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.”
