Page 7 of The Blue Hour

RENOWNED ARTIST LEAVES MULTI-MILLION-POUND ESTATE TO BITTER ENEMY

Vanessa Chapman, the reclusive artist who died of cancer in October last year, has left her entire artistic estate to a man who hounded her through the courts, it was revealed yesterday.

Chapman’s artistic estate, estimated to be worth several million pounds, was bequeathed to the Fairburn Foundation, a charitable trust set up by Douglas Lennox, the philanthropist and art dealer.

Lennox and Chapman were embroiled in an acrimonious legal battle from 2002 until 2004, after Chapman withdrew from her solo show at Lennox’s Glasgow Modern Gallery at the eleventh hour, incurring costs to the gallery of tens of thousands of pounds. The dispute was eventually settled out of court. Lennox claimed at the time that Chapman’s actions had ‘come close to ruining [him]’ and that the stress of the court case had damaged his health and his marriage.

The reviews date back to the very first exhibitions of her work in the early 1990s, when she was a more traditional landscape painter. The critic atArtFuturemagazine praised her exuberant use of colour and her expressive brushwork, but saw her paintings as nostalgic to the point of futility: ‘Chapman bravely swims against a sea of conceptualism, raging hopelessly against the dying of the paint.’

The more abstract Vanessa’s work became, the more the critics warmed to it.The Independentwrote of her contribution to the 1995Painting Todayexhibition at the Southbank: ‘Chapman’scolour-saturated canvases inhabit an intriguing space between abstraction and figuration and are all the more thrilling for that …’

But if the press was beginning to like her work, they did not appear to likeher. ‘Where Chapman’s paintings are bold,’ one review stated, ‘her ceramics are delicate and restrained, as undemonstrative and chilly as the artist herself.’

This became a theme: Chapman’s work received accolades, and her looks – dark-eyed, dewy-skinned, graceful, slender – were praised effusively, while her character was not. She was described by a series of critics and interviewers as tricky, disagreeable, impatient, sullen, strident and single-minded.

Rereading these pieces, Becker shifts in his seat, discomforted. He has never been able to reconcile the image of Chapman portrayed in the press with the sensitivity of the artist he loves. He scans the pages for references to her sculpture and ceramics, but little seems to have been written about her interest in media other than painting. He reads on, and on, and eventually, lulled by the sound of the waves breaking against the harbour, he drifts off.

He jerks awake, his mind grasping at the vestiges of some disturbing dream, to find someone – a child, he thinks at first – banging on the front of the car. This person, wearing a yellow high-vis jacket over an outsized grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled down so far it almost covers their eyes, gesticulates towards a sign across the car park that reads ‘NO CAMPING’.

‘Do I look like I’m fucking camping?’ Becker mutters as he opens the door, clambering out of the car into the mizzle. He beams graciously at the tiny figure. ‘I’m here to visit Grace Haswell,’ he says, ‘over on the island. I’m waiting for the tide to go out. Do you know what time it’ll be safe to cross?’

The person’s head jerks up and Becker starts: it is the face from the window – a woman, her skin weathered and wizened, her mouth twisted, her lips moving.

‘I’m sorry?’ Becker calls out after her but she has turned away, walking in the direction of the cottages.

After a few paces she stops and looks back at him briefly before turning away once more. As she walks slowly away, he sees that her hands, ungloved and pale at her sides, clutch themselves into fists and release, over and over, as she goes.

A wave hits the harbour wall, making a low, threatening sound, like a muffled explosion. Becker climbs back into the car, remembering as he does that he was in the car in the dream. He was in the car and there was water coming in, pouring in through the fan vents and around the doors; there was a baby on the back seat, and it was screaming.

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Someone is coming. Someone new. They’re coming across the causeway, puttering along in a blue car. Grace can tell it’s a new person by the way they’re driving, slowly and tentatively. Taking their time.

She checks that the front door is locked before returning to her lookout spot at the large kitchen window. With the fraying sleeve of her cardigan she wipes condensation from the glass, but the car has disappeared; it will have reached the near side of the causeway, it will be idling at the bottom of the hill. Its driver will be looking at the chain slung across the track and at the ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’ sign dangling from it.

Grace moves from the large window overlooking the sea to the smaller one on the north side of the house. From here, she can monitor the top of the steps leading up from the track to the front door. A minute or two passes. Just as she starts to imagine that the person must have turned back, a tall, thin man comes into view. He is pale, with hair the colour of damp straw, wearing a dark coat and thick-framed glasses. She starts – for a moment she thinks she recognizes him – but no. Just one of those faces. The man pauses at the top of the steps, catching hisbreath; he looks up at the house, rain falling on his face. She’s not sure, but she thinks she sees him smile.

He doesn’tlookthreatening, but Grace knows better than to imagine she can deduce the level of threat from a glance. You cannot infer a man’s propensity for violence from how he looks. She has set bones broken by soft hands, stitched cuts inflicted by men with easy smiles and white collars; she’s met brutes with angel faces.

She steps away from the window. From the rack on the wall in the living room she fetches the shotgun and carries it to the hall, propping it up against the bench – in full view of anyone standing on the doorstep. At the third or fourth knock, she opens the door.

‘Mrs Haswell?’ the man says, smiling nervously, holding out a damp hand.

Grace neither returns the smile nor takes his hand. ‘DoctorHaswell,’ she corrects him.

‘Doctor Haswell, I’m sorry. Forgive me for turning up like this, I—’

‘What do you want?’

‘My name is Becker, James Becker, from the Fairburn Foundation? I’ve been trying to contact—’

AtFairburn, Grace starts to close the door. ‘I don’t have anything more for you,’ she says, mortified by the tears in her own voice. ‘You’ve already taken everything.’

Vanessa Chapman’s diary

This place! No matter which way I turn, the landscape speaks to me. Look east, to those soft, rounded hills, so comforting, so female! Or uptowards the wood, green and black and mysterious, or if you want real terror, climb to the rock and look down at the chaos of the sea. Right now I am captivated by the south, by the islands, by Sheepshead. So unsheep-like! To me, she is a wolf.

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