Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Packing in her job as a stripper and signing up for part-time art classes paid off for Stella Vine when Charles Saatchi sauntered into her gallery, above a butcher's shop in east London, to take a look around.
A large portrait of the late Princess Diana in a state of emotional distress with paint dripping from her blood-red lips, calling on her butler Paul Burrell for help, originally priced at £100, caught Saatchi's eye and he bought it for £600. Like so many of Saatchi's purchases, it propelled Vine, not least because of the controversy surrounding the painting and her subsequent works of the princess, of Rachel Whitear, a teenage drug addict whose painted image so offended her grieving parents and of Kate Moss's alleged drug use.
The iconic painting of Princess Diana has lost much of its shock value as it hangs at Vine's first major British retrospective, opening today at Modern Art Oxford. But there are other "shockers" that may make up for its now anodyne effect.
Controversy has remained Vine's calling card. While she is still in the process of painting the prostitutes who were murdered in Ipswich last year, it is the images on display - including Princess Diana's car wreck, a portrait of the missing Manic Street Preachers band member, Richey Edwards, with a razor-slashed torso, and the model Lily Cole sitting in a tub of red paint - that are bound to raise eyebrows and cultural debates on the cult of celebrity and the ethical boundaries of the artist.
Other pieces in the exhibition of 100 works, incorporating Vine's trademark drips of paint falling from the lips and chin of her famous subjects, include images of Pete Doherty, Nigella Lawson with a chocolate cake and Courtney Love taking her knickers off in the back of a taxi, as well as an entire series around flame-haired supermodel Cole.
A painting of the Celebrity Big Brother stars, Samuel "Ordinary Boy" Preston and Chantelle Houghton, which was used as the invitation to their wedding, also features in the show, although the couple have since split.
Vine, born Melissa Jane Robson in 1969, has been dividing critical opinion for as long as she has been painting and this comprehensive show is bound to reinvigorate the same hostilities and adulation as previous works. Her examination of celebrity culture has been described as coming from the same tradition as Andy Warhol, the founder of pop art.
Andrew Nairne, director of the Modern Art Oxford, defended Vine's work as highly emotional and bold. "She looks at the mix of who society considers to be important, who we revere and respect. The paintings seem to be made with love and although they seem to have an incredible naïvety in style, they are actually very sophisticated with a great emotional power behind them," he said.
The "Lily Cole" series highlights many of the themes Vine seeks to explore. In the collection, she shows the model holding a pink telephone with the text "Lily breaks up with her boyfriend in Bulgari, Marc Jacobs and Still by J-Lo", while in another, she is shown swooning alongside some tablets with the caption, "Lily overdoses in Marc Jacobs". Mr Nairne said it is the inclusion of an "emotional" life given to the model that gives the work such force.
Germaine Greer is another Vine fan. In her introduction to the catalogue accompanying the show, she writes: "As a woman paints her face every day, Stella Vine paints the painted face, the mask behind which celebrity females take cover even as they flaunt themselves. Paint cannot lie. Every brushstroke threatens disintegration. The mascara runs. The rouge stands out on the cheeks like a bloody bruise. The eyes glitter with unshed tears or is it terror? Or rage? The paint wells and dribbles like the blood of the self-wounded. The surface heaves and slips. Underpainting grins through."
Mr Nairne said the wit in her work is marked by paintings such as Jose and Leya, featuring the Chelsea football club manager, Jose Mourinho as a matinee idol, alongside his dog and accompanied by the text, "I will always love you". The painting is inspired by Mourinho's arrest this year over a dispute about his dog's quarantine status. It was alleged that the Yorkshire terrier was taken out of the country and returned without going into quarantine.
Nairne argues that those who criticise Vine's work for being celebrity obsessed have missed the point. Her work is not only about celebrities, he says, but also about herself. For example, portraits of Moss and a young Princess Diana, both of whose sometimes tumultuous personal lives she identifies with, bear a resemblance to Vine. He said: "She is open to the idea these paintings are about her, that they are self portraits, and that they are actually about her, and by extension, they become about all of us and how we relate to our own self worth".
But others have written Vine off as a tasteless trickster whose shocking subject matter crosses the line into moral reprehensibility. David Lee, the editor of The Jackdaw, has called her a "brainless rotten painter" , while her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over was nominated as one of the 10 worst paintings in Britain. A portrait of Princess Diana, Murdered, Pregnant and Embalmed, which was bought by George Michael for £25,000, was also condemned as "sick" by the red-top tabloids.
Vine has never appeared perturbed by the criticism. She has likened the commercial art world to the sex industry of which she had some knowledge in her former life. She once said: "The art world is exactly the same as the sex industry: you have to be completely on guard, you will get shafted, fucked over left, right and centre."
And for Vine's supporters, there is a suspected agenda against the former stripper and single mother who is regarded as an establishment outsider. "A few critics insist that she is not a real artist, but just trying it on," said Greer, adding, "They think her work is somehow fake, not seeing that it is about faking it, faking everything, from virtue and innocence to orgasms."
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