P. Viktor

Stella and Sylvia

“I think it is such a fine line between staying and going, everyone is just really hanging on by their fingernails in some way and I’m quite fascinated by that. That being on the edge of the cliff”.

I had the recent pleasure of attending a private view of the Stella Vine exhibition showing now at the Modern Art Oxford gallery. The gallery has exhibited high profile works before now, but Stella Vine is perhaps the biggest name they have showcased for some time. Hailed as the new Tracey Emin, Vine is one of those artists that people will probably have heard about in the press, and maybe seen one or two of her more notorious works, but perhaps not much else. I was only vaguely familiar with her work – which in many ways made the private view all the more thrilling.

Much like Tracey Emin, Stella Vine is something of a celebrity in the art world, a sort of post-BritArt/post-Stuckist heroine whose star is ascending much like Emin’s and Damien Hirst’s. (It seems de rigueur these days to be a personality as well as an artist. Celebrity is no longer the privilege of movie stars and musicians. If you do not have a media presence, you can kiss goodbye to getting people interested in your work, whether that be painted, written, or otherwise). Vine unfortunately seems to have a similarly lurid, tabloidy presence as Emin, her work being constantly lambasted by the likes of The Sun and Daily Mail alongside details of her past.

Behind the Painting

We are now already into September, and Summer is dwindling fast, even though the warm weather seems rather determined to stay around to make up for the rather dreadful month of August we had in England. September is always a month of preparation and change. Like the farmers who are harvesting the Summer’s bounty, I guess people too make a sort of self-harvest, airing out those hot August attics full of spiders and stagnant musty air, thus letting in the cooler air of very early Autumn and starting afresh with new challenges and projects. I’ve always liked September, but I guess that’s because I’ve spent about sixty-six percent of my life in academia, and the impressions of the academic year seem so indelible now that I always view summer as a long stagnant period of leisure and eating and replenishment, and then Autumn as a time to get back to work (despite the usual fact that I have been working during the hot months too, just at a slower pace).

The Autumn does promise to be an incredibly taxing time. I will be back at university for my second year studying towards my psychology conversion degree and immersing myself in research and books. But there is always so much to look forward to in the Autumn; the evenings slowly drawing in, leaves filling the streets, Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ night, those beautiful golden magenta afternoons and of course, long walks out in the countryside.