OPEN STUDIO

The year was 1993 and it was Open Studio season in Los Angeles when all the established artists living amongst the Hollywood hills opened up their private toy house residences to rich prospective buyers in order for them to engage in a bidding war while they provided drinks for their clients and got the latest gossip on who was sleeping with whom.

But the one artist who refused to participate in this vanity ritual of buying and selling over this long weekend was the one artist whose work everyone wanted to buy the most.

Gary Varnay.

Famous for selling only one artwork every few years for record-breaking prices, the chief art critic of the Los Angeles Times once famously wrote of him.

"A once-in-a-generation artist that captures the slow decay of the West in the heart of the entertainment capital of the world - Hollywood, Los Angeles. In his excoriating and highly satirical depictions of those who live tragic lives in pursuit of fairytale dreams in Tinseltown, he is without equal. The fact that the very people he depicts in such cruel and unforgiving fashion with their plastic faces and rented smiles desire his work so greatly only makes the exquisite paradox of his art even funnier in a richly ironic, almost masochistic way. In essence, he is the truth serum to their collective self-delusion, their 'mirror mirror on the wall.'"

Varnay enjoyed being the misanthrope savant amongst all the attention-seeking narcissists living next to him. Secretly it gave him a thrill to possess the opposite energy to them all and he knew the harder and tougher he was with the 'poor babies' the more they would desperately want to hang his subtle punishment on the walls of their homes.

"They want to atone for their celebrity and I am only too happy to help them. The tragedy is in their grasping of immortality through being captured on celluloid only to discover that it exposes their aging even more cruelly as we've all had the privilege of studying their faces in close up. Essentially they're competing with their own peak of youth and beauty. It can't be easy to realise there's a skeleton lurking behind all that stardust. The rest of us, especially artists, are only too well aware."

Relaxing in perfect solitude in his pool all the while knowing that the frenzied festival of celebrity art lovers were close by unable to enter his private fortress in the hills made him feel like he truly had all the power in the art market right now.

He would sell only when he was good and ready and that made him a master of the business. By doing nothing he was in fact doing everything to increase his value and in the silence of his contentment he felt like a God only too aware not to fall victim to hubris like his deluded subjects.

"The difference between my celebrity and theirs is that I don't grasp onto it like a desperate child with a lollipop always just ever so slightly out of reach. I let it arise naturally and if it withers away and dies, as all things inevitably must, then so be it. The only power I possess over these children of Hollywood is in realising the impermanence of things. They absolutely could do the same but they refuse to. Even when sat slap-bang in front of my paintings. Still, they pay large amounts for my work because it makes them feel like they're dealing with some access to a truth they won't find anywhere else. Not even with their fake gurus."

To retain his mystery Varnay knew only too well that while his peers' studios would be open his would be closed.