I have bought a painting. I paid more for it than I have ever paid for anything in my life except a house. I'm not going to name the amount because to some people it will seem absurdly low and to others unattainably high. I bought it all the same, because I fell in love with it and with love came the lust to possess. It cost twice as much as I have ever spent on a piece of furniture; ten times what, even at my most extravagant, I have shelled out for something to wear. It cost as much as two holidays, which is where the money came from-out of my holiday fund.
I first saw this picture at the National Portrait Gallery last August. A large oil painting by an unknown young artist, it was hanging in the annual BP Portrait Award exhibition. It stopped me in my tracks. Since then, everyone who has seen it, whether they like the painting or not, agrees that it has colossal impact. This is partly due to its size-roughly two metres wide and one and a half high-but more to its strangeness, its vitality, the light that pours out of it and the intensity with which the main figure stares out of the canvas at the viewer. These make it very arresting-too arresting for some people.
That first time, strolling through the exhibition-itself a composite portrait of Britain today-there were many paintings I admired but none I wished to own. But then I found myself opposite Sisters, by Ulyana Gumeniuk, and felt something much stronger than aesthetic appreciation: this was a painting I had to have. I kept circling the room and returning to stand and contemplate it. The impact was not softened by repeated viewing, nor by detailed scrutiny. I found the picture challenging, original, full of strange spatial relationships (a bowl of water floats above the ground in a scene that is otherwise largely realistic); while the enigmatic links between the four women in the painting were endlessly provoking.
Without being able to say exactly why, it had struck me as Russian before I saw the artist's name. Two young women sit on a high-backed seat. They are noble, even disdainful in their bearing, archaic in dress. They look like haughty young princesses from War and Peace, with bare sheeny faces and tight lace-covered bodices. To the left, a serving woman prepares to dry the outstretched foot of the foremost young woman. Behind her a second servant bustles through a doorway, an enamel bowl under her arm. Intent on their tasks, these brawny figures with their coral-red cheeks and big hands could have come straight out of Tintoretto or Veronese.
Is it a religious scene... Mary and Martha, perhaps? Is it symbolic of the corrupt old regime, an idle serf-owning class waited on hand and foot by downtrodden peasants? Does it say something about the fate of women: the young so poised and proud, later so submissive, endlessly ministering to the needs of others? Why is the painting called Sisters?
Some of these questions were answered in due course; but at first glance I felt chiefly covetousness. What did the picture cost? Because I must have it.
The next day, I came back to look at it. It hadn't changed, nor had my feelings. Other visitors glanced at it and moved on; I stood hypnotised. I adored the subtlety of its palette; old ivory and palest salmon pink, pearly grey and flashing white highlights; shards of gleaming lace, a chair composed of two strips of dark brown; and almost bisecting the painting, a rectangle of translucent lemon yellow light against which the young women's heads-one in profile, one full-face-are thrown into stark prominence.
I came back a week later, this time with my 15-year-old granddaughter, curious to know what her untrained eye would make of it. She liked it; she too felt the impact of the strange, almost eccentric group absorbed in their private thoughts, but she was more interested in another portrait of a modern girl passing through a front door-poised between the safe dullness of home and the fearful excitement of the street. She looked at that. I returned to Sisters.
For the first time I paid attention to the painter's technique. She was in full control of her medium. The light glinting off the edge of the bowl was a single curve of the paintbrush; the curlicues of lace across the front girl's bosom were laid on with a single flick from the tip of a brush. A swathe of satin was evoked with the same skill and conviction. The gleam of flesh-tinted with mauve and lilac, blue and grey, rather than the flattering rose-pink of convention-was rendered with cruel accuracy. I became more and more curious about the talented Ulyana Gumeniuk.
I made enquiries at the desk and was told I could contact the artist by writing care of the exhibitions organiser. This I did. Two months later, Ulyana replied, naming a figure so far beyond my reach as to make the decision easy. I said no; alas, I couldn't afford it. Several days later she rang me. We haggled. It took another two months-and an exhibition of her work in Cork Street, at which, mercifully, the painting failed to attract a buyer at its full (and justified) price-before we agreed a sum. Reader, I bought it.
Soon afterwards, one Saturday evening in February, Ulyana and a friend mounted the stairs carrying the picture between them, staggering under its size. A space awaited it on my drawing room wall-a radiator was removed to make room. Carefully, they hooked it on to two brass chains suspended from the picture rail and we stepped back to assess the effect. In this intimate space its impact was even more powerful and for a moment I wondered whether it only worked in a public gallery. That thought was quickly replaced by a sense of triumph. Sisters was mine! Ulyana was, I think, glad that her painting was going to someone who felt so strongly about it. She explained that its original, its real title had been Saints and Sinners, but it had be re-named to qualify for entry into the BP exhibition. No, she said, she wouldn't explain what it meant; she'd rather I made up my own mind. We shared a celebratory drink and they left.
I got up early next day, and for several mornings after that, to view my picture in the clear, unforgiving first light. The young women and their attendants were strange company at first. It took time to get used to them; their formal juxtaposed attitudes, their enigmatic presence. My partner, Tony, still finds it disconcerting; it's not a soothing picture, it doesn't blend in with the room or the furniture or us. It hangs there, secret and autonomous, defying interpretation. Almost every day I discover something new. It will take years before I know it properly.
I have commissioned a new painting from Ulyana: a portrait of my daughters, to be called Sisters.
