with the collector infuriated her former compatriots who claimed she had taken their ideas and sidled up to the enemy. She achieved further notoriety when she created a work depicting Rachel Whitear, who had died of a heroin overdose, to the anger of the dead girl's parents.

Vine, who opens her own solo show at the Modern Art Oxford gallery next month, developed her skills attending classes at Hampstead School of Art, and after falling in with the Stuckists exhibited her work for the first time at a small display in Brixton, south London, in 2001. Within weeks she had married Thomson at a ceremony in New York's City Hall, but they separated within two months.

Thomson told The Independent on Sunday: "I did these paintings after we broke up - the sort of consolidation period. For me it was a way of working through the emotional after-effects. Basically she had told me a lot of stories about her time in the sex industry and really they were quite gutting. It wasn't very nice hearing them and it left a bit of an emotional scar on me. It was a way of getting them out of my system. I found it quite gruelling to do them."

The Stuckists emerged from a group of artistic friends who once counted Tracey Emin and her then boyfriend Billy Childish among their number. Their devotion to painting as an art form, instead of moving into other experimental areas, led to Emin condemning Childish as "stuck, stuck, stuck", hence the group's name.

Thomson, who stood for Parliament in 2001 against the then Culture secretary Chris Smith, has not spoken to his former wife for four years, although they have traded vicious barbs in newspaper interviews. She has claimed he "exploited" her and is "full of shit", while he has branded her "a mercurial character who thinks nothing about he pain she puts others through".

Thomson said it was the gallery that chose to exhibit the nudes, but he was unapologetic about showing them in public. "She will probably be very pissed off. She'll be angry and very upset because it is one rule for her and another for everyone else. She expects people to understand when she does it. She does Diana with blood coming out of her mouth and looking traumatised and it's fine, but that woman is a mother and her children are still alive.

"She claims it comes from deep within her and it is the same with my pictures. It comes from deep within me and it is important. If she does feel upset, it can't be half as upset as the parents of Rachel Whitear or Diana's sons."

Vine was keeping her counsel about the exhibition when she was informed by The Independent on Sunday. She said: "I have no comment. I've had my dealings with them [the Stuckists] over the past couple of years and I don't want to say anything more."