Walking into portrait artist Phoebe Dickinson’s studio is like being welcomed home. Thanks to the soft sage green shade behind a collage of paintings covering the walls, an eclectic mix of antique furniture showing the signs of many loving owners, and a sea of storied artefacts and photographs, her Chelsea hideaway has more of a feel of a familiar old friend than a workspace. 

Everything has here has a story. On a country-style cabinet that forms the centrepiece of the studio’s furnishings, a tube of blue paint was given to Phoebe ‘as my something blue before I got married’, a dried up sprig of holly holds the memories of an Italian beach, and painted jars made by her cousin bare amusing inscriptions that she clearly holds dear. Alongside them sit photographs of family and friends, as well as one of the artist proudly flanking the impressionist-inspired elephant she designed for open-air charity exhibition, The Elephant Parade. ‘It was really cool because mine was chosen for the auction which only the big name artists were really picked for’ she remembers fondly. ‘So I was in a Sotherby’s auction with all these famous artists, which was amazing’. A bureau housing further personal accoutrement was given to her as a birthday gift from her parents. ‘It was my first really serious present and I love it’, she explains. ‘I moved it from my house to the studio so that I can see it every day’.  

Even the easels, on which Dickinson’s works in progress stand, tell a tale, having been given to her by the wife of the late Matthew Carr, a figurative artist who she notes ‘was a really great friend of mine, a really brilliant artist. He’s been a big inspiration to me’. When Carr died in 2011, The Telegraph described him as somebody who had ‘the ability to get under the skin of his subjects investing his depictions with an emotional life, an honesty and humanity attained by few other modern artists’. Carr’s knack for extracting and depicting the stories of his subjects is a trait that Dickinson too strives to achieve through her work, recognising ‘it’s always better to find out what a person’s interested in when they come and sit, because then you can hopefully show it in the portrait’. She continued, ‘I love it when I have a sitter who tells me all about their lives’, revealing that a recent sitter, who was ‘just so interesting’, was once a ‘tramp on the streets of Paris’, before infiltrating the circles of London’s literary elite. Ever the professional, Dickinson is not quick to reveal the identities of her eclectic cast of subjects. ‘I have some clients that want to keep quite discreet – that’s part of my job. If I get celebrities, I have to keep quiet’. 

Of course, it’s not just other people’s stories Dickinson tells (or secrets she keeps) with her work. A self-portrait shows the artist at a distance in the surroundings of her studio, which likely reveal more about her character than simply her physical form could, confessing that ‘I did paint my actual face, but I just hated it, so eventually I just tore it up and decided that I really wanted to do one that showed the studio’. 

In addition, her passion for travel is glaringly apparent, not just from snapshots and keepsakes around the studio, but looking at the pictures she’s painted while roaming from one far-flung location to the next. One scene of luscious green fauna was painted during a trip to Sri Lanka. ‘I sat on the rail track while I was doing it and my aunt got really scared as I’m deaf in one ear’, she recalls. ‘She kept saying to the security man on the edge of the tracks, “make sure my niece doesn’t get run over!”’. Similarly, a painting of a dusky woodland scene depicts more than just trees at twilight. ‘We were camping in Sardinia over the Jubilee weekend and we were having dinner with all our washing hung out’, explains Dickinson. ‘I just thought it would make a really cool painting’. 

Dickinson then, who finds escaping the miserable weather and taking a trip every February, ‘always really inspiring’, paints and draws as she travels much like a writer would take notes. ‘I have this little painting box and I take it with me wherever I go, and then just get up a little bit earlier than everyone else and I just do tiny sketch paintings’. Even her forthcoming honeymoon to Sicily and the Aeolian Islands is no exception, although she is quick to note that ‘I don’t ever try and do some masterpiece, just sketches’.    

The cliché of the struggling creative is one that’s bandied around often, but between telling her own stories as a roving painter, and holding down a day job telling those of others through her portraiture, Phoebe Dickinson is an artist on top of the world.