Man in the mask

With her milk-white skin and helmet of sheeny black hair, Clare Shenstone looks very much a Chelsea girl of the Seventies. So it comes as no surprise to learn that a photograph of Shenstone, aged 16, was used on the poster of Andy Warhol's movie of that name (that was Chelsea, New York, but don't let's be pedantic). The Francis Bacon portraits were a surprise, though. Not their existence, but their variety and intensity. I can think of no artist who has been so possessed with - and by - another artist as Clare Shenstone has been by Francis Bacon.

Sounds strange? Not as strange as it was.

Shenstone began making art as a child. 'Drawing to me was like eating, sleeping, going to the toilet,' she says. But it was a private passion. She showed her work only to her architect father - he specialised in gothic churches - and never imagined it could be a career. That was to be the stage. She had the talent. 'I won awards,' she says. Soon she was landing the roles a pretty ingenue will get, such as a landlady's daughter in Doctor in the House. She played Solveig in Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Constansia in Man of the World. But she was also painting. Large abstract canvases got her into Chelsea School of Art in 1976. There was a tug of war between acting and art. Art won.

'I turned down a thing Antonioni offered me,' she says. 'And I turned down Tony Richardson's I, Claudius. I knew that if I did something like that I would be tied up in the whole razzmatazz. A bit of me wanted that ... the theatre is fantastic. When you are in a production, whether it's theatre, film or whatever, and it all comes together, there's nothing like it. But nine times out of 10 you're not playing the part you really want. The life is a compromise most of the time. I am a very solitary person and making my own work had become the path I needed to take. I was more and more obsessed with painting. So I had to say no to these parts. I wasn't going to be tempted by anything!'

But Antonioni made art. 'I would have loved to have done it, and I deeply regret that I didn't. Anyway, I stopped.'

After Chelsea, she went to the Royal College of Art.

'Then the Royal Shakespeare asked me to do a production, Chekhov's Ivanov. I rehearsed through the summer, then started at the Royal College. I was working there all day, jumping on my bike and going to the Aldwych in the evening. It was the best time of my life. I was doing my two loves.'

That was that for showbiz. But Shenstone had learned how the human face transmits emotion and decided she had to draw from life. She pressured the Royal College to let her draw from a professional model, but this was even less modish in the late-Seventies than it is today, and they only caved in in her third year. 'So I drew every skeleton in the Natural History Museum. I was drawing the Assyrian friezes in the British Museum.' Students got into London Zoo free, she found. 'I particularly loved drawing ring-tailed lemurs.'

Then, in 1979, her art took an unexpected turn. The Assyrian friezes made her want to make human faces in relief. But in what material? Shenstone had spent some months at Yale, looking at Oldenberg and Rauschenberg, and had become intrigued by their use of fabric and sewing. The Egyptian rooms in the British Museum also came to mind. 'There was a case with little mummified animals I adored. There was one with two little birds and there was a kitten. They were bound in bandages with the face sewn on top. The other thing that I was looking at was the Turin Shroud. The idea of an image that was part of the cloth, not painted on top of it, but actually existed inside of the material ... All of these were making me feel that I could make a face out of cloth. I didn't know how I'd do it. But I'd do it.'

She called her first cloth head Janet. Why Janet?

'I finished it about 4am in the morning. And when I say "finished" - the thing suddenly comes alive. I remember going to the other end of the room and looking at it and feeling concrete in my stomach. I recognised it. It was totally bizarre because it was a lady I didn't know well. I still don't even know her surname. My mother's twin sister worked in a dress shop and this lady was the manageress. I thought, "Oh my God! It's Janet!"'

Janet has shortish, curly brown hair, a prominent nose, an open mouth baring tongue and teeth, and she seems to be laughing, but it might be a jeer or a scream. It is, I should add, a risky piece of work. You won't see many cloth pieces in Chelsea, Williamsburg, Cork Street, Hoxton or the other enclaves of High Art, and artists who do work with it tend to use it as a 'degraded' material, like Mike Kelley; or as a commentary on women's work, like Rosemarie Trockel; or as both, like Tracey Emin. Janet was something else - unabashedly expressive, and 'craftsy'. Shenstone hung her and 11 other cloth heads along with some 60 drawings at her degree show at the Royal College in 1979.

'I had a side wall. I had to fight for the space like a tiger. I had a fist fight with another student. Because they think I'm skinny, and a little girl, and they can tread all over me. No way!' She was there at nine every morning. On day three, a tutor rushed over.

'He hands me this minute little piece of paper with some numbers in pencil. He says, "You are to ring this number at exactly 11 o'clock this morning." I said, "What is this?" He said, "You had a very distinguished visitor." I said, "Is this some kind of joke?" "No," he said. "This is genuine. Just ring the number."'

Francis Bacon answered her call.

'Francis arrived about eight o'clock in the morning purely to collect some cases of wine, because he got it cheap through the senior common room. He was waiting for them to bring it down and looking around and he saw my wall of heads.'

Hence the number, the call.

'I adore your work,' he told her.

'I said, "My gosh! Well, I think you're the best artist alive in the world today."

'He said, "Great minds think alike! I love Janet. Will you let me buy it?"

'I said, "There's nobody I would rather have a piece of my work." So Francis bought Janet. I still hadn't met him.'

A couple of years later Shenstone was offered a solo show at the inauguration of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. It was to be opened by the Queen.

'I completely panicked,' she says. 'I rang Francis and said, "I need every piece of work I've ever done. Can I borrow Janet?"

'He said, "Well, I'm loath to part with it. But if you need it, have it. Anyway, she's got to be in it."'

The show was up for six weeks. Shenstone sent the piece back. Bacon telephoned.

'I am so thrilled to have this piece of work back,' he told her. 'And I have been thinking, would you do my portrait?'

A cloth head.

'I said, "Oh God! I don't know whether I can."'

She had never made a formal portrait. She would just play with cloth until things came out right.

'He said, "Will you try?"

'I said, "OK, I'll have a go. But I'm a bit scared."

'He said, "We'll just see what happens."'

The first sitting was in Bacon's studio at Reece Mews, South Kensington. 'I went round on my bike and tied it up to a lamp-post. He peered down at me and said, "Come on up." I went up these steps. It was like going up in a boat. He was peering through this hole in the floor. This was the famous studio that's now in Dublin. I was very nervous. I was hardly more than a student. And here I was tackling the portrait of the person I most admired in the world.'

Part of her nervousness was because Bacon was known to be 'difficult'.

'But he was so nice. He had really prepared for it. He had a pale grey suit on, with a blue cord shirt, and this big Rolex watch, and a lovely gold necklace. He had really taken trouble. He looked absolutely fabulous.'

They talked.

'We got on very well,' Shenstone says. 'We both sort of say what we're thinking. He asked what I thought of the Lucian Freud portrait [of Bacon]. I said, "Well, Francis, I think it's very beautiful. I just wish he'd stopped a little bit sooner. Maybe just not worked on it quite so much." 'He said, "I don't disagree with you. But he took two blasted years of my time painting that portrait. You deserve at least the same."'

The sitting began.

'It was very easy. There was no tension because I wasn't the kind of person who was going to get involved with Francis's private life. I wouldn't be going drinking with him. There was no way I would have asked him anything intimate,' she says.

'We were just chatting and he was saying a lot of his close friends had died. And he felt that he was left behind a bit, which was quite an intimate thing to tell me during the first sitting. But he was like that. He would just come out with what he was feeling. He mentioned George. And his eyes just welled up with tears.'

This was George Dyer, who had been Bacon's lover since Bacon had caught him burgling his studio in 1964. In 1971, they had gone to Paris.

'Francis was having a huge retrospective. It was a big deal because the president was opening the show, and it was being televised. The evening before they had had a bit of a disagreement and Francis went in one direction and George went somewhere else.'

Dyer took a lethal overdose. 'When Francis got back he found George dead in his own vomit, sitting on the toilet. It was totally horrific. But Francis had to go straight off to this grand opening, and just get on with it.'

Bacon painted Dyer's death. 'Arguably it's the best triptych he ever produced,' says Shenstone. Now he was weeping.

'When someone is overcome with emotion you want to be helpful,' Shenstone says. 'And yet you're frozen because you don't want to interfere. So this extraordinary silence happened in the middle of quite a relaxing conversation. And what I was amazed by was that I have never been with someone whose emotions were so on the surface and were so registering from minute to minute. I was riveted by it. And, of course, it triggered this obsessive drawing - endless, endless drawing.'

Further sittings followed. 'He would just ring me up whenever he wanted. We might not meet for, say, a couple of months. But then we would meet up two or three times over a couple of weeks.'

The sketchbooks multiplied. Each is filled with images, if fewer than there might be, because of Shenstone's youthful generosity. 'People would ask for a page and I would say OK,' she says.

Often Bacon would visit Shenstone in the attic studio where she lived and worked, in Bloomsbury. In some drawings he is sitting on a park bench. 'That's in Bedford Square. Just outside where I lived,' Shenstone says. 'It was a private square and I had a key. We used to walk and talk and then we would sit and I would do some sketches.'

What would the conversation be about?

'Whatever came into our heads. He was going through a very emotional and vulnerable stage. And I think he liked the anonymity of our liaison. It was just about the work. And getting on very well in a kind of very personal way. I think he felt safe with me. He knew I wouldn't abuse the situation.'

The head progressed at deliberate speed.

'I always work on lots of different things at the same time. So I did quick sketches and drawings at sittings and then produced paintings over a period of time. And the cloth head was produced over four years. I did an initial one just to see how I could play with the whole thing. And then I started on the actual piece - working on it, off and on ... doing more drawings ... doing paintings ... and then going back and doing more work on it.'

Did he follow the process? 'He would see things that were lying around my studio or pinned to the wall, but he would never ask to see things. He didn't like people to look at what he was doing. He would never show any of his work to sitters until he was ready. And he would never ask to see things that were in the process of being made. So he didn't see the cloth head until I showed him it in completed form.'

Bacon was giving Shenstone an extraordinary amount of his time. What exactly was he gaining? 'That's a very difficult question,' she says, after a long pause. 'I think it was a combination of things. He spoke about being very excited about the space I produced. He said it was a metaphysical space, because the head appears out of the surface. It created a floating image. I know that he had worked on producing sculpture. And he had not been happy with the result.'

She thinks this was in the late-Sixties or early-Seventies and believes he had worked in steel. 'I never saw anything,' she says, 'but I think he made some kind of circular structure on which some three-dimensional thing went round.'

Bacon destroyed the work, as was his wont with 'failures'.

The cloth head had taken four years. How much longer did the relationship last? 'After he took on the piece? Gosh! Only a matter of months.'

Was it a melancholy parting? 'It wasn't a parting. We spoke a couple of times and we would see each other. But then he drifted off, doing his thing. And I moved to Oxford.'

Shenstone didn't see Bacon in his final years, but she had come to know his partner John Edwards. He called after Bacon's death. 'He said, "Clare, would you do a cloth head of me so that I can hang it with the cloth head of Francis and Janet?" I then got to know John much better.'

And then John became ill, with cancer. He very much wanted his portrait completed before chemotherapy. He was such a lovely chap. In fact, there might be drawings in one of these.' She riffles through her sketchbooks. There are.

Thus ended one of the most curious and moving episodes in postwar art. 'It's so strange,' Shenstone says. 'I have never talked about it very much. It was something that happened ages ago. It was all so personal. I didn't think of it as being anything but a very private thing. Some things seem to just click.'

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