Morning light pours into Luella Bartley’s studio on the first floor of her Bloomsbury townhouse. Palms are visible from the garden below and a tower of art books sits in front of the stone fireplace. There’s a Kae Tempest poetry collection on the wooden work table, alongside jars of paint brushes and scattered black and white photographic cut-outs of disembodied limbs of varying proportions and naked, headless female bodies marked by lines of red ink. There is scant art on the walls – most of the former fashion designer’s paintings and monochromatic photographs are now on display in her new exhibition.
The studio was once the children’s playroom, but they hardly used it. Since then there has been great loss in the family, and today Luella and her two younger children, Stevie, 18, and Ned, 16, are drawn to the small room and to the togetherness and talismanic creativity it affords.
