Memorialised in song by former residents Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nico, New York’s Hotel Chelsea has housed an astonishing clientele of artists, writers and mavericks including Brendan Behan, Arthur C Clarke (who called it his “spiritual home”), Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In 1994 the British artist David Remfry, then 52, joined this esteemed roll-call when he relocated to New York ahead of an exhibition of works he intended to paint in the city. He went on to spend 17 years at the Chelsea, drawing and painting its remarkable denizens. “I was in heaven,” he says. His pencil portrait of punk pioneer Dee Dee Ramone is part of this year’s Royal Academy summer exhibition.
Raised in Hull and now based in London, Remfry arrived at the Chelsea check-in desk that summer with “17 pieces of luggage, no reservation and no money. Stanley Bard, the owner, asked me, ‘David, how much do your paintings sell for? And how many do you paint a year?’ I think he was figuring out how much he could charge me.”
Bard eventually installed Remfry and his wife Caroline in a 12th-floor studio with a roof garden and “fantastic views of the World Trade Center on one side and the Empire State Building on the other”. More than the scenery, however, Remfry was inspired by the Chelsea’s residents. “I remember grumbling to Caroline, early on, about how I was starting over in New York without the models I usually painted in London,” he says. “Then a woman with bobbed hair walked past. Caroline said, ‘She’s the sort of person you like to draw,’ and ran after her. That was Lulu, a dominatrix I went on to draw. She’s still a friend to this day.”
Remfry found potential subjects around every corner of the Chelsea. “I became part of the fabric of it. I got into the elevator one day and in walked a young woman with a bullwhip. I said, ‘That looks dangerous’ and she said, ‘Yeah – but there’s no room to use it in here!’ I’d go to [drag festival] Wigstock on Pier 17, which was the best fun you could ever have, and bring people back to my studio to draw. They were astonishing, beautiful, in how they looked and how they were. I just really like people – I love their stories. When I’m painting them, people talk to me like I’m their therapist.
“It was an amazing artists’ colony,” he adds. “Stanley really loved artists.” Remfry painted many of the hotel’s celebrity residents, including Ethan Hawke, Quentin Crisp, “party queen” Susanne Bartsch and, of course, the Ramones’ legendary bassist and songwriter. “Dee Dee was a pal,” Remfry says. “I’d loved the Ramones – they were just my kind of music – and I saw him around the hotel. We got chatting and he was very amenable – he was odd but a really nice guy. He was very funny, but you wouldn’t want to cross him. He had a neighbour he really didn’t get on with, and he told me he poured Coca-Cola under their door to encourage all the roaches to go in there.
What was he like to draw? “Terrible, because he’d load himself up with whatever it was he was on and be twitching all the time,” Remfry replies. “I really wanted to capture his tattoos, but his arm was never still long enough for me to draw them properly. One time he took me down to his room, and when he opened the door I was hit by a wave of this substance, whatever it was, like a pot of the most potent glue. It was hanging around the room itself – you got high just breathing in. God knows how he lived as long as he did.” Ramone died in 2002 aged 50, of a heroin overdose.
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Remfry describes the 17 years he spent at the Chelsea as a “magic period”, and says he felt “liberated” by New York. “New Yorkers are not judgmental,” he smiles. “You can walk down the street dressed however the hell you like, and someone will compliment you.” But Remfry sensed the city changing. “Giuliani banned dancing in public, and I’m a big fan of dancing everywhere I can. He banned the seedier side of it, he tried to sanitise the city.” The Chelsea was changing, too; Bard was replaced as managing partner in 2007, and the hotel no longer felt like home to Remfry. He returned to London four years later.
Remfry still feels great fondness for Bard, who died in 2017. “I painted people dancing, and I’d planned to paint Stanley and his wife Phyllis. Some time passed, and I asked Stanley if he was still up for that sitting. And he said, ‘Phyllis and I have parted. She got a bee in her bonnet and she’s left me. But I’ll ask her.’ And they came to sit for me every Friday for a year. They brought Frank Sinatra records, and they danced quietly and they cried. And then they got back together!” Remfry grins widely, and claps his hands together with joy. “It’s one of my greatest achievements in art.”