Charles Thomson (artist) - Stella Vine

Stella Vine

See also: Charles Thomson, Stella Vine, and the Stuckists

In June 2000, Thomson gave a talk with Childish at the Salon des Arts in Kensington on Stuckism and Remodernism. It was attended by Stella Vine, who was following Childish after developing a "crush" on him. She subsequently met Thomson on 30 May 2001 at the private view of the Vote Stuckist show in Brixton, where she accepted his invitation to form The Westminster Stuckists group and to exhibit some of her paintings publicly for the first time in the show. On 4 June, she took part in a Stuckist demonstration in Trafalgar Square at the unveiling of Rachel Whiteread's sculpture there. On 10 July, she renamed her group The Unstuckists. In October she had a painting in the first Stuckist show in Paris, curated by Elsa Dax.

Thomson and Vine had a two month relationship and they married on 8 August 2001 in New York. The next day, Vine said she wanted a divorce; they had an intense row, their room in the hotel was "trashed" and Vine told Thomson that she was refusing to have sex with him. She left him and they did not meet again till a week later at East India Club in St James's Square, London. They finally consummated their marriage. He said that eventually he was unable to cope with her vacillations, and she said she could not cope with his controlling behaviour. The marriage ended in 2001 after about two months. They were granted a divorce in October 2003.

In February 2004, after Vine "rose to fame after being championed by Charles Saatchi", Thomson said that he was pleased that she had got success, but it was he and the Stuckists, not Saatchi, who had "discovered" Vine. Vine said that Stuckism was a misogynistic cult, that she had quickly realised that the marriage and the Stuckist group were not right for her, and that her marriage to Thomson was "an utter disaster". During the relationship Thomson had paid off Vine's debts of £20,000, and Vine said she married him because this had been a condition of his funding her: "I couldn't face stripping any more and it was too bloody good to turn down." Thomson said that they had a business arrangement to promote themselves as an art couple, there was no condition of marriage, and that she was "really selling herself short" by saying that was her motivation.

In March 2004, Vine said that she had only seen Thomson once, in an art shop, in the previous two years. She later told The Times that it was "impossible to explain" why she married Thomson, that he didn't "give a s*** about art or the Stuckist movement", and that he saw her as a means of gaining his own publicity: "When I met him and he saw some of my history, he saw dollar signs. He is a very exploitative man." Thomson said she showed herself in a manner to gain the largest amount of attention or sympathy, avoided reality and created a fantasy world : "Now it makes me question a lot of things she told me about her past." In June 2007, Vine said that the marriage was consummated in 2001, a few weeks after the ceremony—"I owed him that"—and Thomson then paid off her debts of £20,000, after which "I've never seen him again."

On 28 March 2004, Thomson reported Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for alleged breaches of the Competition Act and cited as an example Saatchi's promotion of Vine, a situation which made the row "more bitter". The OFT said they did not "have reasonable grounds to suspect that Charles Saatchi is in a dominant position in any relevant market", which Thomson said was "just another cruel smack in the face" for Saatchi. In September 2004, Vine threatened suicide if her work was included in the The Stuckists Punk Victorian show at the Liverpool Biennial, and the owner of the painting withdrew it.

In October 2006, The Stuckists held a group show, Go West, at Spectrum London gallery, including two of Thomson's paintings, Stripper and Strip Club, "explicit images of his ex-wife." Thomson said the works would make Vine "pissed off", but that she had painted images that were far more upsetting for people, that he would prefer her to enjoy them as he did her art and that they were painted as a catharsis not as an attack. Vine said she had no comment.

In July 2007, at the same time as the opening of Vine's major solo show at Modern Art Oxford, Thomson, furious at Vine's refusal to acknowledge her debt to the Stuckists, held a rival Stuckist show at the A Gallery in Wimbledon, I Won't Have Sex with You as Long as We're Married, which Vine apparently said to him on their wedding night.

In September, Thomson wrote in The Jackdaw, criticising the Tate gallery for not having work by a number of figurative painters, among whom he listed Vine, and said she should have been one of that year's Turner Prize nominees for her show at Modern Art Oxford.