Lucian Freud, Robert Lenkiewicz

Lucian Freud, Robert Lenkiewicz
Article by Nahem Shoa

Lucian Freud and Robert Lenkiewicz are, in my opinion, two of the world’s greatest figurative artists who both chose to go in a direction completely opposite to the 20th century trends of abstraction and conceptual art.

Since the beginnings of Western Art, artists who painted the world just as they saw it, without flattery placed themselves unintentionally into the role of rebel or outsider. These artists went against the values of the Art Establishment that only adhered to the concept of the Classical Ideal and strove to make nature more perfect than it is. They preferred to idealise and paint only what was considered beautiful, detesting the artists who portrayed life as they saw it warts and all. The ability to dig deeper revealing the beauty in ugliness was dismissed as vulgar. So it comes as no surprise that many of the famous realist artists throughout history, who in their own time struggled for recognition are the artists today that are the most respected. Without Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Goya, Constable, Courbet, Manet, Monet, etc, the history of painting would not amount to much. Let’s not forget that Freud only became world famous in his late 60’s and Lenkiewicz still has not received the fame that is due to him. Luckily for us history is usually very kind to these individual artists.

It would be impossible for any Jewish artist born before or around the time of the Second World War to make work that wasn’t profoundly affected deeply by that human nightmare, consciously or unconsciously. Freud and Lenkiewicz were affected directly with family killed in concentration camps, where over half the Jewish population were annihilated. I think it is no coincidence that both of these Artists were obsessed by the figure, and of making art that pulsated with life. Freud will go to incredible lengths to get a painting to work spending often hundreds of hours to finish a picture, restating each figure again and again in his canvas, in an attempt to make the paint become real flesh, life itself. Lenkiewicz painted hundreds of figures, sometimes in one canvas. Each year he painted up to five hundred people, almost wanting to over fill the studio with the living as a reaction to all those that died. He stated that all his projects have been an attempt to understand Fascism and how the individual can free himself from the limitation set by society.

Lenkiewicz was the only 20th century figurative painter able from a very young age to paint huge group figure canvases convincingly, very much in the French Romantic tradition of the early 19th century. The greatest pioneers in this discipline artists like David, Delacroix, Courbet and Gericault were great heroes of Lenkiewicz. Their grand scale paintings were referred to as ‘Grand Machines’. Lenkiewicz too had that 19th century ability to fit each figure into his large canvases with incredible lyricism, creating a perfect harmony between the figures and the background, which only a great draughtsman and colourist can do. His 3000 square foot mural of 1973 wouldn’t look out of place in the Lourve. Freud’s group figure canvases have always been just a few figures, no more than five. They sit together often in a stilted way, figures that are not conceived together as a whole. Although painted together at the same time, there is little emotional connection between them. It is partly Freud’s process of working each part of the body separately that leaves the final picture looking disjointed and only working brilliantly in a few parts.

If Picasso is the painter who reinvented the figure, then Freud will go down in history as the artist who reinvented flesh. Freud has found a completely new language of mark making. His eye penetrates so deeply into the model, like a surgeon’s scalpel enabling him to bring each limb to a monumental conclusion, that gives his best single figure paintings their greatness. He usually starts with the eye then, works each part to a finish, crawling over each wrinkle, wart, burst blood vessel and mapping out the body through its flaws. They are like each individuals personal diary expressed in flesh. It is this brutal matter of factness that shocks many viewers.

Lenkiewicz on the other hand has also painted difficult subject matter, vagrancy, mental handicap, death, sex and suicide and has approached this work with impartial objectivity. He gained a deep psychological insight into the world each sitter inhabits. A combination of conversations, and a vast amount of reading produced painting of a deeply thought provoking nature. Lenkiewicz painted people the rest of us would be terrified and repulsed by, stinking tramps, pimps, prostitutes, junkies, thieves and Murderers and yet still managed to look at humanity in a caring way, similar to that of Rembrandt. Both Lenkiewicz and Freud’s life’s work is about understanding the human condition.

For me Lenkiewicz’s greatest contribution to figurative painting, is his deep and penetrating research into colour, not in a pigment sense but in the way he translated the retinal experience onto canvas. His unmatched ability to break down tone and colour to a huge range of shades and hues allowed him to push his colour to a richness of hue and yet still stay in the boundaries of the way the eye sees. There is no figurative painter who works directly in front of the model that has reached his brilliant use of colour. Of course the more deeply one looks the more you see and a highly trained artist like Lenkiewicz probably saw 4 or 5 times more colour changes than the average artist. Cezanne’s quote about Monet would rightly apply to Lenkiewicz “ Monet is only an eye, but what an eye”

Compared to Lenkiewicz’s 300 to 400 hundred paintings a year Freud paints only 5 or 6 a year. Each of Freud’s images is an attempt at a masterpiece, although many images fall far from this standard. Lenkievicz claimed his pictures should not be seen singularly but only as a complete body of work under one of his themed projects. Both Artists have produced many bad paintings; Lenkiewicz has done many more, due to his output and need to make money, but in my mind has also produced more masterpieces as well.

We have been lucky to have two great painters, who have both contributed to the language of art. Their artistic legacy confirms that observational painting is still alive and full of new possibilities. Both of them will be seen as major role models for future generations of artists.

{Ed. our thanks to Nahem Shoa for allowing us to publish his article. Copyright and all rights remain the property of Nahem Shoa.}

My time with Robert Lenkiewicz by David Gamble.

In 1997 when I was nineteen Robert Lenkiewicz started teaching me. At the time I lived in Dousland, ten miles from Plymouth and about a mile and a half away from Yelverton. I had no transport so my grandmother would drive me to the Barbican Studio and wait patiently for me outside. On one occaision when I had finished the lesson and got back into the car my gran said, "Does  your Mr Lenkiewicz have long grey hair and a beard".  "Yes".  I said , "He came out picking his nose!" she said.

During  our conversations Robert told me of a painting he did when he was about sixteen which was three hundred and sixty four feet long, which sadly along with other paintings was burnt by an evil woman whose daughter had a prediliction for Robert which was unrequited so the woman and her daughter burnt all his paintings. He remarked in a meloncholic way, "Some really good stuff was lost then". I bet there was.

He advised me not to be a painter if I wanted to make money because it is a lifestyle which doesn't pay well. I asked him about the prints of his paintings and he made it very clear that he hated them, "They're merely pale imitations of decent paintings" was one comment he made on them. I complained that I did not have enough space in my room to do large scale paintings, he told me that space is irrelevant and that he had done his three hundred and sixty four foot painting in a tiny room by unrolling lengths of a huge roll of canvas, painting on them then rolling them up and unwinding more of this huge canvas. He said there was lots of unused space in every room above head height and it was just a question of overcoming gravity with maybe a cargo net or hammocks. He advised me to get rid of anything I haven't used in a year which is something I still do. He told me the only things I needed to be a painter was a room, a cooker, a bed, a place to keep my paintings and a place to keep my books.

His son Wolfe used to do big copies of well known paintings on heavy canvas and sit with them taped down on the ground like a form of silent busking. He made so much money doing this that he even managed to pay someone to sit with the paintings all day and look after them. Robert told me his murals on the barbican are slowly peeling away because moisture seeps through brick work and strips the paint off from the inside out, so walls must be treated to make them water proof before any painting is done on them. Anyone who I have known who has been to prison, including Robert, has advised me to never do anything that would have me end up there. He said it was full of bullies and it was where he had his nose broken. He was sentenced to three months for taking books from Plymouth Musuem.

At this time I was attending Plymouth College Of  Further Education in the Goscen Centre. A mural painter called Heath was commissioned to paint a wall in the college. I mentioned Robert to him and he screwed his face up and snarled that Robert was just a self promoter, that he was not very good at painting and that he "couldn't get it up anymore". I stuck up for Robert saying he was a brilliant artist, a good man and and that he had a very bad heart condition. Heath was having none of it and carried on putting him down. Heath also painted a mural in 'Zavvi', previously Virgin Megastore in Plymouth, he is nothing compared to Robert and really should know better.

Robert told me an amusing story of when he used to be visited by a religious group (may be Jahovas witnesses but I can't be sure) who would try to ge him to join their group. This was in the late nineties and they believed the world would end at the end of 1999. They would always disturb him while he was painting or entertaining a lady friend. On one occaision they came in with an attractive young lady and saying the usual, "Oh Mr Lanevich you have to let us save your soul". " Ok then, I'll join your group" he said. "Oh Mr Lanevich that's wonderful". "But you believe the world will end in 1999 right?" "Yes Mr Lanevich absolutely". "Ok I'll join on the condition that I can meet her (pointing to the young lady) on January 2nd 2000 for sex". They were stunned and the young lady smiled and blushed, he said the never bothered him again.

One time I met him in the bedroom area of The Barbican Studio which had a beautiful old spanish bed in it. During our conversation a little light like a fairy started dancing around the room going from painting to painting and shining in my eyes. There was a little girl standing at the entrance with a mischievous grin and a little mirror which she was using to reflect the light and have it jump around the place. Robert said "Alright Little Mouse, I'll be with you in a moment". She scampered off somewhere. To me it was a very magical moment.

I had moved to Plymouth just before January 2000. In August 2001 I showed him my still life with a gas mask (a fairly decent picture of which can be seen on my blog www.dgambleart.blogspot.com and soon to be on a website). We were in the bedroom area again and he was very impressed with the painting, he looked at it from numerous angles and even put it on the old Spanish bed. Without thinking I leant on one of the bed nobs and there was a loud cracking sound, I stepped back quickly and Robert uttered a little sigh and shook his head a bit. He got back to the painting and praised it highly which was an honour for me. I also noticed he had a Wallace and Gromit alarm clock, the kind that says "Come on Gromit time for walkies!". He saw that I noticed it and gave me a little grin. I realised he knew a bit about psychology because I noticed he mirrored my body language as we spoke.

One day I was perusing the places down on the barbican and found a Gallery run by the Garland family. I spoke to Seth Garland for a while, he seemed nice until I mentioned Robret. His tone became pompous and smug, he said "Oh no, I don't rate Lenkiewicz at all". He took the flyer I had with Robert's Barbican fishermen on it and started an ill informed tirade of petty critisism, about how the faces were twisted and unnatural. I stuck up for Robert again and left the Gallery feeling genuinely dissappointed, before he started his verbal onslaught I thought I had found a kindred spirit, a new friend even, an art lover. He is another artist who really should know better. I think that some artists like Seth and Heath were jealous of Robert's ability and may be even his popularity with women and deep down they knew he was much better than them at painting.

In late 2001 I was going to move to Bristol. Before I left Robert asked me to be a disciple in his dipictions of The Last Supper and The Crucifixion. Robert took me to a flat on The Barbican which was just up the street from Castle Dyke Lane. He said, "Now remember, this place does not exist". "Ok". I said. We entered the flat and every available bit of space was taken up by paintings on easels, dozens of them with just a very thin path leading to the bedroom and to the kitchen. His broad 6'2 frame breezed through this tiny path without a second thought, I however was teetering along just inches away from the paintings aware that any clumsy nudge might send these paintings to the floor like very expensive dominoes. Robert glanced back at me he noticed my careful progress and chuckled. The path was really thin and I am hardly a svelte twinkle-toed chap myself at 6'6 and fifteen stone. There was a beautiful woman in the kitchen area making some tea. Robert had a diary in the bedroom and made an appointment for me. He didn't use people's names but assigned symbols for them, mine was a dice because my surname is Gamble.

I was never late for a single sitting. The Last Supper and The Crucifixion were in a huge building on Castle Dyke lane, it was an amazing place. It was huge and all the interior walls were white while the huge doors were black. There were lots of paintings and big blank canvasses waiting to be painted on. It had huge chamber-like rooms except where The Crucifixion was in which there was very little space in the room along side the painting.  In the last Supper I am the second figure on the right, a background figure with long hair (see pic 374 of Dr Phillip Stokes' book of photos of Robert's life). In the Crucifixion I am the first figure on the left looking down into a candle I am holding (see pic 376, Dr Phillip Stokes). The twenty pounds an hour wage was a bonus. During one of the sittings he said "I painted Billy Connolly today". "Did you really, he seems like a nice man". I said "Yes he's a very nice man" he said. I did not see the footage until a few years afterwards because I do not own a television. The footage can be seen in the last episode of Billy Connolly's World Tour Of England, Ireland And Wales. I came in for the last sitting and Robert told me the paintings of me were resolved that he was sorry I came in for nothing and offered me the twenty pounds. I refused saying I had not earnt it, he insisted that I took it but I refused again. Then smiling, he did something imperceptable to me and suddenly he had a huge roll of twenty pound notes in his hand, he peeled one off slowly and said "Take it". So I did.

The first sitting for The Last Supper was forty five minutes and in that time he had laid out the tones for my entire head with all the features established and an indication of where my shoulder was. The second sitting was about thirty five minutes and he seemed to make the image more accurate and it seemed to almost click together more, it seemed more like the other figures. The third, and to my recollection the final sitting took about the same time and the image seemed much more sharp than the initial tones of the first sitting although they did not change much throughout. He established the tonality of most of the areas with the first marks made. He still paid me the whole twenty pounds an hour wage for each sitting. I did not care about the money, to me it was an honour to be painted by him and to observe him in action. 

He told me that he had not worked to get his doctorate and that it was not something he had ever planned, I said I knew and it had just happened naturally, he agreed. I never told him that I thought that being a doctor of paint was very cool. I often wandered where he got his clothes, he seemed to always be wearing one of a few black velvet tops with a red scarf. These garments never seemed to fade to grey so he might have dyed them, I thought they looked great. He wore black comfy jogging trousers and black Cat boots, even in the summer it seemed.

He invited me along to The Beggars Banquet at Bretonside Bus Station on Christmas afternoon where every year Robert and some friends would provide vagrants and down and outs with a sumptuous christmas feast.  Before it he remarked that some of the vagrants had dogs as part of a sympathy act for the public and he considered the dogs to be tortured by them by lack of food and care. Sadly it turned out to be the last Christmas one but I was so impressed that they provided a veritable feast for those who where in need. This sort of thing should happen everywhere every Christmas.

In 2002 I was living in Bristol and working on a bunch of paintings. I phoned Yana to try to get an appointment with Robert so I could go back to Plymouth and show them to him. Yana said he was really very ill and I should wait for another time. I was sitting in a waiting room in the Bristol Royal Infirmary with my girlfriend at the time who had fallen and broken her coccyx and fractured her sacrum. My old friend Tristan Nichols, a respected journalist for The Western Morning News, phoned me and I took the call outside. He told me the sad news that Robert had died. There is a strange feeling that follows such news, a visceral physical sensation like being blasted in the chest by a shotgun, then a numbness sets in. The wounds heal over time but the scars remain.

Months later I was talking to a friend of mine known as Big Al'. I mentioned Robert and he had a story for me. Al's mother was very ill, bedridden in hospital. For some reason Robert was there and started to talk to her. Someone came up to interupt them and talk to Robert. Robert did not even look at him he just put his hand up to the guy's face as if to say WAIT!. Al's mum was forever touched by the fact that Robert had given her his complete attention that he was very sensitive to her condition and showed a genuine sympathy for her.

Bristol is well known for it's music scene and the biggest band to come out of it are Massive Attack. I kept seeing on of the front men, Grant (Daddy G) Marshall around my area of Gloucester Road. One day I saw him going into the supermarket around the corner from my house and I decided to give him a copy of Keith Nichols' book on Robert which has lovely pictures but I can find fault with some of the information. When I gave Grant the book he was a little bit stunned and told me he had seen an exhibition of Robert's about ten years previously in a cave, he thought it might have been penzance, but he could not remember Robert's name. Grant likes Robert's paintings and I ended up giving him the excellent book of photos by Dr Phillip Stokes, the brilliant Paintings And Projects book, which I consider to be the best most informative account of Robert's work and life, and I gave him the Robert A. Fenner and co. auction catalogue of 2004. These books were well recieved by Grant and he still has them in his book shelf.

I also saw the actor Paul McGann around and had the same feeling that I should talk to him about Robert. I saw him early one morning and gave him a copy of Keith Nicholls' book. We sat in a cafe and he told me he knows Robert's daughter Rebecca, a successful playwright in London. Paul told me of his interest in Russian poets and how once Robert sent him a selection of poetry. I was completely skint at the time and Paul was having cake and tea, to this day I regret not being able to afford to have had cake and tea with 'Marwood', vis-a-vis the Penrith  tea shop scene in Withnail and I.

I started a couple of life drawing classes, one in Queen's Road Art School. I offered a copy of the Paintings And Projects book to my tutor who looked through it but did not accept the gift because she was not very interested by the paintings, although she did think he was very talented. I was quite surprised at this but ended up giving that copy to the comedian Russell Brand who was interested in the work but it was the first he had heard of Robert.

After looking at hundreds of Robert's paintings, sometimes in different stages of completion, I know he is one of the most important artists of modern times and he is my favourite artist. I didn't think much of it when he was alive but I sometimes can not believe I knew him and that for so long he was just a stone's throw away from where I lived. I enjoyed just going down to the Barbican studio and looking around at the dozens of paintings that were there, whether Robert was there or not it was incredible to just be amoungst his work. He could paint anything he looked at and was equally good at illustrations, although his obvious favorite subject was painting people which he excelled at.    

In my opinion Robert was a modern day Rembrandt, he was always keen to see other people's art. He would always try to help someone if they had a problem and gave excellent advice, he touched the lives of so many people and tried to make their lives a little better if he could. He is a great artist and should be recognised as such, he is truly the people's painter.

 

 

 

The Art of Robert Lenkiewicz

The following is reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Henryk Ptasiewicz, St Louis, MO, USA:

Robert Lenkiewicz should be the most famous artist in Britain, but few people have heard of him. Sadly he died last year at age sixty. He was prolific and he was also financially successful, in a way. His library was worth an estimated three million pounds, but his studio wasn't heated. He had twelve children to different ladies. He was driven and his subjects were people, sex and death.

I've had the good fortune to meet him on several occasions, starting in 1985, and he was virtually the last person I spoke to when I came to America. He made Plymouth, England his home, and his studio is in the Barbican area. As you came around the corner of quaint, but daunting back streets you were confronted by a huge mural, which always reminded me of Hieronimous Bosch, and then you noticed a glass fronted room, which was the display area, and a sign above it which simply said, "Robert Lenkiewicz, portrait painter". I spent a lot of time with my nose pressed against that window. Next to it was a weathered door, which led to several book rooms, and finally three huge rooms that were RL' s studios. In the cafe opposite on the wall is a parody of the last supper, with RL as Christ, and behind the studio was a mural that was "The Last temptation of St Anthony" where 96 naked figures lift their arms, and one lone youth defecates gold coins.

It's not the sort of subject that you could give to your aunt, but he didn't care, this is human nature, it is what we all do and are interested in. There was an episode where he embalmed a dead friend, and put his naked body in his studio window, to see if people became blase after a while and just treated it as an object.

He worked in projects. For his project on addiction he had over 800 people come and sit for him. On the project for education, 150 people sat for him and then wrote a one thousand word essay.

At age 16 he painted a three hundred foot long mural. He didn't go on about technique, or colours, he painted with whatever he could get hold of, he said that he needed two brushes, one to paint with and one to clean his teeth with. If David Hockney or Lucien Freud, his contemporaries, broke wind, it was great art, this man painted rings around them.

I wished that you could have met him, he was physically huge, but very soft spoken, and you hung onto every word he said. I could talk about him all day. If you ever go to Britain check out Plymouth. He is the epitome of someone who knew that he was an artist from day one and was forever following his own muse.

In a way Robert Lenkiewicz gave me permission to be an artist. Looking at his method, directly from life and life size, he showed me that ambition and commitment work. I know the struggles he had, to make ends meet he sometimes broke into empty buildings to steal the lead and copper pipes. One of his studios was a place where the derelicts could sleep. They put a piano in there and he talks about carrying out the bodies of people who died in the night. His parents took in as lodgers survivors from Auschwitz and Dachau, the hotel Shem-tov. These were people who were deeply disturbed and throughout his career the theme of helping people who were on the periphery of life became his life's work. A lot of his work was only suitable for an audience with a broad mind, but so is life. I have seen a lot of his work. The closest painter to his style was N.C.Wyeth, huge broad brush strokes that almost rip the canvas. In his studio were numerous unfinished canvases, at the same time at his major retrospective in 1993 I believe there was over one hundred paintings, most of them over six feet by four. Billy Connelly the comedian did a tour of Britain and had his portrait painted by Robert, and did a tour of his studio, but apparently it was a damp squib, a bit like the coming together of Madonna and Warren Beatty.

When Robert died, the Guardian newspaper did a little piece, and hid it. A television documentary that was only seen in the South West of England was also shown, but that was it. To me one of the most influential artists of the late Twentieth Century disappeared and the Art world seems relieved. He was loved by ordinary people, which is never a good thing if you want to be the next Damien Hirst. He was an avid reader and scholar, he could talk about anything in depth. He was a man alone.

The Painter with Sarah Jane King

The Portrait Painter (in memory of Robert Lenkiewicz)

You sit across the table from me, fingering your empty glass. The Milk Bar is the place you like to come to in between sittings, an unselfconscious place with urns dispensing tea, cold milk or day-glo orange squash and a woman in pink overalls making the cheese or ham sandwiches. There are only two tables, each about two foot square, so that your knees press into mine and your red knuckles brush against my glass, which is still more than two thirds full and flecked with clots of milk about to turn. Basically, you say, you’d like to sleep with me. But it is probably illegal.

I don’t know why this statement fails to make me uncomfortable, but it doesn’t, just as the odd way you are dressed doesn’t make me fear the sort of glances I think I attract when I walk down the street with my mother in her too-tight suit. You are wearing an orange fishing smock, which reaches down to your knees, and jeans tucked into wellingtons. Your hair is long and thick and red (though long hair is still fashionable for men) and you have full red lips and milky teeth. Your voice is a cultured baritone. If we had been sitting in the Latin Quarter, drinking cloudy Pernod instead of milk (or better still, absinthe), I could not have felt more thrilled than I do here, in this Plymouth milk bar, with some old biddy at the other table peering at us through her Woodbine smoke and obviously not liking what she sees. I am fourteen years old, which, I compute, is only 1.25 years away from the age of consent, or near enough. Not that I have the slightest intention of sleeping with you, now or in the future. It is the thought of it – the dirty deed, and the fact that it fails to confound me.

And so we go back to your studio, where I pose in an attitude of contemplation, my arms arranged as though cradling an imaginary man (to be painted in later), a sad expression on my face because the man is dying. In the afternoons, I sit for you unchaperoned, although my aunt, with whom I am spending the holiday, insists on coming along for the evening sessions, bringing her knitting. I watch her watching you paint me through the corner of my eye, and when we break for milk or juice and biscuits, you ask her searching questions, such as why she still lives with her parents and chooses to work as a secretary. She is coy with you, and when we walk home through the summer twilight, which softens her edges, she tells me that she thinks you fancy her. A misunderstanding, of course, because you have already observed to me that she has a dried-up nature, like a rose nipped in the bud, and seems uninterested in life, or sex, which, you sigh, is only messy and disappointing. But that doesn’t stop you kissing my hand or stroking my hair from nape to waist and telling me to come back and see you again, when I am eighteen and cynical.

The sketch you gave me at parting, almost as an afterthought, still hangs on my living room wall. The frame I got for it is made of plastic with fake gilding that fools no one. But you admired fools, all marginal people you admired: tramps, sad-eyed clowns, people with red hair. You saw yourself as less of a painter, you said, than an observer, someone whose primary concern was social and philosophical investigation; and for that you really need to target nonconformists. You drew them from a highly formalised perspective, though, a conventional style that cuts right against the grain of current art trends. A standard academic painter was how you described yourself, a traditionalist preoccupied with two much-tested themes, Eros and Death. You painted fleshy, come-hither nudes and tramps about to croak, or already in the grip of Thanatos (“Diogenes Listening to Wagner”). Once, you painted your idealised dead self, your jaw bound up in a cloth, your corpse supported by a crowd of red haired women, lit by candles. But you always put yourself into your paintings, peeping like a Goya from the edges of the frame, or taking centre stage like Rembrandt, or glimpsed from behind like Vermeer. Your face even imposes on the sketch you gave to me. You gave me your eyes, your cheeks, the lie of your hair, the masterful strokes of your shading technique correcting my unformed features. However imperfect this is as representation, you were still, to my mind, the greatest painter working in Britain since Francis Bacon, and he himself was thin on the Eros content which crowns your work, giving it both its cheesiness (the cock of the barnyard content) and also its tragic edge. The seriousness of your investigations stripped the subjects bare, even down to the last thin layers of kitsch, which worries some people because of your lack of playful irony, your refusal to splice the figure from the ground, like cleaved cows in formaldehyde or piss holes in the snow. You did not separate out your work from your life, but entered into the allegory, rolling with the carnival of clowns or drowning in the ship of fools; and so you and your work must stand together, for better or for worse, without the comfort of distance or qualification. You looked the part of parody but didn’t play it. You didn’t want to play that too too clever game.

Long after I turned eighteen and was living in London, I would sift through the postcards in the National Gallery, looking for something suitable to send to you by way of renewing our acquaintance. I was torn between two favoured paintings, Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten By Lizard” (an allegory of the sting of love) and Piero di Cosimo’s “Death of Procris”, treating Ovid’s tale of jealousy and regret. Sometimes, I felt as though I had climbed into that painting, walking onto the beach at dawn, where the shore and sky share a sorry blue, the sorrow of the hunter, Cephalus, reflected in the eye of his large dog, upon whom the fact of death has just dawned also, so that animal and man are united in this experience of truth. The man I was seeing at the time (also a figurative painter, who, like you, was running against the grain of abstract installations) had told me to look at di Cosimo’s work; and so in searching out this artist, I felt that I was looking you up too. According to Vasari, Piero di Cosimo was an eccentric character who ‘lived off eggs boiled twenty at a time along with his glue'. My painter friend called this mode of existence, ‘working to the edge’. It may be art, it may be affectation. Who is to say?

The coda to this memorial should have been how I called in on you decades after I sat for you that summer and talked about those thirty intervening years. But I never sent the postcard. I stood in front of your studio several times after moving back to the south west, reading the sign you had put in the window inviting strangers in to talk with you about sex and death. I felt awkward about doing this, however, even though I had acquired first hand experience of both of those subjects since you first talked about them to me in the Milk Bar, and I could relate now to what you had said about the sex being messy and disappointing, though not universally so. There were other less loaded subjects I could have chewed over with you, such as the art-dealer I’d met in London, who had shared a studio with you in the 1960s, not far from where I lived, in fact, in Belsize Lane. He told me you had taken it in turns to sleep behind the partition while the other worked or made out with some model. And then I had shared an agent with someone who had written a novel about your work. Even the father of my child was a friend of yours, who called in regularly as he passed through Plymouth to listen to you philosophise, and to whom you gifted several of your palettes, vibrant testimonials to your engagement with the medium, the spots of paint still palpable. But I never had the courage to ring and catch up with you, although I had not shied away from knocking on your door when I was fourteen years old. You had risen from your stool and opened up, towering over me in your orange smock and rubber boots like Turner’s Colossus – a case of once seen, never forgotten. And before I could ask you the same question, you asked if you could paint me.

But now I can only endorse what you said last Christmas, when you were interviewed for BBC Spotlight South West. You said it would be inconvenient if you died within the next few years because you still had a lot of things left to investigate. It is very inconvenient. I wish you had not died at only sixty years old. There were still things I wanted to ask you.

Reproduced here with the kind permission of the author, Anne Morgellyn. Copyright and all rights remain the property of Anne Morgellyn.