This great solitary ouevre

We spoke at length today about an artist whom we discovered this morning had died just under three weeks ago. I met him across the ocean so a small part of me takes his death personally, which is absurd really as I didn't know him at all well. He burst through the room at a party in tweeds one night, looking like a rock star dressed as Sherlock Holmes, so intense and wanting immediately to discuss the superficiality of the art world. You could feel the ruffled feathers in the room shimmering like fear. He was in such a hurry, too. He was 54 when he died. The cause of his death was given as a ruptured appendix. But he was always in a rush, it seems. I keep seeing his long blond hair parted to one side and the small blond beard clipped like a thick cigar when I close my eyes. He worked as a maintenance engineer in a steelworks before going to art school. When he crossed the ocean in his late twenties, instead of hanging out like everyone else in the warm blaze of an over-bearing art scene he disappeared into a small studio and worked his socks off for a year. A major art critic - a gentle man with white hair and red cheeks - wrote about some of his work in the major broadsheet and the rest - as they don't say - was a pocket of short-lived but intense art history. Soon after, our man defied yet another trend - that of soaking up the praise and preening oneself forever in public - by returning back across the ocean to his native land in the chilly north, claiming he needed some space. What I think really happened was that he could see fashion's tide begin to turn again. The obituary in front of me as I write on the round red table has a large colour reproduction of one of his pieces, and it has to be said that the unfashionably figurative nature of his work shines through. How dare the art world have turned its back on him. He was another victim of other people's idea of fashion, and the art world that thrust him into the spotlight later switched him off at the mains. (Cannot something be both universally and timelessly profound? Does it always have to have some too easily decipherable code saying, 'Now!') They say he never doffed his hat sufficiently to the people who make up the art world. I'm doffing mine to him right now. While it's warming to hear his belief in painting never wavered, I'm still waiting for the critics. In fact, I can hear some of them now. 'Actually, he wasn't that bad,' they'll say. Someone else: 'You know, at the time some of his paintings seemed either dated or juvenile, but when you look at them properly ... they're all rather deep.' As early as the late 1990s his health had begun to fail apparently. They say he lived dangerously. Well, conviction is dangerous.