MaIt is commemorated in song by former residents Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and NicoThe Hotel Chelsea in New York was designed by Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke (who described it as “Spiritual home“, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and other British artists in 1994. David RemfreeThe then 52-year-old joined this prestigious group when he moved to New York ahead of an exhibition of his work there. He spent the next 17 years in Chelsea, drawing and painting the city’s remarkable residents. “It was like heaven,” he says. Pencil drawing of punk pioneer Dee Dee Ramone It’s part of this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
Remfree, who grew up in Hull and is now based in London, arrived at the check-in desk in Chelsea that summer with “17 bags, no booking and no money”. “The owner, Stanley Bird, asked me: ‘David, how much can you sell your paintings for? And how many do you paint a year?’ I think he was calculating how much he could charge me.”
Bird eventually gave Remfrey and his wife, Caroline, a 12th-floor studio with a rooftop garden and “awesome views of the World Trade Center on one side and the Empire State Building on the other.” But more than the landscape, it was the residents of Chelsea that inspired Remfrey. “I remember complaining to Caroline early on that I had to start over in New York because I didn’t have the models I’d always painted in London,” he says. “And then this woman with a bob haircut walked past, and Caroline said, ‘She’s the kind of person you like to paint,’ and followed her. That was Lulu, the dominatrix I would later paint. She’s still a friend to this day.”
Remfree found potential subjects all around Chelsea. “I became a part of it. I was in an elevator one day and this young woman came in with a whip. I said, ‘That looks dangerous,’ and she said, ‘Yes, but there’s no place here for it!’ I [drag festival] Wigstock at Pier 17 was so much fun, and then I had people come back to the studio to paint them. They were so amazingly beautiful in the way they looked and lived. I just love people and I love their stories. As I was painting them, people would talk to me like a therapist.
“It was a great artists’ colony,” he adds. “Stanley really loved artists.” Remfrey painted many of the hotel’s famous guests, including Ethan Hawke, Quentin Crisp and “party queens.” Suzanne Balch And, of course, the legendary bassist and songwriter for the Ramones. “Dee Dee was a friend,” Remfrey says. “I loved the Ramones. Their music was just my style. I saw him at the hotel. We chatted and he was very submissive. He was a weird guy, but a really nice guy. He was very funny, but he didn’t like to go against me. He told me he had neighbors he didn’t get along with very well, and he poured Coca-Cola under the door to get all the cockroaches in.”
What was it like to draw him? “It was awful, because he was always smearing stuff on his body and twitching all the time,” Remfrey says. “I would have loved to draw his tattoos, but his arms were so still I couldn’t get them right. At one point he took me into a room and as soon as I opened the door, I was hit by a wave of some kind of substance. I don’t know what it was, but it was like a container of the strongest glue. It was floating around the room and I got high just by breathing it. God only knows how he lived so long.” Ramone died of a heroin overdose in 2002, aged 50.
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Remfree describes his 17 years in Chelsea as “magical times” and says he felt “liberated” in New York. “New Yorkers are open-minded,” he says, smiling. “You can walk down the street in whatever clothes you want, and who “I would praise you.” But Remfrey sensed the city was changing. “Giuliani Dancing in public is prohibitedand I love to dance wherever I can. He banned the sleazy side of it and tried to clean up the city.'” Chelsea was changing, too: Bird was removed as managing partner in 2007, and the hotel no longer felt like home to Remfree; he returned to London four years later.
Remfrey remains deeply attached to the bird, who passed away in 2017. “I was painting people dancing, and I was going to paint Stanley and his wife Phyllis. After a while, I asked Stanley if I could still paint it, and he said, ‘Phyllis and I broke up. She went crazy and left me, but I’ll ask her.’ So they came to sit with me every Friday for a year. They brought Frank Sinatra records and we danced and cried quietly. And then they got back together!” Remfrey beams and claps with joy. “It’s one of my greatest artistic achievements.”
