A couple of days ago, I decided to print out a nice photo my wife had taken of our kids on our most recent vacation. I've become a bit of a CVS or Walgreens photo-printing whore and now that I realize how easy and cheap it is to do, I'm determined to fill our tiny apartment with awesome 8x10 family shots. Anyway, sometime after the framing and hanging of the latest photo, I remember we used to have a decent oil painting somewhere in our apartment that I'd bought years ago stuffed inside one of our closets. Backstory: While my old apartment in LIC used to have art on every wall, when my wife and I moved into our new apartment, we liked the look of clean, freshly painted walls and instead of having a number of tiny paintings and prints, I had my heart set on one large piece of art. I was obsessed with scale at the time. Anyway, all our old art was promptly stuffed into the upper, unreachable decks of our closets. Keep in mind, none of the art that we own is valuable in a collector's sense.
So there I am happily hanging the latest 8x10 of the kids smiling at the beach, when I remember this old painting I used to have. On a whim, I decided I would drag it out of the closet. I had neither seen it nor thought of it in years, but at that moment I felt compelled to dust it off and look at it, as if being possessed by artistic inspiration.
Double-backstory: In the late 1900s, I used to record music at a recording studio on West 26th street. Anyone in NYC during that time can remember that the area between the Flatiron building, Tekserve and Billy's Topless was a strange wasteland of empty parking lots and "Olde New Things"-type antiques. Anyway, there used to be a regular flea market that existed every weekend and on one such weekend, I was happily strolling around. I'd just moved into my new, now old apartment in Long Island City. I was basically broke, certainly living paycheck to bar to paycheck to bar, and so the notion of spending any money on anything like an oil painting was basically off the radar.
That said, as I was leaving the studio and walking along 6th Avenue, I saw an extremely tan, white-mustached man with a hat, smoking a personally rolled cigarette and standing in front of a chain link fence full of crap. He had a lamp, some pinwheels, some old LPs, a couple of ashtrays, some books about Muffins and a smile. He was a bit like the old captain from Jaws. Or Santa. In the sense that he is probably the only person I've ever seen that had a twinkle in their eye in the middle of a hot summer day in mid-August NYC. Anyway, for some reason, next to the guy, on the chain link fence was this painting. It was being held by a clothes hanger. It caught my eye because it was dark and the day was so bright, it was hard for me to see anything.
The painting was a cityscape -- a dark moody city scape. It looked like New York in the rain. It fell pretty solidly in my brooding, artist, Frank O'Hara reading wheelhouse and when I saw it I couldn't help but ask, "Hey, how much for the painting?"
The old guy smiled. Inhaled his cigarette and looked away from me as he said, "how much you got?"
I was wearing shorts. My pockets were filled with tissues, receipts, and crumpled dollars. I did however possess a rogue, unspoken for twenty dollar bill, that I pulled out like I was He-man embracing my inner grey-skullian powers.
"Twenty bucks," I said.
The old guy looked at me. He seemed to be trying to get a read on me. Was I someone that knew anything about this painting or was I just a tall blonde doofus with a hankering for a piece of art?
"Thirty," he quickly replied.
I could tell it was a good painting. I certainly could tell it was old. "People don't paint like that anymore," I remember thinking in my head. There was an impressionist-vibe to the painting. Maybe with a dash of some old Jazz record. It was cool. That wasn't to be disputed.
So, I decided the painting is cool. I'm cool. I need more cool things around me. Done. I'm getting it.
$30 bucks later I had the painting in hand. The old guy looked at me, squinted, the light literally twinkling in his eye. He says, "Good buy."
I walked away psyched. Put the painting up and never thought about it again. I just liked the look of it and the way it made me feel and I had it on my wall for 8 years.
Fast forward: I pull the painting out of storage and get hit by a wave of dust. Dust isn't my thing. It gets my already hypersensitive skin all flummoxed and so I grab the painting and head to the sink to wash my hands and change my filthy t-shirt.
Suddenly, I see something written on the back of the painting.
It's in pencil and says something like "Avenue of the Americas. 4th street New York NY."
Intrigued, I flip on the light and look at it again. In the upper corner, there's more, "Oct 4th 1964 Cross county art show"
Now, I had had a terrible completely unproductive day, filled with creative struggles and blues guitar playing, so anything to get me out of that funk was welcome in my mind.
I flip the painting over. In the corner is a signature. It says Noel.
Within moments, I am googling artists with the last name "Noel" and of course running into a litany of information about Noel Gallagher from Oasis and a couple of other randoms. After a few google, course correct -- ie. google images: "paintings, 1960s, Artist, Noel".I figured out who painted my painting.
My painting was painted by none other than the famous playwright Noel Coward, who had spent many years of his life not only as a playwright, but also a composer, musician, writer and painter. Christie's has done an auction of Noel Coward's work in 2015. According to "the Paintings of Noel Coward" website:
It was not until Noël's lifelong companion Graham Payn decided, 15 years after Coward's death, to sell a significant number of the paintings for charity that any idea of their commercial value was established. Christie's came to estimate their value and with little precedent to work from estimated the 30 or so paintings to be worth £300,000. They actually went for £786,000.
My next trip is to Christie's to establish the validity of my theory. Certainly, the signature looks the same, but time will tell. The most kismet thing about the whole experience is that I just liked the painting. What's even more amazing is that besides some notable differences, Noel Coward and I enjoy many of the same things in life: painting, writing, music, comedy. I could not be more excited to find out more about my flea market find.