The picture I never bought...

Sometimes you need to follow your heart, your instincts, your gut. I wish I'd had the guts to do just that a few years back, I'd be a happier and wealthier man if I had.

Some years ago I was in a gallery shop in the town where I live and I saw an oil painting that captured me completely. It was large and well-painted and stunning in its composition. I’ll try to describe it but my memory will probably have changed it - embellishing it here, deadening it there. It was a self portrait of a bearded man sat on a stool to one side of a mirror, painting. Nothing remarkable in that I suppose, but there was a second figure in the painting, a semi-naked woman and this woman was sitting on the artist’s shoulders as he painted. No that isn't it, Google couldn't find it, but this one is nearly as good - although there is nowhere near as much naked flesh and sex on show.

That other picture though whilst purely figurative was so surreal in its composition and subject. I loved it and I wanted it.

I recognised the artist. I’d seen a television programme about him a few months previously whilst we were on holiday in Looe. Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz was one of the South West’s most celebrated artists although unfashionable in art circles. He tended to paint on a large scale, usually in themed series looking at hidden communities like vagrants, the mentally handicapped, and prostitutes or difficult social issues including suicide and death. He kept the bequeathed corpse of a vagrant in a box in his studio and had affairs with all of his female models. They adored him, even though he was self-obsessed, indifferent to them and his eleven bastard children, and of course an alcoholic who never paid tax or kept any records of the sale of his works.

When he died, aged sixty from a heart attack, he had £12 cash in his possession (having never opened a bank account), and owed £2 million to various creditors. Despite this he owned a library that was devoted to art, the occult sciences, demonology, magic, philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, death, psychology and sexuality which was sold at Sotherby’s for over a million pounds.

Yes, he was fascinating man, living the madcap life that everyone assumes an artist must lead and in many ways I wanted a small part of him. Anyway, back to his painting. As I’ve said I loved it - so much so that I wanted to buy it. It was a high price tag for me at £3,000 but worth every penny and I did have that amount (or just about) in the bank sitting around waiting for a holiday or something.

I should have just done it - bought it and be damned, but instead I asked my wife’s opinion… suffice it to say that it was too big, too expensive, and too…well, too rude. So I didn’t buy it, except in my mind where it remains ‘my’ painting. I knew it was wrong, I knew that I should have bought it, but a holiday in Barbados was required.

Then a few years after my costly Barbadian tan was nothing but a pasty memory, I heard that L (as I thought of him, never quite remembering his name properly) had died. Along with the sadness I feel whenever a great painting talent passes it also crossed my mind that ‘my’ painting’s value would immediately increase threefold. If only I’d bought it instead of lazing around on a white sand beach for a couple of weeks.

Then last week a friend whom I’d told this story texted me to tell me he’d seen ‘my’ painting hanging in an Alderley gallery priced at £55,000. It was definitely ‘my’ painting, he recognised it from my description.

I thought about going to view it, take a long longing look at ‘my’ painting and let myself wallow in the ‘what could have been’… I though that I might even take my wife along.

But in the end I didn’t have the heart.