Is your chap driving you dotty? Spare a thought for Damien Hirst’s other half !
IT’S more than a year since they spotted each other. Now Damien Hirst has transformed his girlfriend Sophie Cannell into a work of art.
Britain’s richest artist, famed for his pickled shark, is pictured daubing the naked 26-year-old former ballerina with multi-coloured polka dots in a portrait by fashion photographer Mario Testino.
Testino, one of Princess Diana’s favourite snappers, posted the image online with the caption: ‘Collaborating with my friend Damien Hirst in turning his girlfriend into artwork’. Hirst, 54, and Miss Cannell – who is only two years older than the eldest of his three sons – have been dating since May 2018 after meeting at Chiltern Firehouse.
The pair appear to have a picture-perfect life together, with the aspiring actress sharing candid photographs of the two to celebrate his birthday last month.
It is not the first time Hirst, who is worth £250million, has been inspired by a younger muse. For his 2017 show, Treasures From The Wreck Of The Unbelievable, he made a statue of his then girlfriend, actress and model Katie Keight, 29.
Hirst has created almost 1,500 spot paintings throughout his career, producing the first few dozen of them himself before bestowing the task on a team of assistants.
The Bristol-born artist has said the paintings came from his ‘phenomenal love of colour’. However, he later confessed the idea was taken from abstract painter Larry Poons. In 2017, one of his spot paintings, Malonic-2-13C Acid (2002), sold for $607,500 (£500,000) at Christie’s New York.
Two of his works, Pyronin Y and Oleoylsar-cosine, featuring grids of multi-coloured dots, were stolen from a Notting Hill gallery in 2013.
Hirst’s formaldehyde-preserved tiger shark, which he titled The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living, became a symbol of the Young British Artists movement. Created in 1991, it sold in 2004 for $8 million – but not before Hirst replaced the original, decaying shark.
MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger once declared that James Bond was both a blessing and a curse for the British secret services.
But this summer the spy chief seems very keen to count his blessings.
For I can reveal that Sir Alex made a secret visit last week to the set of the as-yet-untitled 25th Bond film at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, where he shook hands with Ralph Fiennes who plays his fictional counterpart ‘M’.
‘Sir Alex and other senior MI6 figures came down and met Fiennes as well as other stars of the film, including 007 Daniel Craig, Moneypenny Naomie Harris and Bond baddie Rami Malek,’ says my double agent.
‘It was an absolutely fascinating
meeting of real-life spies and their on-screen equivalents.’
Apparently sworn to secrecy about the get-together, a spokesman for the film-maker Eon Productions declines
to comment. But Sir Alex has spoken publicly about 007 in the past.
In a speech in 2016, he said the action film franchise offered priceless free publicity, but gave a rather misleading picture of the more prosaic life of an intelligence officer.
And last year MI6 made a TV advertisement which aimed to turn the Bond image on its head.
It featured a scene that could have been straight from a Bond film, with sinister music playing as a shark circled. Seconds later, the scene widened to show a startled child being comforted by his mother in an aquarium.
MI6 wanted to convey the message that the spy agency was less interested in recruiting would-be 007s than people who reflect Britain’s diversity — mothers, for example.
‘We are intelligence officers, but we don’t do what you think,’ said the ad’s voiceover. Then came the payoff: ‘MI6 — secretly, we are just like you.’
MI6’s head of recruitment explained: ‘The concept was to play on the image but to explain very clearly that this was not James Bond.’
Try telling that to Sir Alex.