The first issue of PERSONA has been littered with little acts of synchronicity. Case in point, when we asked Bella if she’d sit for the Los Angeles- based painter Amanda Wall for the issue, we had no idea that the two women already had a shared history, an important one. Bella was the first person to buy one of Wall’s pieces. ‘Bella DM’d me in 2018, while I was working on the floor in the corner of my apartment, using shitty cheap supplies from Michael’s craft store. It was the first time where I felt, “Oh, no, people are taking me seriously,”’ says Wall. Bella has a long history as a sitter, she sat for several portraits for her father, the painter Lucian Freud, starting when she was six months old. His sitting process was famously long—several hours a day, sometimes for months at a time.
Bella sat for Amanda in an entirely different way. ‘This was my first time painting from a reference image that I didn’t personally photograph, which was so much harder than I had expected,’ Wall says. ‘I asked Bella to send me a selection of intimate, random selfies, and listened to her podcast as I painted.’ Wall tried multiple studies before finishing Bella (2026), with oil paint and paper, in a sudden burst of creative energy. ‘I spent a lot of time on the first studies, trying to force them to work, but there was this one black and white image of Bella wearing this incredible, simple look that somehow felt more vulnerable. I felt quite free painting it, and it came together within a few days.’
