If someone had walked into one of your studios at that time what sort of sight would have greeted them?

They would have seen huge canvases all around the walls. Many people did visit; they were bad paintings, but they were very impressive to look at. There would have been fifty or so people dossing in the studio, most of them crazy, disturbed people.

Were you becoming interested in these people as character studies or were they just available as sitters?

It was a combination of many things, but there was truly a belief that it was possible to be an ‘artist-saint’. I was interested in ethics, in a certain way of behaving, and of being a painter at the same time. It was a daft notion but a very powerful one; hence the Schweitzer thing and all that. I thought it was a right and honourable thing to do: that if I was going to be painting about people and in some way about the human condition then I should live in it—even if I created it somewhat theatrically around me, which is what I did.

One of them hanged himself in my studio—I remember cutting him down. He had lost an eye a few months before diving through a chemist’s window to fix himself on a bottle of aspirin because he was so desperate. I painted a lot of them.

Robert Lenkiewicz