Hint Fashion Magazine -- Art Crawl

Two years ago, David Remfry became the talk of fashion with his drawings for Stella McCartney's first ad campaign. But, for more than three decades, the quiet and unassuming British artist, who now calls New York home, has been hitting the scene, portraying subcultural revelers in nightclubs and bars. Remfry's drawings and watercolors are at once penetrating and distant. Locked in gazes—with each other, the viewer or some other space—his subjects project both intimacy and isolation in ambiguously social settings. In time for his current show, Paradiso, at New York's Neuhoff Gallery, we visited the 62-year-old Remfry in his studio at Manhattan's storied Chelsea Hotel. There, he gave us the dirt on working with McCartney and told us how he still likes to go out and why he won't say where.

AC: We're in your studio at the Chelsea Hotel, but you also live in an apartment down the hall.

DR: My wife Caroline and I arrived in 1995 from London, with no reservation and 17 pieces of luggage, at like 9:30 at night. They put us into a really expensive suite and the next day showed us this room and we lived here for a year and a half before moving into the bigger place [down the hall].

AC: What were you painting then?

DR: I was interested in the transvestite scene. They were kind of everywhere then, and there was a lot of material. I couldn't actually tell you what it was about them, but they were something removed from me, and that was interesting.

AC: Where were you hanging out then?

DR: Everywhere. I just went to lots of different places and still do. People continuously ask where I go, but I never say. The fact is, my paintings become a fiction. They're not real places, even though they might be based on them. I've always been interested in what happens after dark, which is kind of paradoxical because I paint the pictures in daylight.

AC: But along with drawings, you primarily work in watercolors, which is something that developed out of circumstance.

DR: In 1979, I got a viral illness and couldn't move for about 9 months. It was really hard. Oil painting is quite strenuous and so I started making watercolors because they're easier to make when you're lying down. Now I'm very hooked on the medium.

AC: It was also in London in the 70s that you did the cover for a magazine called The Image. That's what eventually got Stella's attention, isn't it?

DR: Yes. In 1972, there was this beautifully produced little magazine called The Image, and it featured contemporary artists, photographers and the like. Peter Blake did the first or second cover and I did the one after. It was quite a sexy image because it was a girl with her arms back and pubic hair was visible and so on. I'd forgotten all about it. Then a few years ago, I got a phone call from Stella-she had somehow seen the magazine in her father's collection. She didn't first say she was Stella McCartney, though. She just said [in come-hither voice] "Hi, this is Stella" because, she later told me, she thought I would immediately think Ching! Ching! if I knew who it really was.

AC: You agreed to work with her, but had some conditions.

DR: I wasn't playing hard to get, but I said I would only do [the images for her campaign] in New York. I don't like to travel or work in other places and she said fine. But then she came back and said, "I've found the absolute perfect model [Tetyana Brazhnyk] for you. She looks very much like the girl you drew all that time ago, but the big problem is she's Ukrainian, and because of the aftermath of 9/11 she can't get a visa. Could you possibly come to London?" For a long time I kept these nine answering machine messages from Stella in various degrees of pleading. It was very funny.

AC: You gave in?

DR: I agreed and she put me up in [London's] Grosvenor House Hotel in Elizabeth Taylor's old suite, which had five bedrooms. It was just vast.

AC: That's not a bad set up. But you also didn't want her to see the drawings until you were done. Did she keep that part of the bargain?

DR: Well, she got very, very nervous. She really knew nothing about this old guy and was paying all this money and was freaking out, totally. The second day, the model was getting dressed and somebody came to me and said, "Stella's here and she'd like to come up and run through some ideas." So Stella was there with her art director and a couple of Polaroid cameras and was posing the model saying, "I think I'd like this and this and this." And I just thought if I said anything at all, this project is dead in the water. And so without answering either of them, I turned around, went back into my room, closed the door and left them to it. Because I'm not going to work to anybody's brief, I'm going to do the drawings I'm going to do. And the next day, Stella came along with that little giraffe that's up there on the shelf [points to a toy giraffe tied with a yellow ribbon] and gave it to me and said, "Friends for life." Later, I showed her the drawings and she was knocked out. You could just see the relief. I was pretty relieved, too.

You can see David Remfry's latest work through December 18 at Neuhoff Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, New York, 212-838-1122.

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