Wednesday 14^th April 2010

Have you heard of Patrick Procktor? Maybe not. In his day, which was the 1960s, he was the ‘twin’ of David Hockney, wonderful painter, much feted, outrageous figure, friend of Cecil Beaton, Princess Margaret round for drunken candlelit evenings etc. On Monday, before it opened, Marcus Coleman, England’s leading clock mender, owner of outstanding Procktors, was doubtful that this Redfern Show and launch of a book, Patrick Procktor: Art and Life by Ian Massey (Unicorn Press £40) would do much to boost his old and now dead friend’s sunken reputation and prices.

He was wrong. Redfern seething last night for the opening, many on sticks it is true, £75,000 the highest price (I do love prices) and the work, at its best, ravishing. It is a fragile talent. He must have worked quickly, a lot of watercolour, hit and miss, can be rather slight or sentimental. Works in oil risk veering the other way, into ponderousness. But fragility is a strength. Flowers, exotic landscapes, finely wrought portraits of weirdoes and boys , small-scale, delicate, colours you hesitate to call pastel, capture some kind of elusive beauty. None were quite as stunning as the painting of the boy in white swimming trunks on a beach in Greece which is in the private collection of Marcus Cargill –  long landscape picture, nothing to it but blue sky, sand and small figure of the boy oddly reproduced over and over, caught in a few brushstrokes.

Who should I run into at the Opening but Eric Vaughan, 85 if a day, of a different generation of Poor Little Rich Gays, partner of Lionel Moore (not present) who produced a famous TV Drama serialisation in the 1980s.  ‘That man’s trying to pick me up,’ he announced. ‘He’s a roofer.’ It didn’t seem very likely. When I last saw Eric he was a la port de mort, with an awful cancer that drills holes in your bones – but now, like Patrick Procktor, revived, although PP actually really dead of course, not that that is standing in his way now. Eric and Lionel knew everybody, and still do. Once Lionel couldn’t think who the tall woman standing next to Edna O’Brien was. ‘D’you know Mrs Onassis?’ Edna inquired (you have to imagine the upward Irish lilt).

Only the most famous woman in the world!

Eric is worried. ‘That Chinese woman. She’s the owner of the Gallery. Doesn’t know anyone. We must help her.’ I say, ‘What about Redfern? Where is he or she?’ Eric is confidential: ‘Long gone but I can tell you. Leather harnesses. Used to lock them in an upstairs flat and throw the keys down the stairwell.’

Andrew Logan, of the Alternative Miss World, at the Patrick Procktor Opening