From modelling for the famous artist to painting by the sea, former benefits supervisor Sue Tilley has found her mojo in St Leonards
Sue Tilley’s flat in St Leonards-on-Sea is five minutes from everywhere. Five minutes from the beach, five minutes from the station, five minutes from the parade of secondhand shops where, 18 months ago, having shrugged off her London furniture and flat after her second visit to the town, she bought a whole new life. She celebrated her 60th birthday a week after moving in; the party with her new neighbours went on until 6am. “I’m not one for living in the past,” she says, sitting back on her lipstick-red sofa. “I like moving on.”
Tilley might have moved on, but her image, her body, remains, for the rest of us, quite fixed. Fixed in the large nude portraits painted by Lucian Freud throughout the 1990s, including Benefits Supervisor Sleeping which, when Roman Abramovich paid £17.2m for it in 2008, became the most expensive painting by a living artist. Tilley was introduced to Freud by her friend, the late performance artist Leigh Bowery – in her charcoal-walled bedroom hangs Freud’s portrait of him, cheaply printed on to canvas.
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