My Pounds 600a-Week Coke Habit Just to Paint ; Controversial Artist Stella Vine Speaks About the Project Inspired by Kate Moss That Drove Her to Addiction and How Only the Love for Her Teenage Son Stopped Her From Attempting Suicide

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WE SIT together, Stella Vine and I, in her Bloomsbury flat, both swaddled in blankets as the bright winter sun, like the small electric heater on the paint-spattered floor, decides to give up on us. It seems as if the room is crammed with blondes - Paula Yates smiles down from one large canvas, Sienna Miller from another and a painting of Princess Diana shadowed by a paparazzo lens leans against the kitchen wall.

Vine wraps herself up tight in her checked blanket and shifts positions on her plastic chair. She has made no attempt to tidy up - dirty plates are stacked precariously in the sink in the small kitchen - but I like the honesty of the chaos and squalor. Vine, who is 36, isn't so dishevelled - she's wearing a pretty pink-and-black Marc Jacobs dress, her blonde hair pulled back neatly and she kicks off a pair of round-toed shoes into some dark corner of the room.

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My Pounds 600a-Week Coke Habit Just to Paint ; Controversial Artist Stella Vine Speaks About the Project Inspired by Kate Moss That Drove Her to Addiction and How Only the Love for Her Teenage Son Stopped Her From Attempting Suicide

It's been a difficult 18 months for Vine but also her most productive.

Less than two weeks ago, she stopped taking cocaine after a four- monthlong addiction (she has also been on and off Prozac for years). She started, she says, because she had taken on too much work. "I thought I'd just get some cocaine and paint all the time. I thought I would stop after that. I had taken it before, but very rarely - I think I had always known how I c...

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