Alice Instone interview: 'They tend to have warmth and want to help women'

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/15/alice-instone-portrait-painter-interview

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Alice Instone has avoided the temptation of giving her exhibition – to be held in Lamb House, Rye, where Henry James once lived – the title Portrait of a Lady, although she has put the name of James's best-known novel to one of her canvases. Early in her career, she wrote to Cherie Blair, explaining her mission to give women the painterly attention lavished on men. She was thinking of women of influence – the National Portrait Gallery, she points out, is overcrowded with paintings of famous men.

To her amazement, Cherie emailed back. Annie Lennox, approached through her management company, was interested too. Alice has since painted both women and their daughters, plus Baroness Helena Kennedy, Baroness Susan Greenfield, Nicole Farhi, Alice Temperley, Laura Bailey, Caitlin Moran, Emma Freud and Emilia Fox, among others.

The list is long, the process is too, and it is no surprise to learn she often makes friends with sitters. She is a sympathetic mixture of distrait glamour and robust feminism. She would make a magnificent subject for a portrait with her bohemian verve (wearing sequins at elevenses – and mittens). Endearingly, she compares herself to a hairdresser. Mobiles confiscated, her sitters sometimes confide about their love-lives: "You might have thought they would be flinty but they tend to have warmth in common and want to help women."

Recently Instone, 38, swapped life in south London for a beautiful house in Kent where goldfinches feed outside the kitchen window and two-year-old Arlo, the younger of her children, feeds inside the beamed kitchen. The adjoining studio is dominated by the arresting face of Helen McCrory, continuing her acting career on canvas as Lilith, "Adam's wife before Eve". Instone is more than a portraitist. She is a casting director: she dresses women as characters from history and literature. Charmingly, she finds fault with James's heroines for making wrong decisions ("Why couldn't Isabel Archer make the sensible choice and marry nice Jasper?"). In an eye-catching piece entitled <em>She Should Have Known Better</em>, three women have lost their heads.

Instone's way into painting was unconventional. After studying English at UCL and art history at the Courtauld, she taught, travelled and worked as an accounts executive at advertising agency J Walter Thompson. One day, sitting on the grass in Soho Square, a colleague asked what she would ideally like to be. She replied: "An artist." That Christmas, her husband, a financial adviser, bought her a set of paints.

She is honest about the struggle in creating anything, the "low points, the feeling it is all too much with two children and that maybe I haven't anything left to say… " But Henry James helps – she quotes his words as a motto: "We work in the dark; we do what we can."

<em>She Should Have Known Better is at Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex, until 20 Dec. </em>

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