Valerie Wiffen, left, a self-portrait dating from 1965; above: a recent photograph by Angela Cobbinah

THE young woman gazes steadily out of the picture, with a look that is wary and combative all at once. Who is she? What is she thinking? How does she feel? Fortunately, the person who painted her, Valerie Wiffen, is standing next to me and knows the answers because it is the self-portrait she painted while a student at the Royal College of Art 60 years ago.

“I was pretty miserable at the time because I was being horribly bullied by another student,” Valerie recalls with the same direct look of her younger self but this time smiling.

“However, I was not a total doormat and one day I’d had enough and shoved him down the stairs. He managed to get up and hobble away but never said a word to me again.”

Aged 22, she’d resorted to painting herself because she couldn’t find anyone to sit for her. “It took me two weeks to complete but I wished I’d bought a better mirror – the one I got was a cheap Woolworth’s job.”

For me, the luminous canvas was the highlight of a recent mini retrospective of Valerie’s work at Burgh House in Hampstead, Out and About, an eclectic mix of oil paintings and charcoal drawings, from Hackney backyards to oak trees in The Bishops Avenue and an antique teddy straight out of the V&A’s Museum of Childhood.

But there’s much more to Valerie than meets the eye. She is best known as a portraitist whose subjects have included Prince Philip and Labour politician Margaret Beckett, while her portrait of the entrepreneur Sigmund Sternberg is in the National Portrait Gallery.

So it is no surprise to learn that she used to enthral audiences at the Hampstead School of Art, where she once taught, with her portraiture masterclasses in which she would paint someone there and then alongside a racy running commentary.

On one occasion, her sitter was former Camden councillor Flick Rea.

“I love doing portraits. It’s the only artistic practice that gives you a licence to stare – if you stared like that at someone on the bus they’d be offended. I also love to chat. So I witter on and on and my sitter usually joins in. It’s a lot of fun,” she laughs, a frail-looking 81-year-old wearing a leather biker jacket and sipping an Americano, no sugar.

Valerie grew up in Grays, Essex, the middle of three children born to working-class parents.

Art came naturally to her, to say the least. “One of my earliest memories is when I was two years old and found a spent match on the rug. I got hold of the sooty end and drew on the sole of my shoe. I was hooked for life. After that, I drew and painted incessantly and was always top of class for art at school.”

But she was a sickly child, struck down periodically with a mysterious paralysing illness that she discovered much later in life was due to a severe dairy and gluten allergy.

“When I was nine I spent six months in hospital lying on my back. Being chronically sick changed my relationship with my peer group as I spent so much time around adults. It was a lonely childhood but I became a student of human nature because of it.”

Aged 16 and for now restored to health, she enrolled at Walthamstow School of Art, with the work of 17th century Dutch artist Vermeer forming her North Star.

“I got very good marks but the principal told me my work was the height of banal vulgarity. However, I got into the RCA at a time when it only accepted 25 pupils a year. Also, I was a couple of years younger than the rest of the intake. I think he was jealous,” she says, allowing herself the flicker of a smile.

Among her fellow students were pop musician Ian Drury and film director Peter Greenaway, while her tutors were all eminent artists, including Peter Blake of Sgt Pepper’s album design fame.

On graduating in 1966, she won the Royal College of Art Drawing Prize and she now has the letters ARCA after her name, an associate of the RCA.

However, the need to earn a regular living meant that Valerie had to leave the studio for the world of work and she got a job at Doncaster College of Art before joining the staff of Holloway Boys’ School, where she spent 13 years, ending up as head of art.

Thereafter she taught at adult education institutes West Dean College of Art in Chichester and the Hampstead School of Art until retirement, making sure her students learned to draw, in her view a neglected discipline.

In between teaching she painted, exhibited and received several important commissions.

“I painted Prince Philip when he was 84 over four one-hour sittings at Buckingham Palace,” she pauses to tell me, adding, “He was very kind and polite. I could find no fault.” As for Beckett, she was “lovely – the last real socialist in sight”.

Together with still lifes, landscapes form a large part of her back catalogue.

With a home in the pretty Dalston square that inspired the setting of EastEnders, her keen observer’s eye has been able to bring to life urban views from her back window as much as sweeping panoramas of Hampstead Heath and the quaint charm of Cornish fishing villages.

“All I have ever wanted to do is to take flight from what I see,” she enthuses.

“When I see something I find visually exciting I want to paint it. What I am trying to do is record what I see in my own personal way. It is my choice, it is my selection, I just have to sit there long enough and record.”