Quentin

From the street, you would never guess that the house had a full-length attic studio, never mind one which housed one of the nation’s most revered abstract artists, almost a ‘natioinal treasure’.

I had been browsing in the Riverside Gallery on Wye Street where Cynthia worked. I’d actually walked into town when the sun eventually warmed the late spring day to pick up my shoes from the menders, but I never missed an opportunity to pop in to the gallery almost next door when I knew Cynthia was going to be there. We went way back. Tall and slightly too thin, she was arranging some canvasses for her 2018 spring show and purred with pride as she showed me a highly coloured abstract so thick with oil paint that it was really three-dimensional. “It’s a Quentin King,” she said. “He only lives down there,” and she pointed in the direction of Vanburgh Avenue.

I rarely like modern art and struggle with abstracts, but there was something about this painting which drew me in.

“Should I have heard of him?” I asked.

“Oh, Simon, you’re such an uncultured dork”, Cynthia laughed. “He only won the Turner Prize! This is quite an early one. It’ll go for high six figures.”

“That’s a bit rich for you, isn’t it,” I said, tactlessly.

“I know,” Cynthia admitted, fortunately without having taken offence. “We’ve had the security upgraded. We wouldn’t normally get anything nearly as valuable as this, but he is local and we have actually become friends. He’s getting on in years now.”

She told me not to miss the opening scheduled the next month – she’d send me an invitation to what would be a private view. I said I’d do my best…

“If you’re going home now, would you be a poppet and drop this in to Quentin – it’s almost on your way.”

As usual with Cynthia it was a bit more than a request and she handed me a copy of the exhibition catalogue with the abstract painting prominently displayed on the cover. “They only arrived from the printer this morning”.

She jotted down his address. “Just push the door open when you get there – it’s never locked, and go up to the top. He will be in the attic studio. He never goes out,” and I was sent on my way with a dismissive ‘mwah’ to my cheek.

From the pavement, No. 59 looked like most of the other houses on the avenue: tan coloured brick with odd blackened one is still ubiquitous in some areas of the capital. The slate roof gave no indication of any loft studio, and I checked Cynthia’s slip of paper a third time before crunching over the gravel drive to the paint-peeling front door and, seeing no bell, gave it a bit of a push. It swung in as Cynthia had predicted and I called through the gap. No reply.

I was an intruder, and I certainly felt it as picked my way up two flights of bare-wood, paint-blotched stairs. The door on the left was slightly ajar and I called through the narrow opening, a crack of light showing more paint spill on the landing floor. Still no reply. The door opposite was firmly closed so, gingerly, I tiptoed in.

At the far end of the surprisingly large room an elderly man with a mass of almost white, unruly hair stood with his back to me, leaning over what looked like a saucepan on a small cooking ring.

“Hello, Mr King?” I called really loudly and the man turned, his wild hair and dirty smock making a disquieting impression.

“Who the fuck are you?” he barked.

“I’m just a delivery boy really. Cynthia asked me to bring this,” and I proffered the catalogue.

“Whatever it is, put it down there,” he said pointing vaguely towards the very large, cluttered wooden table. Then, paying me no more attention, he turned back to the saucepan.  I ventured further into the studio and across to the table, reaching out to deposit the catalogue, trying my best not to disturb anything else.

”I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said, now aware of a strange smell in the room, embarrassed by my intrusion and hoping to slither away harmlessly.  But before I could escape, he turned again, this time with the hot saucepan held in both hands in front of him.

“What did you say your name was?”

I hadn’t said.

“I’m Simon. Simon Percival. I’m a friend of Cynthia’s – you know at the gallery.”

“Do you know anything about classic French cooking?” he demanded, as if it was a logical follow-up question.

“Not a thing,” I admitted, completely nonplussed.

“Well then you’re no bloody use,” he said as he moved towards me, somewhat menacingly, the saucepan out in front.

I now realised that the bizarre smell in the room was a mixture of oil paint, perhaps turps and linseed oil, and whatever was cooking in the pan. I had assumed he was heating up some type of art material, but actually he was cooking what appeared to be a version of fish soup: bouillabaisse perhaps.

He put the none-too-clean pan precariously on the newly delivered catalogue, which had become the only flat landing space on the table, and handed me a spoon.

“What does this need more of?” he said, as if I was an established connoisseur of all things French and fishy.

It tasted sublime and I told him so.

“You’re still no fucking use,” he snapped again. “Sit down there,” and he pointed to the messy table.

It was a strange invitation since there were no chairs or stools anywhere, but I was way out of my comfort zone and not about to disobey what was not an invitation but an ill-tempered order.  Anyway, I’d been wrong, for he then pulled from beneath the table a metal-and-wood folding chair of the type one might see on garden patios. “Yours is under there”, he said as if talking to an imbecile, which was actually how I felt. By the time I had grovelled under the table and retrieved a second chair, two bowls of steaming fish stew had been placed on the table. Along with two hunks of bread, they vied for space amid partly-squeezed tubes of oil paint, discarded brushes and objects I dared not to try to identify. Hygenic? Forget it.

I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t stay; that I’d not long had lunch; that I’d got to get back for… well for anything I could invent on the spur of the moment. Instead, I meekly sat on the chair without demur and with no further discussion or explanation, we both started to devour the truly delicious stew.

He finished his bowl way ahead of me and mopped it with the bread until not a smear of food was left showing. I wondered if he’d ever bothered to wash his crockery.

Next, he wiped his now red-stained and whiskery mouth on the sleeve of his smock, the bright hue of the food joining the multi-coloured patches of paint and whatever else was already on the garment. Without comment, he got up and fetched from somewhere a bottle of wine, already uncorked. He poured the wine into two smeared glasses, and drank one without pause, giving a small belch.

“That’s better,” he said. “Is Cynthia coming?”

“I don’t think so. She did not say anything to me about that. I was asked because…”

“I bloody well hope not. Can’t stand the woman. Can you?” he interrupted.

Not waiting for a reply, he got up and wandered over to a large, empty easel standing on one side of the room.

I could see now why the studio was not visible from the road. The whole length of the roof on this side of the apex had been cantilevered out and a huge window inserted, giving the interior space ample, even north light.

I got up, hoping to slip away with thanks for the unexpected meal, but he wasn’t having any of it. “Aren’t you going to drink that?” he said looking at my wine, which remained mostly untouched.  Before I could apologise for not wanting alcohol mid-afternoon, he grabbed the glass and, like the first, downed it with a good imitation of someone just back from 24-hours in the dry Sahara.  “Help me with these”, he demanded and waddled over into the corner where several large canvasses were leaning against each other.

We moved three of them, so he could extract the fourth which he then needed help holding upright so that he could fix it to the easel. By then I had got oil paint on my hands and on my trousers, too.

“I’m not really dressed for this,” I ventured.

“You’re not”, said my host-of-few-words, as if I should have known how to dress before calling round. “Bugger off now”.

I was glad to get away, confused by the contrast of his rude abruptness and his unassuming generosity.

Back home, I treated my chinos and hands to paint remover and then, freshly adorned, looked up Quentin King on Google.

He’d been lauded more than twenty years earlier, compared favourably to other well respected late 20^th Century artists, some of whom I had actually heard of, and then, according to Wikipedia, he’d been admitted to hospital with depression. There was also mention of alcohol… I found no information about him since early after the millennium, there or elsewhere on the internet. Perhaps his return to active work was recent.

It was quite a lot later that I heard that the Riverside’s Spring Show went particularly well, with many more in the gallery than ever before. Someone said Tracey Emin had been at the private view, which I deliberately missed. Despite Cynitha’s invitation it was just not my thing.

Then over the next couple of years the King name cropped up occasionally in my local newspaper. Whenever he did anything, they made sure we were aware of the art-celeb in our midst.

It must have been a few years after that when I read that Quentin had died. There was a full obituary in the Sunday papers, too, with comments by Mark Lawson who said Quentin King  ‘painted to make people happy’.

Then the Riverside had a King retrospective, which I’m afraid I also avoided. When we met shortly afterwards, Cynthia told me her prices went exceptionally high for his late, large canvasses. Because of it the Riverside was now very much on the art map, so much so that she had re-stocked with items of real interest to serious collectors.

It was later in the spring that I had to go to San Francisco to see Craig and Laura, my son and daughter-in-law. It had been a warm April in California, and even in San Francisco the temperature was in the high seventies. But there was one really wet day, and so we did some culture…  By mid-afternoon we were in the centre of the city and Laura suggested we go to the museum of modern art. I probably screwed up my face, but we went anyway.

We were wandering through the galleries - more slowly that I’d have done on my own. I just don’t get installations particularly when they are a pile of bricks I feel I might have arranged myself. And blank white canvasses? But for once I was keeping my critical comments to myself.

One large room, devoted to ‘recent acquisitions’, seemed particularly bizarre until on one side, filling a large space, was an oil painting which was eerily familiar. A swirl of oil paint in bright colours. A particular hue of red generously applied and dominant. A painting style I was sure I had seen before. I walked over to the label:

Quentin King

England, 1939 – 2023

Simon’s Bouillabaisse (2018)