Stella Vine

Stella Vine (born Melissa Jane Robson, 1969) is an English artist, who lives and works in London.

Her work is figurative painting, with subjects drawn from personal life, as well as from rock stars, royalty, and other celebrities.

Stella Vine was born Melissa Jane Robson in Alnwick, Northumberland, England in 1969.

In the late 1980s, Vine met the film director Mike Leigh.

Vine moved into a home for single parents and then relocated to London, where Vine joined the National Youth Theatre of Britain in 1983, and the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts in 1987.

Vine lived with musician Ross Newell, "the love of her life" for over four years, but "stupidly" left him for another relationship; two years later she wanted to restart the relationship with Newell, but he no longer trusted her.

After seeing Leigh's film Meantime (1983), it became her ambition to direct and act in improvised films.

When Vine was in her early twenties she auditioned for him twice.

She changed her name to "Stella Vine" in 1995, inspired by Andy Warhol.

Vine lived with her mother, a seamstress, and her grandmother, a secretary.

Her mother remarried when she was seven, and they relocated to Norwich.

Vine said she was "making things and performing music and plays, as far back as I can remember."

When she was a child, she used to make water colours in the library, painting Queen Victoria, and copying the Pre-Raphaelites and Greek Mythology.

Prompted by a difficult relationship with her stepfather, Vine left home at 13.

Vine lived in the Argyle Street, Norwich squat before being briefly fostered in Brixton, London.

Vine then moved back to Norwich and began to teach herself in the Norwich Reference Library.

Vine's first job was at age 14 in a local Norwich cake shop.

During this time, she entered a relationship with a 24 year-old caretaker, and, at the age of 17, gave birth to a son, Jamie.

In 1995, she abandoned her ambitions to be an actress and became a hostess in a Mayfair club, where most of the activity was talking, often to elderly men, and "Any negotiation for sexual favours, or your time, or conversation, was very old-fashioned. Very English".

Using the name "Stella Vine", she became a lap dancer.

She worked as a stripper at Miranda's and later at the Windmill Club in Soho to pay the rent, whilst living with her son in bedsits.

In 2001, she was exhibited by the Stuckists group, which she joined for a short time; she was married briefly to the group co-founder, Charles Thomson.

In 2003, she opened her own gallery Rosy Wilde in East London.

In 2004, Charles Saatchi bought Hi Paul can you come over I'm really frightened (2003), a painting of Diana, Princess of Wales, which provoked media controversy, as did a subsequent purchase of a painting of drug victim Rachel Whitear.

In 2004, by which time Newell was settled in a marriage with children, Vine said that he was still her "soul mate".

Describing how she decided to become an artist and what inspired her, Vine said a "wonderful ex-boyfriend" called Ross had always told her she should become a painter, and that she had always made "crazy doodles".

For five years Vine performed as an actress, touring provincial theatres around the United Kingdom, as well as running her own improvised theatre company, Minx Productions, and playing with her band, Victoria Falls.

Vine said it was difficult to tour with a small child but earned her Equity Card by performing with Durham Theatre Company.

Amongst other roles, she played Barclay in Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw at Theatre Clwyd, The National Theatre of Wales: she was a fan of Orton, whom she discovered at drama school.

Vine said she would wake up early and dance to songs by PJ Harvey before improvising around her character to prepare for each day's rehearsals.

Vine remembers seeing "wonderful paintings by Gainsborough" whilst rehearsing at Kenwood House, London.

Later work has featured Kate Moss as a subject, as in Holy water cannot help you now (2005).

In 2006, she re-opened her gallery in Soho, London.

The first major show of her work was held in 2007 at Modern Art Oxford.

In the same year, Vine designed clothing for Topshop.

One man she met, whom she described as a "sugar daddy" and with whom she was still in contact in 2007, looked after her for six years, and in 1998 took her to New York, where he introduced her to the Frick Collection.

She recalled in 2007 that "the candy coloured" room of Gainsborough proved such a rush of excitement that she had to sit down.

Januszczak said that this was the moment Vine "realised how much prettiness was possible in art".

Vine's paintings are the most well documented part of her artistic output.

She paints in both oil and acrylic with "trademark drips of paint falling from the lips and chin" of her subjects.