When she was 21, painter Frances Bell was living “in someone’s trunk.” [her] car” goes for £10,000 a year. “All the stereotypes about starving in the attic are generally true,” he says of the early part of an artist’s career.
By then he had completed a course at the Charles H Cecil Studios in Florence that was “small”, “very intense” and “not at all like a modern university” – more like “17th-century education: everything again and meticulously”.
“Very slowly I started giving horribly bad orders to my friends’ mothers,” he jokes. A year later, when she was 22, everything changed. She won the De Laszlo Foundation award given to young artists. He has since become one of the most successful and sought-after portrait artists in the country.
Bell, 41, who lives with her husband in Northumberland (she hilariously calls him a “colourblind oaf”) and has two children, aged 11 and 9, travels frequently to London for work and we meet there on a sunny Wednesday morning.
“I’m structurally unsuited to city life,” he says, but later concedes that London is “the heart of our artistic establishment.” And that’s where the money is.
His most notable works include portraits of socialite and self-styled ‘Queen Sloane’ Henry Conway and former president of the Royal Society of Portraiture, Andrew Festing (whose commissions include portraits of the Queen and the Duke). City.
Bell’s portrait of Festing took him to the finals of The International last year: a renowned competition hosted by The Portrait Society of America.
Bell says awards and the patronage behind them are vital to the future of the arts. It won 21 awards last year, including the prestigious Valeria Sykes New Light Award and the William Lock Portrait Award in 2021. For this she says “£20,000”. “It was so surreal.”
Our conversation comes at a perilous time for the art market, crippled by funding cuts and the cost of living crisis. Galleries are closing and artists are being paid low wages. “I meet artists all the time who face an extraordinarily difficult challenge, one of which is almost always leaving college with debt,” Bell says. “I don’t know how you would do it without the awards.”
The struggling artist stereotype is there for a reason, and it’s even more challenging after becoming a mother, Bell says. “You want to keep your business flowing. Wholesaling is harder if you quit for five years and start over. I continued painting [while raising children]This made things difficult in the short term but easier in the long term.”
It was Bell’s own mother, an art school graduate, who inspired her love of painting during an idyllic, idyllic childhood in Suffolk; Bell’s painting art has alternately been described as “Wordsworthian,” “unsexy,” and “delightfully wild.”
Bell, who describes herself as a “horse,” realized she had her mother’s eye for drawing animals. He was sent to a school in Yorkshire where he was blessed with a magnificent art teacher by the equally magnificent name of Mr Baby, who nurtured the “tempestuous” young artist. “I was definitely not a fetal genius,” he adds. “I would get angry and throw the pencils away.”
In fact, he failed to get an A at A-Level in art. “I got a B,” Bell says with a sigh, quoting the examiner’s report: “We don’t reward these traditional types with A’s anymore.”
It was the late nineties and the Young British Artists were in full swing. One of Bell’s school trips was to Sensation, the landmark 1997 contemporary art exhibition owned by Charles Saatchi.
The show became famous for the Chapman brothers’ work, including perverted child mannequins with anuses replacing mouths and noses replacing penises. These include Marcus Harvey’s police mugshot of Myra Hindley made from children’s handprints, Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, and Marc Quinn’s sculptural self-portraits made from frozen blood; and of course My Bed, arguably Tracey Emin’s most iconic work.
“I wanted to be a traditional artist,” Bell says. “This was my passion.” Art schools should not bow to the whims and whims of the market or what is fashionable at the time, he continues. Even as more conceptual art becomes obsolete, “drawing will always be useful.”
British schools used to teach drawing as part of the primary school curriculum: Bell thinks it would be “a great loss” to abandon this. “Picking up a pencil and drawing is an innate thread in our tapestry.”
“You build this weird, three-dimensional thing,” Bell says of the portraits. He loves how Instagram has democratized our consumption of art, but adds that nothing can replace seeing paintings in person.
Especially in portraits, the interaction between painter and sitter affects the brush stroke as much as the light. According to Bell, you are “trying to distill what they say and transfer it to the canvas.”
John E Walker, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the same year Bell watched the Sensations show, was one of the models whose speech was an integral part of his portrait.
He would never follow her thoughts about enzymes and adenosine triphosphate (“he did it, bless him, try to explain it to me”) – but he wanted to capture “his talking face” and convey what he could relate to. : his passion.
The artist becomes, in Bell’s words, “an amateur anatomist, an amateur psychologist and anthropologist” whose job it is to convey on canvas the atmosphere around the occupants.
He recently painted a couple of semi-nude paintings. “It was incredibly organic,” Bell says, and it was refreshing to portray the intimacy of a marriage without sexualizing it. “No feather boas,” she laughs, mimicking a model draped suggestively over the sofa.
For hundreds of years, women in paintings were either “saints or sluts”: Da Vinci’s portrait of the Mona Lisa was the first to change the game, and for that reason it “deserves to be the most famous painting in the world,” says Bell. .
Although his own painting offers a gentle and naturalistic approach to the female form, he is not one to “censor” the male gaze (although “in one painting I saw there was a tendency for every old lady to be carrying a hot water bottle on her lap)…and that’s it.” It really bothered me”).
While “idealism and stylistic pressures” have existed for centuries in depictions of the female body, some artists such as Rembrandt and Sargent have created remarkable examples of female portraiture.
However, Bell is a big fan of women painting women (“there’s a hashtag for you here,” she jokes). The “erotic thing” tends to disappear in favor of the “much more interesting psychological elements” that come to the fore.
Our conversation turns to the art establishment and London’s market monopoly. Bell wants to see art schools and galleries spread across the country in a “nice, democratic way.”
Funding is the main issue, but Bell takes a pragmatic perspective. “I’ve always been a little confused by: How do you get government funds to individual artists?” He proposes what some might call a controversial idea: financial incentives that would encourage savvy collectors to become more supportive of art. Loosely translated, this could easily mean: tax breaks for the super-rich in exchange for their artistic patronage.
I noticed it was funny how a conversation about art always turned into a conversation about money. Bell, too, takes aim at a system that impoverishes young artists and acknowledges this. “Institutions need to stop saying ‘oh, this would be really good.’ [your CV] “If you worked for us…for free,” he says, “the pay cycle and the patronage cycle have to be completed to be complete.”
The question of who this boss is raises further debate: For decades, the world’s most prestigious portrait painting competition was the BP Portrait Prize, which the oil and gas company sponsors until 2022.
So, is there a world where people can visit galleries for free, where artists do not struggle, and where the entire ecosystem is financed by companies or private individuals with bottomless wallets and clean records? The answer, of course, is “No!” is.
The biggest companies in the world today (all potential future sponsors) are in the technology space, and this is an area I’d love to ask Bell about. “There are huge copyright and ownership issues,” he says of AI-generated artwork, likening such generators to meat grinders that gobble up and regurgitate content created by real-life artists like himself. “There should be a moratorium on accepting works of art [created by a robot] “I participated in art competitions.”
According to Bell, art created by human hands will always be superior, and this depends on the story of how it was produced; of the human interaction between painter and sitter. It is something abstract that no algorithm can replicate; and this gives the picture its indescribable liveliness.
“Art is a physical, tactile business,” Bell adds. Paintings have a “pulse” that we can only fully appreciate when we see them hanging in galleries. “You want a work of art to wash over you, even though you have no idea how it was made,” he concludes. “This is a portal to a world. “I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but no screen can do that.”
Works by Frances Bell will be shown as part of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ annual exhibition from 9 May to 18 May; therp.co.uk