When she was 21, painter Frances Bell was "living in the trunk of [her] car" who earns £10,000 a year. "All the stereotypes about starving in an attic room turn out to be true," she says of an artist's early career.
By then she had taken a course at the Charles H Cecil Studios in Florence, which was "small", "very intensive" and "nothing like a modern university" - more akin to "17th Century Training: All About Repetition, accuracy' .
"I very slowly started doing catastrophically bad commissions... from friends' mothers," she jokes. A year later, at the age of 22, everything changed. She won the De Laszlo foundation prize for young artists. Since then, she has become one of the country's most talented and sought-after portraitists.
Bell, 41, lives in Northumberland with her husband - she hilariously calls him a 'colour-blind country bumpkin' - and two children aged 11 and 9. She often travels to London on assignments, where we meet on a sunny Wednesday morning.
"I'm constitutionally not set up for city life," she says, but later admits that London is "the heart of our artistic establishment." And that's where the money is.
Her most high-profile works include portraits of socialite and self-styled 'Queen Sloane', Henry Conway, and of the former president of the Royal Society of Portraiture, Andrew Festing - whose own commissions include portraits of the Queen and the Duke of Kent .
Bell's portrait of Festing took her to the finals of The International last year: a renowned competition organized by The Portrait Society of America.
Awards, and the patronage behind them, are crucial to the future of art, says Bell. She has won 21, including the prestigious Valeria Sykes New Light Prize last year and the William Lock Portrait Prize in 2021. "£20,000," she says. "That was damn surreal."
Our conversation comes at a dangerous time for the art market, crippled by budget cuts and the impact of the cost of living. Galleries are closing while artists are still underpaid. "I meet artists all the time who have endured extraordinary uphill battles, one of which is almost always leaving with college debt," Bell says. "Without prizes, I don't know how you would do it."
The cliché of the struggling artist exists for a reason, and it's even more challenging after becoming a mother, Bell says. "You want to keep the thread of your work going. It is more difficult to take up wholesale again if you stop for five years and start again. I kept painting [while raising children]which made it harder 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, pastoral childhood in Suffolk, which she variously describes as 'Wordsworthian', 'unsexy' and 'wild in a fun way'.
Bell, a self-described "horse kid," found that she had an eye for drawing animals just like her mother. She was sent to a school in Yorkshire, where she was blessed with an excellent art teacher, with the equally wonderful name of Mr Baby, who raised the 'stormy' young artist. "I wasn't a fetal prodigy at all," she adds. "I got frustrated and threw the pencils away."
In fact, she failed to achieve an A in Art A-level. "I got a B," sighs Bell, quoting from her examiner's report: "We no longer reward these traditional types with As."
It was the late 1990s and the Young British Artists were in full swing. One of Bell's school outings had been to Sensation, the landmark 1997 contemporary art exhibition owned by Charles Saatchi.
The show became infamous for works such as the Chapman brothers' perverted child mannequins, in which anuses replaced mouths and noses with penises. These were alongside Marcus Harvey's reproduction of Myra Hindley's police mugshot from children's handprints, Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde and for Marc Quinn's sculptural self-portraits made from his frozen blood; and of course My Bed, possibly Tracey Emin's most iconic work.
"I wanted to be a traditional artist," Bell says. "That was my passion." Art schools should not succumb to the whims and misery of the market, or to whatever is fashionable at the time, she continues. Even if fashion is more conceptual art, "drawing will always be useful."
British schools used to teach drawing as part of the primary curriculum: giving up this has been "a great loss", Bell thinks. "It's such an innate thread in our fabric to pick up a pencil and draw."
"You build this strange, three-dimensional thing," Bell says of portraits. She loves that Instagram has democratized our art consumption, but adds that nothing can replace seeing paintings in person.
Especially in portraits, the interaction between painter and sitter is as decisive for the brushstroke as for the light. You are, Bell says, "distilling and trying to get what they're saying onto the canvas."
John E Walker, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the same year Bell saw the Sensations show, was one such sitter whose conversation was integral to her portrayal.
She never intended to follow his musings on enzymes and adenosine triphosphate ("he did, bless him, try to explain it to me") - but she wanted to "capture his face while he was talking" and portray where they were could identify with. : his passion.
The artist becomes, in Bell's words, "an amateur anatomist, an amateur psychologist, and an anthropologist" whose job is to translate the atmosphere around their subjects onto the canvas.
She recently painted a half-naked couple. "It was incredibly organic," says Bell, and refreshing to portray the intimacy of a marriage without sexualizing it. "No feather boa," she laughs, mimicking a model lying suggestively across the couch.
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, which is why it "deserves to be the most famous painting in the world," says Bell. .
Although her own painting offers a soft and naturalistic view of the female form, she is not 'censorious' of the male gaze (although 'there was a trend where every older woman in a photo I saw had a hot water bottle on her lap .. and that really annoyed me").
Although the "pressure of idealism and mannerism" has persisted in depictions of the female body for centuries, some artists - such as Rembrandt or Sargent - have produced notable examples of female portraiture.
That said, Bell is a big fan of women painting women ("there's a hashtag there for you," she jokes). The 'erotic' tends to disappear, in favor of the 'much more interesting psychological elements' that come to the fore.
Our conversation returns to the artistic establishment and London's market monopoly. Bell wants art schools and galleries to be spread across the country 'in a beautiful, democratic way'.
Financing is the main issue, but Bell has a pragmatic view. "I'm always a little confused: How are you going to get government money to individual artists?" She puts forward what some say is a controversial idea: financial incentives to encourage erudite collectors to be more supportive of the art. Which, loosely translated, could easily mean: tax breaks for the super-rich in exchange for their artistic patronage.
It's funny, I notice, how a conversation about art always turns into a conversation about money. Bell agrees and takes aim at a system that impoverishes young artists. "Institutions need to stop saying, 'Oh, that would be really good [your CV] if you worked for us... for free," she says. "You have to complete the circle of payment, of patronage."
The question of who that patron is is causing even more controversy: perhaps the world's most prestigious portrait painting competition in decades was the BP Portrait Award, sponsored by the oil and gas company until 2022.
So is there a world where people can visit galleries for free, artists have no trouble and the entire ecosystem is funded by companies or individuals with bottomless pockets and a squeaky clean track record? The answer is of course no.
The largest companies in the world today - all potential future sponsors - are in technology, a field I'd like to ask Bell about. "There are huge questions about copyright and ownership," she says of art produced by AI, likening such generators to meat grinders that swallow and regurgitate content from real artists like her. "There should be a moratorium on accepting works of art [created by a robot] participating in art competitions."
For Bell, art made by the human hand will always be superior, and that comes down to the story of how it was produced; of human interaction between painter and sitter. It is something intangible that no algorithm can replicate; and that gives a painting its inexpressible liveliness.
"Art is a physical, tactile trade," 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 if you have no idea how it was made," she concludes. "It's a gateway to a world. I don't want to sound cynical, but no screen can do that.'
Frances Bell's work will be on display as part of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters' annual exhibition, from May 9 to May 18; therp.nl
